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Saturday, October 18, 2008
Time Must Have A Stop
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
At least three ABD students, myself included, are currently working on James Joyce at UC Irvine; all of them are working on Joyce’s representations of time, particularly the tension in his novels between diachronic (linear) time, the usual sort, and synchronic (simultaneous) time.
I expected, of course, that when I arrived at graduate school I would find a lot of interest in the philosophy of time, both because of its consistent fascination for thinkers in the 20th Century, and because of the games that fictions play with it. But despite the many ways of cognizing time, simultaneous perceptions get all the limelight: why? Why should it be that Walter Benjamin’s description of history “shot through with chips of Messianic time” now strikes so many critics so forcefully? In my last post, I asked readers for examples of vast alien intelligences, and maybe half of all the passages recommended to me dealt specifically with simultaneity (for example, “Story of Your Life” and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End).
I am reminded, looking back, that Marcel Proust’s revelations of simultaneity hold little interest for us, however much we enjoy their poignancy and the intimacy of their truth. Work is not being done, at least not in the non-Le Clezio reading world, on his madeleine or his overlapping cathedrals. We look instead to Benjamin’s 1939 piece, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written after the rise of Fascism in Europe, only a year before Benjamin was driven to suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Or we might look at Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology, from which I derive my terms “diachronic” and “synchronic,” published in 1958 at the height of the Cold War. These are views of time as it applies to all of society at once, and they were born out of past periods when the whole society felt itself under threat, each moment brought into bas-relief by war.
It is strange that we should feel so comfortable discussing simultaneity when we rarely, if ever, experience such a thing. The Blakes and Rilkes of the world are always in a tiny minority, and most of us know time in the plain, old-fashioned way, as something like a rope knotted around one ankle, pulling us along. As late as 1986, when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons produced Watchmen, the imminent threat was fairly easy to discern: a nuclear war with Russia that produces Messianic time. “Dr. Manhattan,” of course, is the name of the god who announces that “There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.” Now, with the post-Spider-Man film of Watchmen due to arrive next year, circumstances have changed. It is not so much that we can picture the end of the world as that we feel terribly blind, and that this blindness coincides with the happy arrival of the Internet as a storehouse of knowledge, an infinite archive—not only in the literal sense of online text, but in the (perhaps more significant) linkages it creates between researchers and research facilities all over the world.
Eternity is a comfort. It is relaxing to think of narratives repeating themselves across time, to imagine, as Levi-Strauss hungered to do, the structural webs that could make sense of contraries and bring them to peace. But the old homologies, the sparkle of humanistic erudition that unites Derrida with Plato or Shakespeare with Agamben is now a pose, a front for a deeper anxiety that something terrible is coming and that it will take us unawares. Think of all those scenes in the movies where somebody tries to unscramble a coded message, or copy a computer file, or do other kinds of information work while their friend struggles to barricade the door against monsters: that is the real terror underneath these continual re-discoveries of the beautiful fact that time is simultaneous, eternal, unmoving, its truths waiting to be collected, like laundry hanging on the line.
It’s as if I were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea [...] That little woman was probably right, it could be a matter of nerves, nerves are the very devil, No need to talk to me about it, it’s a disaster, yes a disaster [...] Faltering, as if his lack of sight had weakened his memory, the blind man gave his address, then he said, I have no words to thank you, and the other replied, Now then, don’t give it another thought, today it’s your turn, tomorrow it will be mine, we never know what might lie in store for us, You’re right, who would have thought, when I left the house this morning, that something as dreadful as this was about to happen. He was puzzled that they should be at a standstill. Why aren’t we moving, he asked, The light is on red, replied the other. From now on he would no longer know when the light was red.
-José Saramago
Comments
Having just watched the first two terminator movies for the first time, your post makes me think about the weird kinds of simultaneity those movies are invested in: in the first, the son sends his own father back into the past to prevent his being killed before he’s even born and also to conceive him, and in the second, the machine that was invented to kill John Connor is sent into the past, eventually, to destroy the machine that invented him, a machine which it turns out was actually built out of him.
There’s something so bizarrely tautological about these experiences of time, a really interesting combination of simultaneity and linear (since the paradox of simultaneity can only be expressed by recourse to linear terms?), but what I really love about it is Cameron’s disinclination to play “Back to the Future” games with the temporal sequence; whereas BttF tries very hard to make it seem like there’s only one sequence (and changes in the past have more or less instant consequences in the “present") the whole point of the terminator movies seems to be the incoherance of the nuclear age’s machine messianism (leavening “judgement day” with a quasi Donna Haraway-ism in which the machine is what makes us human, even though our humanity is defined by not being machines). Or maybe that’s just plain old “simultaneity” as you’re using the term?
