Saturday, July 31, 2010
Harman on time
http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/first-look-at-being-and-time/
It's about his first encounter with Heidegger. But it also talks about time. There's a golden line:
The intellectual reflex of our time is still to say: “static and essential = bad; changing and becoming = good.”
It reminds me of a half finished thought I posted on Bryant's post on construction. I wrote that the prejudice is to think "object = static."
Graham jumps further in to the core of the problem: this stasis is thought pejoratively.
It made me realize that ironically it's the process view that reifies time into an external container. The trumpery of "you would be a fool to think objects as static" masks an underlying prejudice that is not well worked out.
The prejudice is the default mode in which "everything flows." Now he mentions it I hear the ticking of a clock inside this meme. It's so easy to hold it in an age of ubiquitous time measuring devices.
Ironically then the process view codes for thinking time as a succession of instants. Which is why I find Harman's reworking of occasionalism so refreshing.
"Of course you would be a fool to think that things are static" is trumpery, and that it might mask a deeply held prejudice about time as an external container, just ticking away regardless.
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Don't let the temporophiles kill 'process'! I prefer Latour's take on the term. As he puts it in his essay Trains of Thought:
"Processes are no more in time than in space. ... [T]ime is not in itself a primary phenomenon. Time passes or not depending on the alignment of other entities. In a world made of intermediaries, of displacement without transformation, there is a time separated from space, an immutable frame to measure displacements and, by definition, no process. In a world made of mediations, of transportation by deformation, there are a lot of times and places. Deeper than time is the question of the obedience and disobedience of humans or non-humans."
Removing time from its position of primacy (if anything should be subject to change surely it is that!) does not necessarily therefore do away with process. There can be continuity in process too.
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