(1)
To ‘take place’ is both a temporal (took, take, taken) and a spatial relational statement. More formally, it has two signifiers that release themselves into a potential for an infinite string(s) of signifiers (a semiotic chain): taken place (past), take place (present), and will take place (future): infinity as time. The clock ticking represents both our finitude Heidegger’s ‘being-toward-death,’ and our infinity, or rather our immersion in infinity, for the clock ticks on after death. The clicking clock, a symbol of the 19th Century positions itself as the infinite. Since standardization of European industrial practices, arising mainly from monastic rituals and Christianity’s obsession with time management (whether by god, for Catholics; or by being ‘good workers-sheep for god,’ for Protestants). But the ticking clock surpassed its masters and makers. Father time himself dissolved into all bodies exposed to the clock. His Spirit lives, breathes and animates us. It gives many of us life, for the clock-industrial revolution increased Terra’s population from 1 billion to 7 billion homo sapiens within a century.
‘The artist’ – whether they be a painter or sculpture etc. – often speaks of their work as something that they wish to either keep or sell ‘to a good home.’ They love their work, often more than they love people. Paradoxically, whilst they may love their work, they hate the objects they create, and wish to retain them within an economy of the known, not letting them circulate freely (anal-retention?). Either they keep them as reminders of the thing-itself, or they move for them to be sold. Presumably someone will not destroy an artwork they have purchased. There is an unspoken contract of retention. Tentatively speaking of retention, for there is far too much to say here conclusively, the artist has a scatological relationship to their work: the work, the act of shitting – can be mildly or extremely enjoyable – but the object produced is hated in its inverse. Unlike the horror of the scat, when the artist sees their work they are horrified to retain it, instead of flushing the work. But with retention a certain flushing happens. Through a negation of pipes underneath, the people who made the canvas, the people who shipped it, the universe it springs forth from etc., they hold the object, ‘smelling’ in a type of neither-either world. It must neither be destroyed, or it must either be sold. The registers of the economy bridge the scatological need to expunge the horrifying object of creation, the turd of the toilet, the word of the poet or the pain-tings of certain artists. Now, this is contingent on the co-presences of the artist’s specific psychical investment, here we can speak of ‘economy’ and ‘investment’ in purely philosophical terms because of the ubiquitous capital-philosophy. In a spirit I enjoy, the Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei breeches this code of retention by destroying or painting over (effacing) ancient retained vases.
!["Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn" by Ai Weiwei Courtesy of ameliagroom.com]()
“Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” by Ai Weiwei Courtesy of ameliagroom.com
Chronicity, which I define as both a spatial-temporal phenomenon and an ontological discharge must be laid down to its bare bones. To ‘lay’ something ‘bare’ is also to sexualise it. Sexuality, sex is the (imaginary)Darwinian comedic-tragedy of reproductive-evolution for mammals (and others.) As an aside, we impose temporal and spatial constraints on sexual activity. One ‘must not’ as an adult-being have sex with a baby-being, toddler-being or young- teenage-being. The specific boundaries for sexual activities include the notions of public and private space- place. Temporally, the specific boundaries for beginning sexual activities, especially intergenerational sex, usually vary from 16-years-old to 21-years-old.
A sexual relation with time is a priori consensual for time always wants to fuck. It also ‘fucks with us’ on a daily (and nightly) basis, in an absurd non-consensual quasi-sexual (violation?) which is necessary for existence. Shall we ‘fuck back?’ Yes. Besides time is a concept not a creature, and therefore these ethical constraints don’t apply (or do they, for time maybe a creature?)
