Inventive Temporalities

Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia, edited by Shonaleeka Kaul, 2021

What is time? Reams of scholarship have long concluded that time, like one's shadow, may be that which most eludes the grasp of comprehension the more one tries to capture it. It cannot be known by either its affirmation (time is this) or its negation (time is not this). It is a point but also a duration. It is measurable but measureless. It finishes but does not end. It is absolute but relative. Objective but subjective. One could go on. Something so elusive has also, however, along with space, attained in the modern world the status of a fundamental dimension of existence-a measure and frame of all action and inaction, of change and of movement, of progress and growth and thereby of life and vitality itself. A first principle, if ever there was one. And yet-is time even real? Unlike space, does it have an existence, not to say substance, in and of itself, independent of experience or even apprehensible through the five forms of sensory perception? It may be reasonable to assert that it does not. In other words, there is no clarity about the ontological status of time. And this, together with the large number of paradoxes or aporia about it, only some of which are listed above, suggests that it is highly likely that time has been little more than a human construct. Further, the same qualities undermine the assumption of its given-ness. Not counting natural cycles and rhythms, time, as a human construct, may well be, as Norbert Elias put it, "first and foremost the medium of orientation for the social world, regulating it in relation to human life" (1988 : ix). Indeed this is precisely the awareness that thinking with the term 'temporalities' has effected: namely, the inseparability of time from human, rather than natural, configurations. But which social world or human configuration do we speak of? As such, and as this volume will also argue, it may be productive to think about time through its functions, its fields of operation, or its contextualization (Lebovic 2010 : 282)-and thereby through its multiplicity. However, while some have influentially argued that the discovery of this subjective multiplicity of time is itself a product of modernity (Koselleck 2002 : 110-11), Retelling Time contests this, demonstrating

Photography and cinematography are technologies that seem to tell us something important about time. Not just simply representations of time, but also various ways of producing ideas about it: the folding of time, concepts of memory and history that these images represent. How do we, as human beings, actually experience and understand this notion? What are the similarities and what are the differences between the still and moving image? How do other theorists, photographers and filmmakers support the idea of time, flow of time, memory and its representation in these two mediums? This essay aims to explore these questions. Firstly, it looks at photography and its relation to time. Secondly, it considers similarities and differences between the still and moving image and the way in which they represent ideas about time. Thirdly, it explores this question from various key theorists, photographers and filmmakers. And finally, it looks at work what represents these ideas. At the beginning of the essay I considered André Bazin as one of the key writers about temporality and also the work of Roland Barthes who introduced and expanded his approach from his own experience into philosophical and ontological perspective. After, I developed the argument based on French film theorist Christian Metz and English film theorist and writer Peter Wollen: both are discussing and rethinking great ideas of relationship between still and moving image with respect to flow of time and also the perception of time in terms of spectatorship. Further, I explored one of the most inspirational German filmmaker, director and photographer Wim Wenders and his portrayal of the flow of life, accidental and time itself. Thanks to his films, photographs and especially thoughts from an interview at the Kunstforeningen Gammel Strand (2014) that made me more interested in this question and drove my attention towards the exploration of time, flow and even the importance of sequencing movie frames into the chronological order, and most importantly – the notion of valuing the flow of time. I also enjoyed Wenders’ way of looking at the seriousness of time in photography and its relation to it in comparison to cinematic image.

2002

ABSRACT: Although time has been frequently used as a variable or as an implied dimension in creativity research, very few systematic attempts to date have been undertaken to integrate diverse findings and knowledge about the relation of time with creativity. This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the various associations between time and creativity in terms of 3 temporal modes: cyclicity, linearity, and timelessness.

