Simultaneity and Delay

A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time

Jay Lampert

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781472524775
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441196118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Through original speculations on the surprisingly complementary concepts of simultaneity and delay, and new interpretations of the great philosophers of time, this book proposes an innovative theory of staggered time.

In the early 20th Century, Bergson and Husserl (following Einstein) made Simultaneity-what it means for events to occur at the same time-a central motif in philosophy. In the late 20th Century, Derrida and Deleuze instead emphasized Delay-events staggered over distant times. This struggle between convergent and staggered time also plays out in 20th Century aesthetics (especially music), politics, and the sciences.

Despite their importance in the history of philosophy, this is the first book to comprehensively examine the concepts of simultaneity and delay. By putting simultaneity and delay into a dialectical relation, this book argues that time in general is organized by elastic rhythms. Lampert's concepts describe the time-structures of such diverse phenomena as atonal music, political decision-making, neuronal delays, leaps of memory and the boredom of waiting; and simultaneities and delays in everyday experience and behaviour.

Chapter 1

Introduction to Concepts

Every region of being presupposes some degree of synthesis, synchroni-zation, or simultaneity. But total synchronization is impossible—it is delayed. Delay is not an epistemic aporia; it is the real structure of temporality. Simultaneity is always being actualized, but only in its delay-forms.

The problem of simultaneity—of what it means for events to happen at the same time—strikes philosophy in the early twentieth century, with Bergson and Husserl. In the late twentieth century, Derrida and Deleuze challenge the whole idea of ‘the same time’ and instead thematize delay—events staggered over distant times. This struggle between convergent and staggered time plays out also in twentieth-century aesthetics, politics, and the sciences.

The thesis of this book is that the moment where many things happen ‘at the same time’ is constructed out of converging rhythms and then unfolds in delayed reactions. Time becomes a shifting continuity of events at a distance. The dialectic of simultaneity and delay organizes time into elastic rhythms. With this model, we can analyze the time-structures of such diverse phenomena as atonal music, political decision-making, leaps of memory and the boredom of waiting, and simultaneities and delays in everyday experience and behaviour.

Simultaneity and delay are difficult notions. Simultaneity involves the convergence of two or more objects whose individual time-lines follow different rhythms. Delay describes the situation where events seem as though they should be happening at the same time, but one of them lags behind. Without an ideal of simultaneity, delay would have no reference. Simultaneity and delay presuppose one another, even as opposites. Time is a multi-levelled system that pulls towards both convergence and divergence.

The problems of simultaneity and delay have an impact on general problems in the philosophy of time: for example, on whether the dimension of time is analogous to dimensions of space; whether there is an irreversible time arrow; whether the present is specious and whether past and future exist at all; whether time is objective, subjective, or intersubjective; whether time has a beginning and end.

This book employs three methodologies. The first is to gather relevant phenomena from a wide range of sources, to organize related categories (like contemporaneity, coexistence, and synchronization; deferral, waiting, and anachronism), and to problematize the concepts of simultaneity and delay (both of which challenge the concept of succession). My intent is not to decide which phenomena are paradigmatic (e.g. whether the paradigm simultaneity is that of a visual field, or coexisting causes, or calculations in relativity physics, or political conventions like time zones). My intent is to weave relevant phenomena into an overall conceptual description.

The second method of this book is to wind a pathway through the many unsystematic analyses of simultaneity and delay sprinkled through the history of philosophy, as well as some in the arts and sciences. I emphasize Husserl and Bergson, Derrida and Deleuze, but philosophers from Plato and Plotinus to Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and McTaggart make important contributions to these concepts and leave behind further problems to solve. My intent is to uncover a conceptual order in this history.

The third method is to organize these results. It may be too optimistic to deduce theorems from principles, following Proclus, Spinoza, Hegel, or Badiou. Yet, events that include both same and different times generate a vast and intriguing range of simultaneity and delay phenomena. In the Conclusion, I offer a few notes towards a project of systematization.

