Double Tense: Phenomological or Ontological…
i) Where does one understand time from? In a sense there is only one answer. One pecularily must understand it from ones understandings of it. That is, one needs always to be a phenomenology of time, which one then realized. Heiedgegger therefore must charaterize a vulgar time, to take his distance from; or Deleuze needs the first synthesis or account for; and Kant the Aethetic before then analytic. One then of the curious part in time is that t is never self-evident what one means by it. The world slide betweens registers, and the first move must therefore be to make it appear easy, to make it appear present; to give it traits of its own.
‘Time’ faces the gulf of pheno and geno type. Any Phenotype is both always defined by its genotype, and yet, that genotype is in itself nothing. Mere nonsense. It is only the phentype that allows for any kind of sense. That allows one to talk o the genotype at all…
A Philosophy of time is therefore defined by the quality of its phenotype, which sets the problem and not of its enotype which gves an ideal solution
ii) Or to put the same argument otherwise. There is a great problem within Difference and Repetion: Exactly who sets the problems? Are the problems really the ideal envets whch constantly sifts, and which perpetually protests their difference from the actuals they create? Or are the reals really the actuals, and the idelas are those ideals which can account from these actuals, and all others? This is of course the deep Kantain problem. Surely the categories of understanding will only render what one already perceived, by means of a means.
Deleuze is of course beautifully aware of his problem. His argument will attempt to address it, and to ensure that the ideal he talks of are genuinely different from the actuals: Hence the jump into virtuality and difference. Once things are communicating through difference then they are pitched against the actuals that embody that difference. This is certainly good as far as it goes. And yet, the difference understood as a differential, is the supreme makers of what was already there: What elese is a gradient, but a forknowledge of what is to come? What else is a differential if not an agents which is capable, at a level beyond thought, of entering into a relation which would not disgrace the actual, and producing a result? world becomes that which is created in these relations. It might be creatable otherwise. But the actually world itself keeps it beefy self confidence.
iii)That is, if one has all the resources of chaos at ones disposal, why would one make ths wrld and no other? Why would one not make all worlds all the time,. And one worlds or something else, or doodle the face of God or the face of nothing much… The forces are essentially too liebnizian. They behave themselves, and do not shit of the carpet. Here Leibniz was of right. His answer to this problem is that creating matter and monads imposed a double restriction on God. If monads then the one universe: If Matter then freedom needs all choices in the same universe. So only one can be created. Choamosis faces no such problem. Raising he deep problem is this really as exotic as it gets?
vi) This move to Leibniz matters, and is not coincidental. It is Leibniz who after all critically argues this as a force (and an immanent one at that). And yet Leibniz carefully guards his Gold. That is he carefully argues that there needs to be another element, a divine mind, like and unlike to ground the entire system. The problem is, if one lacks this grounding, if one leaps to merely a differential force, then what is that differential actively doing? What is it creating? Or to put it otherwise how does it relate to the world it creates. In have no problem acceding the reality of this force (nor does any rationalist). But the problem remains whether these forces actively are the same as those that make a body, or whether one needs so many layers and levels hat they are not? That is the problem is not whether is making a too greedy jump from Phenot to Gno, so much as the jump makes and sense at all. Maybe be the modes are simply different. This is after all Leibniz, and Spinoza argument.
v) This is for me the meet of Guattari compliant. There strikes us little point in abandoning God, if creativity is merely a form of spirituality. Better keep God than the spirit…Better keep bleeding world which is perpetually wrong footing itself even as it is given, than reserving the nice ordering Ideal and philosophical worlds. Better be Dead than Bled…
vi) The above points takes one sharply back to time and Burp (in indegestible Bergson). It is after all Burps claim that my time is the same as the universes, if allowed to be fully virtual. And that the NEW, that is the just actualized, operates to produce new differences. Burp therefore allows what would otherwise so very dodgy to become viabl. As the thruth was virtual, and creative it was really out there. Really not merely hanging around like a possible waiting birth, it was really creating
vii) And yet this is merely to cast out Beeblebub with Lucifer: Fly with Light: Or Shit with Blindness. The problem being that either the virtual is fully dynamic and creative. In which case the problem essentially still stands. One can of course say there are points, of change. Points which as a thing is individualized it is born a different set of potions in the world. But this different set of options needs not be univocal with the previous set.
viii) Or better they need only be univocal if one has already assumes a duration, If one says, on what is creative here is the continuity of time, which if one splits one gets different things, which then communicate differently. A move which is fine it itself, but still assumes the time to be as a continuity. That is assumes that we are all within a duration which as it is continual is somehow creative…
ix) Again Deleuze has an answer this creation, is through difference, through the third return. What returns are not the individuals, but the differences, difference that are irrestrictable to any individual. This again is great, and no doubt substantially the case . And yet still begs the question whether all these difference are simply the same in themselves. If it is a difference which operates across a duration which repeates, then whether this difference is really united, whether it is univocal, must surely depend upon the quality of the duration itself. Differential, difference, by itself is a mere middle, and had no need to always be exactly the same as it self. It has no need of a changeless change or an immobility. That is given to it, only it already must be the same. That similarity if of course duration.
x) This double headedness is of course the deep mystery of synthesis which always creates what is out of something else, but does it is a double headed way. A way that constitutes both what is, and what is not in terms of itself. Which therefore can annex the what is not to serve the what it is, and yet do so as respects the very difference it allows between the two.
