Chrono-topologies. Hybrid Spatialities and Multiple Temporalities

240 Pages·2010·5.984 MB·240\240

by  Leslie Kavanaugh (ed.)

Chrono-topologies
Hybrid Spatialities and
Multiple Temporalities
Critical Studies
Vol. 32

General Editor
Myriam Diocaretz
Tilburg University
Editorial Board
Anne E. Berger, Cornell University
Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University
Marta Segarra, Universitat de Barcelona
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Chrono-topologies
Hybrid Spatialities and
Multiple Temporalities
Edited and Introduced by
Leslie Kavanaugh
Cover Photograph: Leslie Kavanaugh
Cover Design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3141-8
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3142-5
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3
Leslie Kavanaugh

2. Minkowski‘s Space-Time: From Visual Thinking to the Absolute
World
Peter Galison 9

3. Materialist Theories of Time
Richard T. W. Arthur 43

4. Corollaries on Space and Time: A Survey of Arabic Sources in
Science and Philosophy
Nader El-Bizri 63

5. Agency and Space in Darwin‘s Concept of Variation
Chunglin Kwa 79

6. The Time of History/The History of Time
Leslie Kavanaugh 91

7. Places Lived in Time
Mary Lynne Ellis 125

8. Intermittences: Merleau-Ponty and Proust on Time and Grief
Patricia Locke 147

9. Lyrical Bodies: Music and the Extension of the Soul
Sander van Maas 159

10. Phased Space
Raviv Ganchrow 179

11. The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World: Jean-Luc
Nancy‘s Cinematic Ontology 193
Josef Früchtl
12. Societies of Control and Chrono-Topologies
M. Christine Boyer 203

13. Digital Architecture and the Temporal Structure of the Internet
Experience
Antoine Picon 223

List of Contributors 237
Introduction

Leslie Kavanaugh

The twentieth century has seen many revolutions - historically unprecedented
events politically, economically, socially, technologically, artistically. In
terms of art, the move to abstraction and non-figurative expression was a
revolution that went beyond the effects of photography, cinema, and
computer animation technologies. Politically, communism, no matter what
one feels about it, was an extraordinary experiment in human governance.
Never before had communities tried to cooperate together in this way for
mutual benefit of the whole. Of course in the seventeenth century, Europe
expanded into a global economy, but the twentieth century saw the mutual
interdependence of the world economies, transcending the economic
autonomies of nation states. Developments in human thought and possibility
also brought many revolutions technologically, of course. The century was
one of mobility, and saw the advent of mass migrations of people – not only
into new territories, ever-shifting boundaries, but mass mobility of
populations on a daily basis just to go to work. Never before in human
history have the everyday lives of every man been occupied with getting
from point ―a‖ to point ―b‖.
Yet increasingly, we live an uprooted existence, forever wandering
waywardly. We seemingly live in a world were we are ―connected‖ to
everything, yet have never been more estranged. We are the voyeurs in the
lives of peoples we cannot grasp, occupying places on the far side of the
globe from us, yet we remain further away than ever because we do not
understand other people, and indeed probably cannot comprehend them. In
our hubris we think that our presence (even our virtual presence) is innocent.
Yet this revolution that has allowed us to peek seditiously into the intimate
chambers of our fellow humans – into their countries, into their bodies, into
their struggles for human dignity – has not left us feeling more
compassionate or connected with the human race as a whole. Just the
opposite; this unprecedented access has left us afraid and uncomprehending.
And fearful people do violent things.
Consequently, no one can deny that the twentieth century was also
the century of unforeseen and unimaginable brutality. The technological scale
of wars, not only the two world wars, but innumerable genocides, proved the
twentieth century to be quite singular in human history; hundreds of millions
of people were slaughtered in the twentieth century. We have never been
more close to each other, yet never been so far away from our own humanity.
4 Introduction

