TEMPORIZING Jordan Zinovich There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate. - T.S. Eliot. Axiom: Dominant ideologies design their own cosmic temporal matricies, which tend to rely on singularities for origin and linearity for direction. But Lived Time is better imagined as a cluster of linked domains: in the physical and symbolic domains, Time -- past, present, and future -- seems an abstract backdrop against which operations and events take place; in the qualitatively distinct biological and ecological domains, time past punctuates the biosphere with a genetic memory of evolution, and time-to-come is punctuated by bioreplication/sex; and in the social and economic domain the time past (History) of Social Time and the future time of production dominate. However, human Inner Time recognizes that, besides these other domains, there is also a lived past of Memory and a future time of Hope/Desire. Question: How does one judge what time it is? And I don't mean by external evidences, such as the position of the sun, eclipses of the moon, the hour on the clock, etc. It always starts this way: I'm standing in the open with a flat horizon stretching in all directions around me; nothing breaks its perfect line. The sun is an immutable sphere hanging in the sky, and though it shines brightly I'm comfortable -- neither too hot nor too cold. Then the hissing starts. Sand. I'm standing on desert sand, which flows in a jet stream around my ankles. Now I'm apprehensive, something is coming. A dot appears on the horizon in the distance (ahead? to my right? to my left?), moving swiftly, growing at an incredible rate -- a huge ball of sand swelling like a snowball. I turn and run. There is nothing stopping me. I could run in any or many directions but flee in a straight line away from the ball, glancing repeatedly back at it. It doesn't stop or change direction, and I won't outrun it at this speed. I run harder, but the sand slips away beneath my feet and I don't make any headway. My footing begins to swirl and sink. The surrounding sand climbs on all sides until I'm trapped in a bowl-like depression. I'm doomed. Sick with fear, I stop and face the ball, which hangs suspended on the lip of the dish. A maelstrom opens and the ball rolls down over me. This is a memory: always slightly different. Proposition 1: Humans employ Time to coordinate their perceptions. They alter their notions of Time to suit their priorities, whether or not these are conscious priorities. Historic & Epistemological Divergence: Religious thinking organizes Time according to singularities -- qualitative points of departure (the illud tempus of shamanistic cosmogenesis, the birth of Christ, the Buddha's enlightenment, the flight of Mohammed, the big-bang origin of the universe, etc.). During the Middle Ages, Lived Time was seen as a passage of no return through a singular world. Humans were pilgrims moving inexorably forward, drawn by the NOW, and were obsessively eschatological. The Renaissance responded intellectually by trying to learn everything about the cosmos. After Copernicus, previously unimaginable aspects of Time began revealing themselves -- e.g. light years and the notion that we see light from long extinct celestial bodies. Comprehendible dimensions of Time were rendered void, tipping individual life-courses into meaninglessness. By the end of the 18th century Descartes' formulation of a universal scientific methodology had shifted the focus from a cognitive and knowing humanity embedded in its life-courses to the ideal of causal laws. The moment the causal ideal was valorized, humankind lost its central position in the world of knowledge, and began to sense Time's indifference. In a causally oriented culture it is easy to consider Time as mechanically repetitive. Hegel tried to reassert the value of lived human awareness. Toward the end of Phenomenology he wrote: "Nature is Space; whereas Time is History." (In other words, to paraphrase Anthony Wilden: there is no natural, universal/cosmic Time, there is only Time insofar as there is History/Social Time; human ideology. During the course of Social Time, humans explore Lived Time through their discourse. Their exploration is the "empirically-existing concept", and Time is nothing other than this concept. Without human awareness, nature would be space, and only space.) Unfortunately, after Hegel the solipsistic idealisms of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology and Existentialism unwittingly increased the void between individual lives and extended cosmic Time. Proposition 2: Human temporal awareness articulates in the future, and is driven by desire/hope. The flow of Time is a kind of "forward recollection" (Kierkegaard), where human awareness struggles to correlate the future with a comprehendible past according to a specific paradigm. Human memory of the past also depends on desire/hope (consider Freud's theory of deferred action -- "the memory of past time depends on the present project of the subject"). The darkness seems overwhelming and permanent, and the jet stream that had pulled at my ankles is now a steady, insistent wind blowing down on me from above. I must be inside the sand ball, but wind and darkness are the only constants in this place. I begin to explore. The wind is strongest where I first found myself. A membrane encloses the outermost edges of the space, which seems large and elliptical, like an egg on its side. The membrane pulses with life, changing in response to signals I can't detect. What face does it show its world? Which signals permeate it, and which ones merely stimulate it? The wind's song is a strange amalgam of all the human voices I've ever heard: gurgling infants; laughter; sobbing; old folks with dry, soft pencil-scratching whispers. Conversations rise from the soughing babble like individual voices in a Tibetan choir soaring on the chant harmonics. How long do I listen? A while, I guess, because I notice some of the whispers fading, vanishing; while small purly voices clearly master words. These voices, these conversations in this dark place; they are my present. Empirical Intuition: Not all moments in Time are equal; there is always a valorized moment. Temporal events are valorized when they are in the position of being directly presented to that part of human awareness that is being "lived". Along a human life-course -- which may stretch out over several decades -- one particular moment is real and alive while every other moment exists only in memory or in desire/hope. All events simultaneous with the valorized moment are valorized events, in that they occur in the NOW. There is no sense of the passage of Time in the NOW. What is the cause of the slowing down that takes place when one endlessly repeats oneself? It's not predicated on physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the cause then complete rest would be the best restorative. Rather, it's something psychical; forcing the perception of time, through unbroken periods of uniformity, to fall away -- that