A synthesis runs through and holds together, what is, and therefore establishes a connection between what it, and what is not.
xi) And yet, this last remark returns one full circle; and full stop. The tiem one gets, the duration, one needs must again depend on what is actual. One needs to uncover the paradox in just being their, and start to account for it, or account for the forces that could be doing it. The problem always comes when some bugger reworks this actualization…
xii) To be actual is to be vulnerable, while the viritual remains invulnerable…
xiii) This takes us again back to the times itnially vulgar characterization, Here a problem of course immediately binds one up. There are two distinct ways to characterize this time. One the one hand one can hold an analogy with space. And yet this is hardly exactly a time. On the other, if one is not to hold this analogy, then the only thing that makes time different is not time itself but tense.
Time either turns or space or tense therefore,. Or possibly both.
xiv) A Vulgar characterization must therefore either be the characterization of a time of flowing moments, or nows, akin to points. Which can then be founded on tense. Or one can jump straight way into the time of tense, and how to uncover a a time capable to explaining it.
xv) Moreover This second approach has to levels. If one starts with the time of tense as a time, so with three tenses which are somehow caught up in one another. Or start with dual tense. The advantage of the former is that one starts with real time. And yet this of course begs the question, as to whether one should start in time at all? It also is a little disengious. Take for example Burps indegestible theory. It is clear that the past is triumphant. But it is not clear that there is really a present at all. Isthe moment of exchange itself present . Surely is point that the past, and the future meet and part company- but is this itself really a present point? Is it not merely a point of mutual embodiment? A Point of ‘being both’, which only ‘becomes’ present afterwards, as the two difference idiocies move apart. At that point them one is both in the future and the past, one embodying the other, in an exchange. That exchange ts not itself necessarily present. It is rather embodied elsewhere.
xvi) The three times, install therefore a point of synthesis: Of switch back. Take the first synthesis. Herel habit is said to exist in the m8iddle postion between past (memo
ry), and the action (the furutre). Each habit passively blends memories into other moemories, and sets up an exchange, in which an action is given. The Habit is that which embodies in an action as it has am mmory.. My problem here is that I see no inedpenadnt reason why the habit itself is ever in the resent. On the contrary it seems to me that a a habit involves a very complex series of move. First there are the presents themselves, which self posit. Within these instances are other ideas, which assemble them into confabulations’. A habit itself gives its as a past As the unthinkable past, or same again. A same which is of course defined within the micro-perceptions themsevles . It is this memeory, as it seems to be whole that creates the norm, and constitutes a habi. But this habit is now understood in the past, but cearly realtes t a futuree. The once and same and future habitual. The future is therefore tha anticpatin, the expectation, the always running into next. This always running into next is givien in meoery and perception. It creates a natural link between them. How could it operate anyother way? One looks to now, and ones mind is turned to what will be, what ought to be. The past, the memory of the past, becomes he gathering of intesitity in the future, The testiment to a future.
This anticpatino, is then givien within the present. It is as a sequen ce of instants. I look for this one, and then that. These instance exile the memory, in the knwoeldge of anticipation to come They looks low, then they look them, in a sequence of different, if linked ideas.
These instants are then free to loop back on he past, on not.
xvii). My point here is that if one simply nods like a donkey, and says, oh it is time, but we always knew that , then all hope of explaination fails, and big beefy hard reality of time reasserts iself. It is afterall one of te weird things about Deleuze,. Here is a philsopher who perhaps best of all philosophers can escape the box. And yet at the very moement he throws all on temporal values, he climbs firmly in the box, in the name of a changless chane, and refuses then to leave!
xvii) That is why time? I accept that there has to be a limit a point that I share in teh world, a point I am implicated within it. And yet this is clearly a double edged problem. Unless one thinks there is somewhere a guilt self awaiting ressurection, then this sharing needs only be with a part in me. And what part then beomes a complex issue. Is clearly something I am, but am in participating with, tha is as I am cught up by, and through and with.
xix) Critically that part needs to be active. Unless I am active hoe can I be in the world at all. Herre of course the psychoanalysis implict in early Deleuze betrays him. He does nto want the conmscious, and eskews any hope to rethink it,- or perhaps better to re-fracture it awayfrom the ego.
xx) A tense is then my answer. In a tense one has a glance of individuality-in temporality. A gance that gives th world actively, and that constitutes it for what it is, and will be. And yet wch does so from the perspective of something already within it, already fractured by it.
xxi) Perhaps the arghuement needs to coe down to the point of fracture. Is what is fractured the result of the fracturing itself. If this is the case then one must think of a medium of fracture, and give it a name. And time is better thnAlbert…
Alternatively one can think the sate of factre is f course primrary,. But that there are many different states, and many different ways to own a fracture line. Whicb is my mpve. Each tense rerpoesenty a sliver, a way of owning a fracture. Except of course one does not own it, without being owned by it, and without creating elsewhere another element which owns what one does as its own…