This collection of essays, specifically, takes up only one revolution
that occurred in the twentieth century – the unity of space and time as
ontological categories. In 1905, Einstein‘s paper, Zur Elektordynamik
bewegter Körper, the so-called Special Theory of Relativity, hit the century
like a bomb. Although in popular culture, Einstein is the most well-known
theoretical physicist, many scientists contributed to the immense revolution
in our conceptions of the physical world and man‘s place in the universe.
Never again could we think of space and time in the same way, even though
many theories would rehearse or rehabilitate notions of space and time
already postulated in antiquity. Each space and time is specific and
individualized.
In a seminar room at the Technical University of Delft, in the
Netherlands, a small group of people gathered in order to think through what
could space-time mean for the twenty-first century. How to think space-time
in an unprecedented way? How to think space-time beyond the disciplines of
mathematics and theoretical physics? This community of scholars, moderate
in numbers, yet expansive in ambition, gathered once a week with invited
guests from all over the world, in order to bend over these questions. The
room itself no longer physically exists, destroyed by fire on the 13th of May,
2008. However, the inquiry remains. This volume should be seen as a
moment in time, when for several months, we came together with questions
circulating about our heads, as Nietzsche would say. These essays are the
result of that inquiry.
This volume is organized thematically with regard to the manner in
which space-time is approached. Firstly, since the term ―space-time‖
originated with Minkowski, a contemporary of Einstein, Peter Galison jump
starts the collection with an excellent explanation of Minkowski‘s genesis of
the concept of space-time. Galison‘s essay entitled, ―Minkowski‘s Space-
Time: From Visual Thinking to the Absolute World‖, not only sketches out
the historical context and development of Minkowski‘s Space-Time, but also
his attempt to provide a unified ―Theory of the Absolute World‖. Notably,
for Minkowski, neither Lorentz nor Einstein had truly provided a new
conception of space, yet it must be said, in the end, he too wanted a world
that was absolute and unchanging.
The second essay by Richard T.W. Arthur entitled, ―Materialist
Theories of Time‖, goes back to antiquity in order to unravel time from
matter and space. Many theories of a matter-dependant chronology existed
long before the twentieth century. What would constitute a materialist theory
of time? A first thought might be that, if matter is what exists in space and
time, then time should be an existing something within which matter can
undergo its changes. Arthur traces the various material theories of time from
antiquity, through the modern sciences, and up to Balfour‘s recent theories
supporting the relativist line taken by Leibniz and Mach, albeit incorrectly in
Chrono-topologies 5

Arthur‘s view. Leibniz remains an important seventeenth century source
whose thought has scarcely been sufficiently explored, specifically in matters
concerning a relational theory of space and time.
Other important thinkers, often forgotten, are the mathematicians,
scientists and philosophers of the Arabic language who preserved much
scholarship of antiquity as well as made strident progress in thinking of space
and time. Nader El-Bizri, in his essay entitled, ―Corollaries on Space and
Time: A Survey of Arabic Sources in Science and Philosophy‖, traces the
origins and development of mediaeval Arabic scholars on the topic of space
and time. Whereas notions of place were extended by mathematical notions
of geometrical space, time was caught, often, in theological arguments as to
the parts of time, and the existence of a future. Obviously, these thinkers are
fundamental for understanding the scientific conceptions of space-time
inherited in Europe in the seventeenth century, effecting even today the core
discussions as to the nature of the physical universe.
Remaining on the larger scale of the universe, Chunglin Kwa takes
up the notion of evolutionary time, and space as variation in Darwin, in his
essay entitled: ―Agency and Space in Darwin‘s Concept of Variation‖. In
Kwa‘s discussion of evolutionary time, he positions Darwin‘s ―Natural
Selection‖ as heir to an 18th century mechanist understanding of nature‘s
history. Time would become the relational sequence between events, rather
than the neutral background on which timeless laws of nature unfold. Space
became the theater in which organisms act out the advantages which
variations in their biological constitution had given them. Thus, the notion of
―event‖ with Darwin, gives us not only a ―relative‖ conception of space and
time, but also a dynamic, interactive one.
In Leslie Kavanaugh‘s essay, ―The Time of History/The History of
Time‖, the notion of time as history, both collective and individual is
explored through several twentieth century historians and philosophers.
Through the examination of, for example, Koselleck, Poulantzsas, Gurvitch,
and Foucault, time is seen as not something linear, stretching endlessly
backwards and forwards through historical time; rather, as spatio-temporal
layers. In the considerations of the historical, space and time can also no
longer be thought of as separate categories. Foucault‘s notions of power,
albeit problematic, can be used to explain how these spatio-temporal layers
are connected. In the end, however, each layer, no matter if it exists upon an
epochal timeframe, or an individual one, is a matter of relations, and one that
Kavanaugh argues, can be seen as dynamic and generative.
Turning to individual histories and time as memory, Mary Lynne
Ellis contributes an essay entitled, ―Places Lived in Time‖, exploring the
notions that although our experiences arises from a specific moment in time,
they are not fixed and unchanging. Each experience or memory is constituted
within a place of their socio-historical and cultural specificity. Ellis provides