There are many themes implicit in simultaneity and delay: speed and synchronization, desire and delayed gratification, revolution and anachronism¹, memory and fidelity, eschatology and return, intersubjective pairing, alternative histories, and the problem of the time-arrow. This network of concepts generates a complex timescape applicable to such phenomena as the illusion of movement in sculpture, the stacking of rhythms in music, flashbacks and cliffhangers in cinema, the power of indecision, the spectre of impending events that never come, political solutions that come too-little-too-late, time zones and time lags (dates and schedules), delayed reactions to trauma, squandered time, techniques for catching-up, hold-ups and slow-downs, as well as deceptively simple synchronizations in everyday life, like walking and eating.

(a) Simultaneity

Simultaneity covers ‘happening at the same time’, whether that time is in the past, present, or future. I allow myself to refer to ‘simultaneous’ events or to ‘a simultaneity’, that is, a network of simultaneously existing events. One could argue that there is no such thing as pure simultaneity (that a temporal moment is not even identical with itself). Or one could argue that reality is eternal, all of whose parts exist simultaneously. One could ground simultaneity in time or in space, in passive experience or active construction. Simultaneity may be perceivable or inferable; it may relate real or virtual events. Sometimes simultaneity refers to two aspects of one process; sometimes to two interacting processes; sometimes to the coincidence or synchronicity of unrelated processes. Simultaneity may refer to events at the identical time or to overlapping, staggered, or commensurable events on a common measure. The ‘same’ in ‘at the same time’ raises all the logical and epistemological problems of ‘sameness’ in general.

Simultaneity seems to be not about things changing over time but about things that are just there at the same time. But I will emphasize that many temporal processes go into simultaneity and that moments of non-sameness are included ‘at the same time’. Yet we should not conclude that simultaneity does not exist—we should rather be prepared for it to be complicated and peculiar. When we think of a time-line on which several events are located at the same point, we may at first imagine points on a simple straight line, like time-codes on filmstrip. But historians over the centuries have represented time-lines in amazing ways. It is difficult to line up independent rhythms on a time-line. Year-by-year chronologies do not easily map onto genealogies of kings who live for different spans. And it is difficult to tabulate dates from different calendars, for example, speculative Biblical dates against confirmed Roman dates. This leads drafters of time-lines to experiment with almost every imaginable graphic design. A survey of the history of time-lines reveals time-‘lines’ pictured as time-trees, time-rivers, concentric time-wheels, kaballic time-bodies, frenzied gothic lines, time-mazes, time-atlases, time-hydrolics, time-cartoons, time-palaces, Doomsday clocks and astrological convergence-charts, palm-lines readied for chronological palm-reading, immense fold-out ‘synchronologies’, and time-line graphics that look more like piles of hair or over-wired computer chips.²

The phenomena

To piece together the concept of simultaneity, we want to collect the full range of phenomena. The Socratic problem is to know which phenomena to gather together if we do not already have a definition. We might think of gathering phenomena in a Heideggerian sense, bringing diverse objects into a focal point of consciousness, constructing a world of potentiality.

To begin, we have to ask whether time is represented (a) in instants or (b) only in durations. Indeed, (c) time may not pass at all, and (d) it may have to be constructed by social or conceptual acts.

(a) Instantaneous simultaneities may take the form of (i) two subjective experiences at the same time or (ii) two objects or events at the same time.

(i) The paradigm of instantaneous subjective simultaneity involves phenomena sharing a visual field. Things in space can be present as a totality independent of the temporal order in which we examine them. Simultaneity here is more a spatial concept, describing objects laid out alongside one another, than a temporal concept involving succession.

There are other paradigm simultaneities in experience besides space, like the simultaneous experience of shape and colour. In fact, perceiving colours simultaneously is already complicated. Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s ‘Law of Simultaneous Contrast’ (1839) shows that the intensity, hue, temperature, and chroma (brightness) of a perceived colour depends on the brightness, complementarity, and size of the thing adjacent to it simultaneously. For example, the same green square looks brighter if surrounded by a bright yellow square than by a dark magenta square. Two colours (‘metamers’) may match under one light source but not under another.³

There are also logical simultaneities, as when a person simultaneously believes one proposition, and without being conscious of doing so, believes its implications. It is not easy to say what experiential simultaneity in all these cases consists in. There may be structures and Gestalts that contain a multiplicity of experiential contents. There may be acts that have to be performed in order to collect contents into one simultaneous picture. Alternatively, simultaneity may be something of an illusion. When I notice something out of the corner of my eye, I can redirect my attention to it so quickly that I seem to see it at the same time. But it does not seem right to reduce simultaneity either to atemporal structure or to rapid succession.