"In my last post, I asked readers for examples of vast alien intelligences, and maybe half of all the passages recommended to me dealt specifically with simultaneity”
I’m not sure whether this is a selection effect, though, based on which of those texts you’re already familiar with. I’d say that a high proportion of those texts deal with time in some manner, because a fundamentally different perception of time is one of the easiest ways for us to imagine an alien intelligence.
Here are some of the other time-effects. In The Call of Cthulhu:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die
This awkward couplet is so often quoted as to be a fertile source of parody, but you can see the basic point—it’s the horror of deathlessness, of time that will never end.
Or, in Stapledon, his basic effect in Last and First Men or Star Maker is to stretch out time by placing humanity within geological time-scales. Here it is not simultaneity, but a kind of absorption of every individual—because you can’t see them, in a narrative that spans billions of years—within a mystical expansion into time. A section of one of these books concerns the highly developed time-perception of a future version of the human species, the members of which can simultaneously perceive very short slices of time and preserve a sort of psychological feeling that events stretching over years are all part of one moment.
For example, J.P. Morgan showed up again just now, even though he’s been dead for 95 years or so.
"a front for a deeper anxiety that something terrible is coming and that it will take us unawares.“
“THE SECOND COMING”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Me, I only hope we will face some sort of apocalypse and not the banality of evil.
I dreamed I saw J.P Morgan last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But J, you’re ninety-five years dead!”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
See, I’d argue that the dominant literary experience of time these days is the uncanny, the moment where past, present, and future smash into each other without either linear progression or rich, modernist simultaneity.
It’s Hamlet’s perception of time at the start of the play. Hey, you’re dead! You should be here, now.
And the presence of the past in the present becomes a sort of emblem for the future. I think of it as conscious typology: if now is like then, then later will be like that other time.
Ghosts. As Joyce wrote, people who have lost their context. One time moves so quickly, leaving other times to linger out of place. The oddity of someone’s idea of the future becoming an emblem of our idea of the past. (The Gernback continuum.) The strangeness of finding someone’s old papers in your attic.
What about Freud’s description of the unconscious as timeless in his ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ - that is, lacking all time? Peter Brook uses this to discuss narrative in his Reading for the Plot. When simultaneity occurs, it is akin to timelessness. If we experience time in our conscious minds as a means by which we can create narrative, timelessness, or the instantaneous, is similar in its construction as the death drive, the implosion of personal narrative.
So, to be clear I understand: the uncanny paradox here is that we’re terrified of timelessness? (Because terror requires time?) That we’re desperately, frantically trying to barricade the door against monsters as our computer geek tries to decode the computer? Or, Dr Manhattan notwithstanding; that the tenor of Watchmen is not the Shellyan multicoloured jewel staining the white radiance of eternity, but rather the consistently localised, pervasive, jittery fear that the minute hand on the armageddon clock is just about to click to upright?
Paradox because being frantic is being immersed most profoundly in time as something that passes. I do tend to collect my laundry from the line in a frantic manner: I’m terrified it’s always about to start raining.
Also: what Aaron B said.
Adam: exactly.
Aaron,
Unfortunately, I never saw the first Terminator movie, and I was very young when I saw the second, so I don’t have a clear memory to go on—and Wikipedia isn’t proving especially helpful. As a result, it’s just difficult for me to say whether or not the films can be interpreted as earnest satires of messianism. It certainly doesn’t seem out of the question.
It seems to me that the Cameron films have something to do with ideology: ideology works like a frame or lens through which we realize possibilities in the present by projecting an imaginary future. So all ideology is, in effect, a time traveler from the future messing with the present. Peak oilers believe that the future will bring an unprecedented oil crisis—as a result, they buy up oil at absurd prices right now, and suddenly the average American consumer is paying four dollars per gallon.
Thus Sarah Connor splits into two Sarahs: the “real” Sarah who is prophesying the apocalypse and trying to save humanity, and the “fake” Sarah who is trying to precipitate an apocalypse (because she is the killer robot impersonating Sarah). They are exactly what they appear: the same person, urging us to make that necessary pre-emptive strike.
The first Terminator is really quite good for what it is, especially if you can avoid reading it (ahistorically) in light of the later evolution of the franchise.
Rich,
Re: Lovecraft and the horror of deathlessness—my title was a reference to an obscure Huxley work, and (by my own free association) also a reference to After Many A Summer Dies The Swan, Huxley’s book about a scientist who suffers immortality named after Tennyson’s “Tithonus.”
Tuck Everlasting, also. But I am convinced that these are artifacts of a different time than ours, though we still feel their pathos.