perception of time which is so closely bound to the consciousness of life that one may not be weakened without the other suffering impairment. There are many false conceptions regarding the nature of tedium. Generally it's felt that novelty "makes the time pass"; that is to say, shortens it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain time's flow. Vacuity and monotony have, indeed, the property of making the moment and the hour seem tiresome. But they are also capable of contracting or dissipating larger time-units to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. Conversely, interest can put wings to the hour and the day; yet it lends a weightiness to the general passage of time, a solidity which causes eventful years to flow far more slowly than bare, empty ones. What we call tedium is actually an abnormal shortening of time consequent upon monotony. Great spans of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together. When one day is like all the others, then they are all alike. Complete uniformity makes the longest life seem short, as though it had stolen away from us unawares. This is one aspect of Inner Time. Proposition 3: For humans, Time consists of the punctuation and organization of Lived (inner) Time by activities in Social Time. Cosmic Time is the mythic and ideological structure upon which Social Time is projected to become History. The function of ideology is to explain the past, present, and possible futures of real live systems. The masters of ideology give cosmic Time a meaning and direction separate from individual human experience (Lived Time). In the membrane-surrounded dark, thoughts, memories, and hopes take on life. They slip from my mind and float like glowing cobwebby disks to my feet, where they stack and stretch into a pulsing tube throbbing to the strange rhythmns of the outer membrane. The tube expands, filling my awareness, becoming a tunnel. This is my escape, a future and a past, the tunnel of a life-course. Proposition 4: The difference between human potential and general cosmic temporal limits is intolerable. Socially mediated temporalization is equivalent to the humanization of Time. The humanization of Time is evident everywhere in society, including in the most "objective" camps. (Even a scientific determinist as certain of his objectivity as Stephen Hawking, ultimately resorts to "anthropic principles" -- either weak or strong -- to explain aspects of his cosmic Time.) A Casual Bit of Causal Jesuitry: Most physical scientists and many philosophers claim that "backward causation" is impossible. Notions of cause and effect are most often bound by a definition of cause, yet in Lived Time we frequently search for a cause only after we have noticed an effect. Despite this strange irrational inversion in our conventional view of temporal flow, philosophers commonly evoke a "sense of strangeness" to deny the possibility of backward causation (physical scientists are more likely to call on "the second law of thermal dynamics"). The question of whether or not NATURE permits backward causation can not be resolved by observing that we remember only the past, and not the future. Backward causation does not imply changing the past, only determining what it actually was. (Accepting total solipsistic skepticism regarding the existence of the past -- both immediate and distant -- enables a backward causation that can alter the past. This is the temporal attitude of both fundamentalist/reductionist religion and paranoia, which is predicated on panic. We weren't here yesterday [or 8000 years ago, say the religious], and we may be obliterated tomorrow. All we can know is the terrible NOW, whimper the paranoiacs.) Causality, as it is traditionally defined, depends on closed physical systems, and closed physical systems are not a general state of either NATURE or social systems. NATURE as humans experience it may never permit a physical effect to precede its cause, but that does not prevent events secured by Social Time to function as if they occurred before their cause. In fact, such events occur frequently in Lived Time. History is retrofit -- e.g. with retroactive contract clauses; by conspiracies/congresses that sanction ceremonies today to confer legal status as of twelve months ago; by exegeses like this one, which elucidate phenomena obscured by domination; etc. Proposition 5: Of course, historical Social Time does not form an unbroken continuum, free of definitive rupture, conflict, and/or contradiction; and it advances the prejudices of its masters. Autonomy commands Lived Time by real participation in Social Time as lived by extended groups. A general language, a common History emerges from groups who experience the qualitative richness of events in a shared present. Inner Time's systolic and diastolic pulses are not uniform. Though it's a game conditioned into us from infancy, clocking life is a futile exercise -- the kind used to occupy dominated minds. Inner and Social times seldom correlate, and when they do they never correspond to the temporal attitudes of other domains. Coordinating them is, at best, an illusion. The temporal frame we normally recognize involves a singular beginning and a temporizing sequence that flows as we play. Its clock is there to limit ludic excess. Yet experience shows me that Time is least obtrusive when I am most interested/involved (i.e. playing). If we must clock life, let's at least recognize a chronometric praxis that more closely resembles Lived Time. Why not truly humanize chronometry? Why not recognize that our clocks run only when we are not playing? That way, as we get more adept at the idiosyncratic life-courses we fall into, chronometry should become less and less important. Eventually, a playful continuity might force that odious controlling science into obsolescence. Etymological Note: (Time - Old English t¡ma = Old Norse t¡mi: fit or proper time; good time; prosperity.) In English, the lexeme "Time" has never functioned exclusively to designate a cosmic backdrop. Quite the contrary, it has often been personalized. From the earliest recorded usages for the nominal substantive "Time" in Old English (circa 893-897 C.E.), one lexical subdomain has advanced the semantic notions of suitability, fitness, and propitiousness. Thus, in English it has always been possible to say: This is a good time; your time; a time for jubilation. Proposition 6: At this moment, the ideology of corporation- dominated Lived Time manipulates us with notions of leisure and holiday (Debord), which are always immanent, always desirable, but never quite present. One ideological trick that dominance resorts to is to manage shared temporal experience by curbing ludic adventure, denying coevalness to whoever or whatever does not toe its line. Shake the scruffy panoptic fetish that has bent us to its design. Upend the dictates of corporate Reason, and abandon its tyrannical clock. Transform your NOW (past and future) into the jubilant NOWEVER. Time flies like an arrow.Fruit flies like a banana. - anonymous