This one is a little different, so a justification of sorts:
I want to make it clear from the jump that this is not an attempt at academic writing; I have no desire or skill with which to do so. Instead, I want to borrow the faux grandeur and credibility from works considered ‘academically composed’ and lend it to a series of attempts at schizo-analysis directed towards time and temporality.
For those learnered in such matters, you may immediately note that refering to this piece as “schizo-analysis adjacent” is laughable at best and at worst would cause D&G to rise from the dead and heckle me until I join them. That said, I have ruminated on these thoughts for years with an intense desire to share and makes sense of them, and I haven’t written anything of note lately.
Bite me.
(please)
So yeah, I wrote a wanky piece of prose masquarading as pretentious philosophical pondering. If that was all there was to it I wouldn’t share it, so trust that there is something more to take away here. I’m also working on a more thorough expansion of these ideas in conjunction with principles from Agrippa’s Three Books of the Occult because apparently, my prosal psychosis is compensating for readability and a fucking point.
Anyway, a piece on temporality, and the preliminaries of why it holds the most cognitive revolutionary potential. Enjoy it if you want, mock it if you like, and decode it if you must.
Thesis:
We suppose that Immediate Temporality (“the present” in temporal terms) is currently the primary mechanism of meaning making and social production, and thus the pioneer of creation itself. Pecedent Temporality (“the past”) follows in importance, acting as an aggregate of stimuli that directs lines of flight and flows of desiring production.
Whilst this process is not without merit nor benefit, we suggest that a paradigm focusing on Potentiality (future temporality) is necessary for meaningful conceptual development, and that one such paradigm should succeed Immediate temporality as the primary impetus of creative force. By casting aside any assumed significance bestowed on being alive in the current day, we embrace the fluid and indefinite to more adeptly percieve creative processes. To blashpeme the god of now is to undo the deification of tangibility and perception predicated upon it, opening us up to more connected and altruistic truths of the world.
We acknowledge the fascist potential of this approach; such potential is contained in all romantic/post-romantic ideology. However, we maintain that there is an equal if not much greater potential to destroy facist ideology by engendering a broader social adoption of post-humanism, an understanding of myth as meaning-making to dispel delusions of pre-ordained greatness and facillitating a path forward for those who need a greater meaning to fuel their actions. In doing this, we have the a chance to build a Copernican revolution of temporality.
Elaboration (or: a series of tangents)
For a moment, I would encourage us to assess the way forms of productive kinesis or “motivations” (lack, desire etc) interact with and are informed by temporality.
Take hunger as an example. How is hunger, a desire for food, impacted by the knowledge that at a precise point, with the certainty of death, we will be fed? You would still feed hungry, that lack of food, and you would still desire to eat food. However, the intensity of hunger is fuelled by uncertainty - if you don’t know when food is coming, if food is coming. If you know that in exactly ten seconds, your appetite will be satiated, the way you perceieve hunger is limited, contained within a span of seconds that you are currently immersed in instead of a permenant, fluid state that is awaiting interaction and malluability.
I think of a pet dog, mechanically sculpted into routine. He sits with his hunger, treating it like a red-light in the cockpit that causes no ailments, no distress. It is simply an indicator of need, of which he is certain that it will be met. Temporal expectancy puppets the steps of rhythmic dance that bring forth his dinner.
Can we take this to mean that temporal diversity drives the movement of desire?
I think of ghosts, which splice the temporalities of historical past and living present together. I think of humanity’s propensity towards short-term gain as they lack appreciation for the chains they’ve used to bind themselves.
If we are to assume that desire (or at least the movement of desire) is temporal it follows that Immediate Temporality is the realm in which it is percieved, as the immediacy of time characterizes its dynamic kinesis. For this reason, I wish to interogate what desire looks like when characterized by a lack of temporal connotation (Atemporality).
I believe that death may be an accessible bridging point for this idea. When thinking of death, one could easily be convinced to view it as linear, an eternity unwinding in a very long, branchless coil. In a sentiment most derivative, I want to pre-suppose instead that states of sentience that exist outside of living individuals are states of atemporality - platonic forms unbeheld to the intense structural codifier of time.
That considered, we must strive to reconsider what is static and what is dynamic within atemporality. We can ponder the application of atemporality amongst explicitly temporal fields; in my own thoughts, I have been curious about its application in the study of phenom such as age regression. This in turn requires further elaboration. Elaboration that as of now exists only amongst potentiality.
Re-tracing our steps, can we suggest that temporality codifies desire? It seems counter-intuitive to assume temporality exists as its consequence, but I can see how one would argue that desire activates the proverbial stopwatch by providing a starting location from which it can move.
Keeping that in mind, how can we position desire against inevitability? Within a sliver of a moment, desire functions relative to an external object that it does not possess in immediacy. Therefore, desire is a perpetually contemporary agent.
The natural evolution of this train of thought is to interrogate what happens when we remove time from this equation. Before we do so however, we must interrogate HOW this could be accomplished OR develop an understanding of how to codify an atemporal desire. It’s worth considering if it is possible to establish the desiring subject as having relational adjacency to the object.
A plain text model that would work much better as a diagrams follows the following:
Is able to conceptualize a distance between itself and desire ->
The subject conceptualises the idea of the object of desire ->
The idea of wanting, needing
Just as desiring production is a critical facaulty of the “human condition”, so too is its temporality. We are able to conceptualise the machines and components of desiring process - can we identify the same of temporality?
I will conclude at this time with the notion that I find that Temporality is a framework that defaults to kinesis and limitation. I hope to expand upon this further as I work through my adjacent immediacy.
Thanks for making this far - I know this piece is questionable (I think) but I really believe it has merit. I want to tease apart the format more for future projects because a space that overlaps academia and art rife with potential.
Speaking of future projects - unforseen circumstances have led me to cancel/re-purpose a couple of things I was working on. Expect to see them emerge here as refined(?) written pieces at some point.
If you are just here for me to ocassionally talk about music, I started making reels about my vinyl collection and interesting albums contained within on my instagram (@vrmvr.core). I intend to get back to it soon because its fun and gives me something to do with my frankly ridiculous quantity and quality of wax.
That’s all for now - thanks again, and greet the sun with grace when it awakes you tomorrow.