For Gadamer, objective simultaneity (in his terms, Simultaneität) is less interesting than its subjective recognition (which he calls ‘contemporaneity’, Gleichzeitigkeit): tasting artworks of past ages, for example, is more interesting than the objective fact that historical works survive (damaged⁴) into the present.⁵

(ii) Nevertheless, we can chart objective simultaneity in all sorts of phenomena by matching multiple spatial coordinates against shared points on the time-axis.

(b) But of course, the idea of a temporal instant or point is not very plausible, except artificially. If we reject instants, then instead of saying two events occur at the same time, we should say they occur over the same duration. (Bergson prefers to call this ‘contemporaneity’.) But if there are no instants at which a duration begins and ends, we have to speak of simultaneity in terms of overlapping staggered events, fading indefinitely in and out of synch. This makes simultaneity, whether experiential or objective, difficult to pinpoint.

(c) There is a view that time-passage is a myth. For McTaggart, the past-present-future relation is illusory, or at best merely subjective (see Chapter 5). McTaggart concluded that time as such is an illusion, but some of his followers conclude that time is not about flow or passage but about before-after relations. The objective fact that Paul Henderson shot a puck at t1 before it entered the net at t2 is indifferent to what is present now. Like all temporal facts, it is true at all times. Most anti-time-flow philosophers do not think that time is totum simul, a block of changeless being, but only that the totality of before-after relations permanently constitutes the time-order of the world. Still, there is something of total simultaneity in the view that before-after relations are permanent fixtures of the time-axis of space-time. For that matter, the totum simul all-at-once universe may not be impossible to imagine. It is a common view that it makes no sense to say that the entire universe could remain static for a certain period of time, on the grounds that if nothing changes, there would be no measure of how long that ‘certain period’ is. But Adolf Grünbaum⁶ offers a thought-experiment. Since we would agree that a local part of the universe could ‘freeze’ for a while, and that all parts of the universe might freeze at different times, we can imagine that by coincidence, all parts of the universe might freeze at once for a while.

We do not have to go this far to hypothesize general simultaneity. Every formal or structural network functions simultaneously behind succession. Phenomenologically, we could not make sense of successive events unless we carried with us simultaneously a web of interpretative categories. And metaphysically, at least for Platonism⁷, changeless principles are at the root of dynamic combinations.

(d) In addition to simultaneities in consciousness and in nature, others require cognitive or social construction. I mention five.

(i) Pairing: Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation⁸ argues that a subject’s experience of the unperceived backsides of a given object—sides that exist simultaneously with the front that she perceives directly—is correlated with the possible experiences of other experiencing subjects. The simultaneity of perceived objects with unperceived objects depends on the simultaneity of the ‘alter egos’ that the perceiver is ‘paired’ with. Simultaneity requires that other egos be given not only transcendentally, but also concretely. Roads, monuments, clock towers, and meeting rooms testify to the presence of simultaneous intersubjective experience. Intersubjective simultaneity can feel like alienation, when communication devolves into simultaneous private thoughts (as in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Simultan⁹ stories), or it can feel like instantaneous communication across distance (as in André Breton’s ‘communicating vases’¹⁰).

One controversy concerns whether the simultaneity of perspectives involves exactly two face-to-face subjectivities (on Levinasian grounds that a third party interferes with intimacy), or else requires third person involvement (on Hegelian grounds that individual perspectives are socially embedded). Simultaneity can be seen as a single-termed all-togetherness, a two-termed relational at-the-same-timeness, or a three-termed intermediary being-with-others.

