Clock Time verse Internal Time Consciousness

The nature of this critique is to challenge what Heidegger would tern the “vulgar” conception of time. Before jumping on the bandwagon and passively buying into the commonly accepted notion of absolute time, straight and uniform, we have to assess the pragmatic ground from which it has sprung.

A story is told of a town where the public clock was hung at street level. Accessible to all, each person would pass by and simply adjust the clock to conform to his or her own watch. Obviously, this made meeting arrangements difficult. Gradually complaints flowed in until someone suggested the grand idea to place the public clock at the top of a high tower. In this new location, the solution was found. The clock was displayed for all to see but not to touch. It would be able to keep a universal time for all now that it was inaccessible.

As this story beautifully illustrates, universal clock time must be in a transcendent position. It must be suspended above all of its subjects to maintain its objectivity. At street level, in the soup of everyday living, where previously each person worked according to a different time piece, an internal subjective watch—a diachrony or polychrony that warps and distorts any sense of universal time—no common measure could be found. Yet the alternative of public synchrony from the clock tower is achieved at a high price. This new temporal index will remain abstract and detached. The subjects’ personal and everyday awareness of time will have to yield to a coercive alien master. As philosopher David Wood put it:

For computational economy, the calendar and the clock both make use of cycles and nesting orders of unit, but what they represent is a purely serial temporal order. Hence they play not just a practical role in everyday dating and structuring the synchronization of social life (timetables, mealtimes, appointments), but also a theoretical role in those disciplines for which a sequential, intentionally neutralized temporality is a prerequisite, like physics. (12)

Infected by this “computational economy,” the practical advantages of an “intentionally neutralized temporality” culminate in what Francoise Dastur refers to as “the ‘de-temporalisation’ at the origin of the ‘formal’ character of traditional logic…”. The assumption that thought thinks in a vacuum—particularly a temporal vacuum—with windows opening only onto a pure “serial temporal order” have fueled conceptions in physics and philosophy, history and society, for generations. What these conceptions lack is serious self-reflection, a move that would no doubt reveal how they had swept their own temporality under the carpet. Suddenly the wake up call comes to shed light on the fact that, as Wood describes:

Time-consciousness has blind corners, failures, and gaps in protention. There are, of course, surprises only for a protending consciousness, but success, let alone failure, here already demonstrates a “beyond” to time-consciousness that is itself temporal. (13)

Part and parcel with the re-temporalizing of thought comes the entrapment of metaphysical closure. Snared in the web of associated conditions for all thinking (i.e. the Kantian lattice of a priori categories) repeatedly demonstrates a spectrum of concepts whose escape velocity will never be reached. Time is counted amongst such concepts. I can never think beyond or outside of time except through a consciousness which is itself time bound. I cannot free myself from my temporal prison through the mere force of thought. Born and raised within that prison, I seem conditioned to its rules. Yet, the question remains in the heart of my imagination, whether some more limited form of transcendence is permitted—a furlough perhaps? In the contradiction in terms that a ‘leave of absence’ implies, one wonders to what extent I can stretch my time thin and thus experience some modicum of release?

Photo by Nava Crispe 2012

Apparently we often walk ourselves through some kind of reduction or bracketing of our own time. No one imagines that the social conditions of the 13^th century are the same as in the 20^th century. We possess a certain self-guided suspicion of our generational standing. For example, I can compare the difficult and often unintelligible life I led before the age of internet and e-mail, to my current overly familiar world the in the heat of the information age. Reflecting on these finite differences informs me that change is no stranger, but rather a central authority that must be reckoned with. I must factor all the variables in choosing my trajectory so as to not “over shoot my object” as Adorno cautions.

Given the enormous historical sweep of kabbalistic research with its extreme emphasis on textual decipherment, one cannot avoid taking the time question—the time of the text and the time of the reader—into the folds of literary theory. Out of this cornucopia of critical tools comes the seminal dissemination of the deconstructionists—the notion of differance with its duplicitous connotation of differing and deferring. Combined, these two meanings inaugurate the alterity of time. Returning to David Wood once more, he remarks:

There is an important sense in which the operational value of Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of the sign lies in its liberation of textuality from the interpretive constraints imposed by traditional concepts of meaning and of time. Even if one were to continue to suppose that real, objective time was linear, Derrida’s critique of the sign as representation would undermine any attempt to restrict textual temporality to a linear form. The text is a privileged site for the liberation of time. (14)

Differance is the play in the text, or rather the readers approach to the text that creates the “liberation of time.” Consequently every experience of reading is time driven. The same text is always somewhat different. Each time I open a book it’s a different book with the same name.

Once an e-mail was circulated from a college professor citing student bloopers in their exam papers. One example was a student who contended that ‘the Odyssey was not written by Homer but by another man with the same name.’ Time ensures that Homer is never the same Homer despite the common name. Even for a single reader committed to a single text of a single author, the temporal scheme multiplies the nexus of relationships until a host of “others” arrive to join the original company.

¹² The Deconstruction of Time. p. 321-2.

¹³ Ibid. p. 326.

¹⁴ Ibid. p. 331.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/elliot-wolfsons-reading-time-part-4/

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