Temporal aspects dwell both in the world around us and at the core of our experience of it. Reality, thought, and language all seem to be imbibed in temporality at some level or another. It is thus not surprising that philosophers who have to face the problems of understanding time have resorted to tools from different spheres of investigation, and often at the points of overlap of these areas. Metaphysics, philosophy of physics and science in general, philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, the study of perception and cognition, but also anthropology, sociology, and history of culture, art, and ideas (and the list is surely far from complete) all contain theories and reflections that are crucial to our understanding and experience of time. Many recent debates in analytic philosophy have tackled in different ways the question of whether the sensation of the passage of time that seems to characterise our ordinary experience should be understood as reflecting some objective feature of reality (as the socalled A-theories of time usually maintain), or is rather a mere feature of our psychology (as is often claimed by the so-called B-theories of time).

Time has an impact on every single person but it has been poorly studied by western intellectuals; especially philosophers and scientists. As Newton knew (and Einstein eventually realized): physics, as the study of material reality, is about Time, so this connection is reviewed here (without mathematics). Major attention is focused on the role of philosophy and even more on the bad uses of language (developed by the Great Greeks) that fails to expose the poor assumptions about Time and its critical role in relationships, especially between humans. Again, bad language (which concentrates on timeless nouns instead of time-oriented verbs, produced the illusion that Time could be understood via objective thinking (using static concepts) when our broad understanding is constructed on experiential intuition. SUMMARY This essay explores the vast range of human thinking about the difficult subject of Time. It begins with attempts to put this concept on a scientific or objective basis but concludes with human psychology, in particular, the critical facility of human memory. The overall framework is to adopt a philosophical view, as this is how most thinkers have approached the problem of the nature of Time. There is also a discussion of the history of ideas of Time across several civilizations and includes a critical analysis of how modern physics views Time, which is not as comprehensive as many think. The conclusion is that Time is NOT an illusion; it is all about Activity and that's the secret of living: doing, the quality actions in life, especially building relationships; substituting numerical views of life (or Time) is a complete waste of time. We show how metaphors are so important in abstract thinking.

Oxford German Studies

The differentiation between 'large' and 'small' urbanism proposed here has only been up for debate since urbanism was established as a discipline, i.e. in the 20th century. These thoughts originate in the fact of the development of standardizing processes which were a response to chaotic conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries (Bogdanović, 1958, p.9.).

in Time and Reality I, Special Issue of Manuscrito (Boccardi, E. eds.), 39(4), 5-34, 2016

This essay is an introduction to Time and Reality I, the first part of a special issue dedicated to the philosophy of time. Here I outline a number of new trends in philosophical theorizing about time, detailing how the various contributions fit into the picture. I argue that there has been a potentially misleading tendency to separate the debate over the passage of time from the debate over the reality of tense. This has obscured a number of interesting philosophical questions. One of the aims of this volume is to bring these two issues together, where they belong. I argue that many contributions to it go in the right direction. The contributions to this volume also establish uncharted philosophical junctures between Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Morality, and the Philosophy of Mind.

APRIA Journal, 2021

This issue of APRIA, Time Matters, was compiled and edited by the ArtEZ Theory in the Arts professorship. All of these reviewed artistic (research) and academic contribu­tions were created and written specially in response to the four­part seminar Time Mat­ters (2019­-2020). The aim of the publication and the seminar is to inquire into the chang­ing concepts of time in the arts and other epistemic fields collectively, and to explore and test alternative – past, present and fu­ture­ oriented – temporalities.

MacDougall has achieved an apparently modest objective: to show us something of the state of mind of some eleven-year-old school children by introducing them to a responsive and interactive camera style. He has done so, taking the risk that nothing may come of it because no real documentary films may result: nobody in the scholastic system seems to put much pressure on girls and boys from disadvantaged social classes to engage in creative activities unless this is likely to lead to a job. There is little interest in encouraging them to express themselves freely or to learn to perceive the reality around them more clearly. These children, however, appear to have enjoyed the opportunity to do so, and one wonders if the world of work will now look the same to them, as a result of the new awareness they have gained. In a sense, then, this poetic exercise has a political dimension. From that perspective, it is apparent that MacDougall’s project is more than a ‘modest’ endeavour.