Chronicity is birth and born. It is also slowly eating away at the flesh sack that is ‘you.’ Its Sein is an epistemological construction and discovered-being with a pre-epistemological ontology. Chronicity for the homo sapien is deadly, as in Heidegger’s philosophy of ‘being-toward-death.’ Life is a terminal illness; Chronicity itself states so much. Levinas contra Heidegger injects time’s Sein with a much-needed enjoyment of Eros, the erotic ‘not-yet’ or ‘the future in the present.’ Both are interpretations of life-death. And both provide a balance of an ontological-epistemological concept being I will develop as- into- (uncovered-?) Chronicity. However, I will ‘move far from’ these 20th Century thinkers although I will note their work and its resonance-residue.
We are finite creatures immersed-immanent in- to- a sea of infinity. Music especially expresses time in its barest form, symphonic vibrations, Jazz flows, screaming Punk Pangs, these vibrations can be felt in the tactile by the deaf or hearing impaired. There is a certain musicality of time as well. Time-perception, which is a neurological movement, slows in boredom; for instance, waiting for a bus ‘goes on forever’ its movement is a slow adagio, yet time ‘flies when you are having fun,’ a cliché that expresses the quickening movement of time. Time itself is musical-water, with its own waves, tides and beings-immersed in it. We are finite creatures immersed in the sea of infinity (and infinite possibilities.)
In Buddhism time is cyclical and the ‘goal’ as it were is to ‘get out of the cycle of samsara.’ Paradoxically, samsara (cyclical time-suffering or eternal return of being-toward-death) is not separate from nirvana. My knowledge of Buddhist philosophy is limited to Soto Zen studies and a month at a Zen monastery; therefore, I will, for now, limit myself to Christianity and post-Christianity temporal obsessional neurosis. However this limitation will dissolve along with this analysis.
Christianity, it is well known, is obsessed with beginnings and endings; from genesis to the ‘return of Christ’ god sets up a definite time structure for his followers. My reading of this original (?) temporal obsessive is god-as-Father Time first embodied in Christ and then dissolved into the Holy Spirit, the movement of god through his church (for Catholics, the pope; for Protestants other institutions.) For the philosopher Žižek, this Holy Spirit means the people (especially the excited-leftist masses). Žižek is widely known to eschew what he calls the pre-Christian cyclical pagan view of time. Unexpectedly, His-his (god and Žižek’s) exegeses ‘enjoy’ the cut off from the pagan cycle into the linear temporality of the corpus of Jesus, and then into the communicative element of the Holy Spirit. A related thinker, Badiou takes up temporality and place in an interesting and novel sense as well; for Badiou the very idea of Communism floats from one era – in a linear but not always clear manner – to another, consistently motivating homo sapiens toward drastic cuts with the past, a commonality of theory that is shared between these three thinkers (god, Žižek and Badiou).
(2)
Chronicity is a concept that drives me mad. It, with the element of time pressing down on- to- the subject I (one can note Kant’s anal-explosive obsession with ‘getting it all out’ in time); this manic madness is as if one with optical vision looks directly at the sun, not for seconds, but for hours. How can a concept drive? Driving something implies temporality and place (a car, a chariot, a brain). Was Kant driven to madness about time? Was he not such a temporal obsessive, a measurement freak, that people set their watches by his entirely precise movement through the park? Although I can be a temporal obsessive, my situation is not nearly as severe as Kant’s – thanks mainly to contemporary pharmaceuticals that alleviate such natural OCD trips.
I must start again, re- noting and re- tracking myself. I’ve made my exegesis about old (grand) Father Time, the great incarnation and then Spirit of Christianity. To steal from some grammatically challenged church managers of a place of worship in the United States: He is Risen. Now it was time for the Jesus-zombie to return to his heavenly abode, the redemption of humanity via a linear process is now going along smartly. He is either reunited with himself (according to some) or reunited with his father (according to some others.) Either way, the body is gone from Terra. Raped by god (her son?), Mary gives birth to it: Jesus. Her son has been killed for god (himself?) and returned to himself or his father. His Holy Spirit will act, and Christians will wait for his return (this time without rape, just a lot of killing, burning and eternal – but tediously linear – redemption or damnation.) (This whole narrative and its interpretations trump Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and make it seem intensely ‘normal.’)
