Of Time: Some Possibilities for a Study of Hägglund

Of the many many things one could say about time, let's just say two of them here, to get started on making good on my previous post's wager. Related points are listed. They can be combined, in some cases. I'd be happy to hear of more related points.

(1) There is no such thing as time.
(a) Everything that exists does so eternally.
(b) Time is merely a mistaken perception.

(2) There is such a thing as time.
(a) Nothing exists eternally.
(b) Some things exist eternally and some things are impermanent.
(c) Time is a succession of moments, howsoever we imagine those moments.

We can make some interesting observations already.

• I bet that a detailed description of 1b would involve some kind of succession of moments. The illusion of time would be an illusion of time passing. This means that there is some kind of present, and some kind of past, and some kind of future, if only in our (deluded) perceptions.

• Some forms of quantum theory and all forms of relativity hold a modified version of 2b. Nonlocality could mean that signals can travel faster than light or, even more bad news for time, that signals could be genuinely simultaneous, across arbitrary distances. (Across the galaxy, for instance.) Relativity means that there are entities such as black hole singularities in which no time occurs. There are countless numbers of these entities in the Universe. Some even more recent theories hold that spacetime ceases to exist below a certain size. Hägglund's view is that everything in reality is affected by temporality. Yet you cannot hold this view and cleave to contemporary (post 1900) physical theories of matter.

That's fine, unless you call your view “arche-materiality.” If you use the term materiality and it doesn't mean what contemporary physics means, you have to justify yourself quite vigorously—for one thing, you need to produce an ontology. Hägglund says he doesn't or that he won't. More on this in another post.

• To hold 2a you need to have some kind of 2c: you need some kind of temporal succession that takes place somewhere, if only in your mind (Kant). “Succession” just is the way one moment “succeeds” another one: at any moment in time, there is a present one, a past one, and a moment to come. (Whether we count these moments as seconds, eons, periodic cycles or revolutionary “events” is beside the point at present.)

Hägglund asserts that his version of succession is different from 2a: “Succession should here not be conflated with the chronology of linear time (which is a recurrent misunderstanding of my argument). Rather, succession accounts for a constitutive delay and a deferral that is inherent in any temporal event.”

To claim that your version of succession is different from 2a because it avoids some kind of “naive succession” must mean either:

(i) The “sophisticated succession” does not involve a past, present or future (since that is what succession involves). The question then arises, is this really a theory of time?
(ii) The “sophisticated succession” does involve past, present and future but this involvement happens in a subjective way, and this subjectivity prevents us from knowing “objective” time, or “objective” time is meaningless. In that case, your theory is really a version of 1b.
(iii) The “sophisticated succession” isn't that sophisticated after all.

(iii) seems likely in Hägglund's case, since he asserts, “the trace is always left for an unpredictable future that gives it both the chance to remain and to be effaced.” There is a future. What is that? If it means anything at all, it's a moment after this one. Thus we have a succession of moments: this one, and the next one (the future).

In places Hägglund comes close to asserting (ii), which is close to 1b. This is because deconstruction adapts theories of reading, which in turn adapt Husserl's view of time. On this view there is protension and retention on the part of a subject. Protension means projection into the future. Retention is projection into the past.

But no, argues the holder of sophisticated succession: you are not appreciating the subtle way in which each moment is hollowed out from the inside by the past and by the future.

Yet is this arguing anything different from 1b? If there is not actually a different moment, howsoever defined, what are we talking about when we talk about succession?

If it is different from 1b, then it must be some version of 2c, in which case, there is no disagreement. Time is a succession of moments. Sure, maybe deconstructed, hollow, ghostly moments that only contain flickers of illusory presence. Look, this flickering ghostly moment is always already inscribed with a past. And what is that? It's a ghostly flickering moment that is different from this one. Ah, you say, so there are indeed different moments. We agree.

Why then does Hägglund want to fend off 2c? There are various reasons I can think of but there might be more.

One reason is that 2c is trivially true and doesn't require Derrida to make it so.

Another reason is that 2c has been regularly refuted since Aristotle. How different, really, is Hägglund's argument from Hegel's? We have scooped out moments that don't really exist at the beginning of the Phenomenology.