(ii) Dating: We often think of simultaneity as events sharing a date. Everyone of a certain generation remembers where she was on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A calendar date has many effects.¹¹ It contracts a 24-hour time span into a single unit of reference in order to simultanize a set of events. The date thus constructs simultaneity not by matching an event and a temporal instant but by games of contraction (like Mark Twain’s patent for a ‘Simultaneity Game’¹²). It results in yearly anniversaries, which line up an original event with its celebration day. Dating may give the illusion of precision to events that are circumscribed only roughly. Since dates are measured by the rotation of planets, unlike the rhythm of most dated events, dating juxtaposes two very different time-lines. In contrast to dating mechanisms, adverbs like ‘meanwhile’ designate vague lateral simultaneities.

(iii) Scheduling: Marconi operators on ships like the Titanic were among the first to network global synchronization. Among other effects, this made global weather visible. The introduction of standard time in the late nineteenth century allows us to say that at the same moment it turns 6:00 in Guelph, it turns 12:00 in Paris.¹³ Before this, there were of course correspondences between clock times in different places on the planet; but there were too many. Railway companies found it difficult to coordinate times in different cities, since each town would match its clock with the sun, and so it would have a unique time zone. Indeed, if clocks are set by the sun, Guelph time should be a minute or so earlier than Toronto time, since Guelph’s position relative to the sun arrives simultaneous with a slightly different position relative to the sun in Toronto. The introduction of standard time, in order to simplify simultaneous settings of clocks, breaks the continuity of positions relative to the earth’s rotation, by separating 24 artificial segments. We need to do this in order for efficient inter-city trade to take over from the urban flâneur who does not care what time it is, but it requires that international simultaneity operate not by instants but by blocks.

(iv) Plasticizing: Lessing argues in the Laocoon¹⁴ that the literary arts (like poetry read aloud) employ temporally successive signs, whereas the plastic arts (like sculpture) employ simultaneous signs in space. Lessing prefers the art of succession, but by the era of formalism and structuralism, synchrony gets precedence over diachrony.¹⁵ Lessing himself is concerned not with raw simultaneity and succession, but with hybrids. The problem for the Roman sculptor of the priest Laocoon was to capture simultaneously several stages of agony, to represent process in stasis.

(v) Stacking: When tones are put into a chord, they are simultaneous, and when the same tones make a melody, they are successive. Adorno argues that chord simultaneities in Schoenberg’s music are more dynamic than those in tonal music (see Chapter 9).¹⁶ The reason is that twelve-tone composition stipulates that all twelve tones must be played before a repetition of any note is allowed. This delays the return of each note as long as possible, to hinder expectation. But the series of twelve tones can be broken up into arbitrary segments, which can then be ‘stacked’ and played simultaneously. In traditional tonal composition, chord progressions are more or less predictable, and so simultaneity is in the service of succession; in music without a tonal centre, chords are unpredictable, and hence simultaneous through and through. One might think that unpredictable stacked simultaneities would reduce the energy of the music’s flow. But Adorno hears the opposite effect: predictable succession does not make it feel like anything has happened, but the unpredictable leap from one stack to the next feels like a series of explosive simultaneities. Boulez and Stockhausen¹⁷ serialize duration further, forcing us to listen to the simultaneity of different durations as much as to simultaneity of different pitches. With a similar insight, Apollinaire promotes poetry readings that he calls ‘simultaneities’, which become models for dadaist disruption politics and surrealist games of coincidence. In general, the early twentieth-century aesthetic of simultaneity breaks down continuity and energizes juxtaposition.

All of these constructions build a temporal substrate upon which time can pass, like a histori...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Continuum Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction to Concepts
• 2. Phenomenology of Simultaneity and Delay: The Problem of Converging Timelines
• 3. Simultaneity and Delay in the Era of Eternity: Ancient and Medieval Issues
• 4. Simultaneity and Delay in the Era of Time: Late Modern Issues
• 5. Simultaneity and Delay in the Sciences
• 6. Simultaneity and Delay in the Era of Simultaneity: Bergson
• 7. Simultaneity and Delay in the Era of Delay
• 8. Simultaneity and Delay in Politics
• 9. Simultaneity and Delay in Music
• 10. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index