Via industrialised standardisation the amount of humans has increased from 1 billion at the beginning of the 20th Century to 7 billion at the time of this writing: the early 21st Century. Deeper still, did these early 18th and 19th Century (god-inspired) managers with their click- clock and tick- tock uncover something beyond the Spirit of Finitude (the Christian exegesis?) In other words, did these temporal obsessives (factory managers, monastics, cargo-shipment dealers, etc.) epistemologically uncover an ontological phenomenon? More radically, did they uncover a part of reality, a quanta of everything with their watches? Did Kant’s numina, the only inferable, dissolve on the factory floor?
Chronicity, in this sense, may perhaps have subsets from the (pre-) beginning of the universe (the Big Pang), to movements in a symphony, or the body of a turtle, to the reflective contemplation or boredom you maybe experiencing whilst reading this. Chronicity gives birth and is born. It unravels through seasonal cycles, the Christian end-beginning, the theoretical concept of Eddington’s ‘time arrow’ that leads from the Big Pang to the ‘heat death’ of the universe – a realm where time, but perhaps not Chronicity (!), may stop, can time-in-itself die? Chronicity is the underbelly of cultural change(s), Darwinian-biological-genetic-phenotype evolution, and space itself, for how can I arrive at any space without first arriving.
Gender and sexuality theorist Judith Butler locates performativity, ‘the norms and mores that contour, animate … a [human] body” as a repetitive copy of a copy; performativity is temporal in that it is birth and born. It is something that happens over time and in time [for us-Beings and other creature Beings], but its genesis is not known, cannot be accessed. To arrive over time, is this not Chronicity-in-Itself as an (un-) folding ‘over’ and ‘in’ and ‘under’ and ‘for?’ For Butler this performativity is highlighted in the social constructions of gendered norms and mores. Uncovering this type of over time repetition without a definite beginning results in some questionable conclusions: (a) Is Butler working with the tick- tock of the clock, for she needs this ‘momentum’ to drive her bodily (spatial) performativity-anality and anal-ysis, and (b) she may have uncovered yet another aspect of Chronicity, that is its gender(ing) and its suspension or (un-) knowableness (and even its Symbolically encoded heterosexuality via the (imaginary-conceptual) numina?)
Chronicity’s being-in-itself, if we suspend ourselves in- to- manic psychosis for a minute, May envelope the ‘we,’ and yet have its-own- multiplicities qua fractures of alterity. As an ontological phenomenon, that is in-itself as universal and infinite, both as birth and born it yet does not structure or materialise every- thing. Kant’s numen remains intact. The hubris of ontology of everything is reduced to ashes. As Avital Ronnell notes, the philosopher must start with stupefaction (and befuddlement) and end with it.
The tides of Karma in Buddhist philosophy offer another potential uncovering of Chronicity’s being. As stated earlier, perhaps the movements of time, and ‘time’ itself are a subset of being-as-Chronicity; time through the tick tock clock is an uncovered element of the necrosis of time for homo sapiens and other animals and perhaps the universe itself. Now secularized and sectioned, time stands alone above and creates a concept. Perhaps time, to crudely put it, ‘angry’ by its new constraints, its new institutionalisation, for it can no longer be an ultimate signifying chain for humanity; language and dis-covering has uncovered a potential dis- ease with life, a breakage of the linear consistency of the subset of Chronicity called time. Heidegger’s ‘being-toward-death’ realised this ‘contemporary’ driving that now has the emergency break on!
(Temporal obsessives from the monastics, to the hypochondriac Kant, to factory managers and scientists have grabbed the emergency break and the car-care which is now skidding out of control.) Many political and personal ramifications result from this 19th Century accumulation of partially uncovered Chronicity, or necrosis without redemption; one can note the atheism of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Heidegger’s own fatalistic vitality for Nazism and France’s contemporary hyper-secular ban on Muslim head-scarves and body coverings for females. Not only confined to the linear string of signifiers imbued in Christianity and its manifestations in monastic, industrial and post-industrial temporal neurosis, time itself has other features. These features are uncovered in various ways through different cultural lenses, and perhaps the pre-Christian pagan cycle and other cyclical uncovering(s) of Chronicity throws the entire concept and this entire project into nothing more than mere waist? Chronicity’s bare bones may be another chimera, another distraction of junk philosophy, yet the I continues, perhaps in vain.
Returning to Buddhist philosophy, temporal constraints and transcendence from constraint, are products of actions, this is a relation with time that is also shared with Christianity (whereby an eternal or perpetual god is the genesis of actions). However, in Buddhist phenomenology there is no singular beginning from an eternal Sein, but rather an endless- eternal return of cycles, cycles that can be overcome through various actions. In this sense, the human being or the hungry ghost may be able to – through appropriate actions – ameliorate their condition, becoming gods or humans and ultimately may even leave this cycle altogether, whilst paradoxically remaining a part of it: nirvana and samsara are not two. At this point, given my limited knowledge of Buddhist philosophies I will leave the subject, but its constrained exegesis is here, as promised earlier.
Finally, returning to the heterosexuality of time, yet also the neuter of Chronicity, have I managed to ‘lay bare’ that which ‘fucks with us’ that which ‘we waist’ that which ‘we kill’ that which we … and so on… The temporal language is not lacking. Chronicity is birth and born. It grows into both beautiful and monstrous edifices, and it can even produce beautiful monstrosities like life-toward-death. Death is a central part of Chronicity’s dictionary definition; its denotative Sein is construed through the senses of homo sapiens whether impaired, damaged or functioning ‘normally.’ Heterosexual, Chronicity needs to interact with the Other on a sensual level, the Other; from the pond of shit grows the food. Yet the movement of birth and born is also homosexual, for Chronicity fractures and rubs against itself, creating ripples: Einstein’s demonstration of the phenomenon of time slowing as an object moves faster may uncover yet another (homosexual) aspect of time. Whilst Chronicity infers the numina of its Other, and jolts against it, this is a deeply humanist and post-humanist reflection, for what is numina other than what is purported to be only ever inferred by humans and language or more broadly bodily semiotics. Orgasmic juices, bosons, gluons, fermions and morons fly out in (im)possible directions based on probabilities. Chronicity breaks down the distinction of phenomena and numina. The homo sapien ego breaches into its unconscious, which withdraws from inspection; the (human) ego’s battles with the super-ego’s invocations of Father Time, dissolved as it is through various mechanisms into the Holy Spirit of European & Western discourse, result in probabilistic quantitative and qualitative psychosocial biological and other bodily embodiments as the super-ego internalizes, along with the ego, the secularism-Christian nuclear battles and subsequent radiation of modernity and post-modernity. The Holy Spirit contra other Uncovered Chronicity both reside within and outside time: without gender, without time, out of time, running out of time, having plenty of time, being finite and infinite, a crawling paradox, a jolting (Darwinian) play of birthing and borning, an infant, the aged, the free and the caged: how can It be ‘laid bare’ when it lays us (fucks with us?) The I is- are- laid bare before the numina, the only-inferable-Being of Chronicity and its ever pleased- discontented- subset: Time.
________________________
(Note: The senses I mentioned earlier can be damaged, and it is important for philosophy to recognize this fact. A philosophy that does not and/or eschews any technological advancement for the amelioration or complete recovery of damaged senses is dubious. Here the anarcho-primitivist (or anarcho-ableist) theorist John Zerzan comes to mind. Anarcho-primitivism advocates for the total abolition of technology to a pre-Neolithic era. A return to Eden as Zerzan himself admits, and does not account for a plethora of Being-realities, at best, or despises them as refuse of the techno edifice, at its worst.)