The New Time and Space

John Potts

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137494375
• eBook ISBN: 9781137494382
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

In the networked age, we are living with changed parameters of time and space. Mobile networked communication fosters a form of virtual time and space, which is super-imposed onto territorial space. Time is increasingly composed of interruptions and distractions, as smartphone users are overwhelmed by messages.

1

A Brief History of Time and Space

Before time and space

In the beginning, there was no time or space; in their absence, there was void or chaos. The cosmologies constructed by the human mind – whether expressed as mythology, religion or contemporary physics – have posited a state of formlessness, or of nothing, prior to the existence of time and space. Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity occasioned a re-conceptualisation of time and space in the early twentieth century, noted that ‘scientific thought is a development of prescientific thought. As the concept of space was already fundamental in the latter, we should begin with the concept of space in prescientific thought’.¹ This insight pertains as well to prescientific concepts of time and to mythological accounts of the origin of time and space.

For long sections of its history, humanity has understood time and space through the prism of mythology, which provided narrative descriptions of the origin and nature of the world. Religion provided a later account, as did philosophy and, most recently, science. The experience and conceptualisation of time and space have been rendered in many forms, according to many systems of thought; there are striking differences, as well as surprising similarities, between the earliest mythological descriptions of the origin of the universe and the Big Bang theory of contemporary physics.

Cosmogony – the theory of the origin of the universe – is first articulated in mythology. These narrative accounts of the beginning of the universe are also descriptions of the birth of time and space. The mythologies of traditional, pre-literate peoples often proposed an initial state before time and space, characterised by darkness, lack of form or, frequently, water. ‘In the beginning there was no land, there was but one water’: this phrase from the origin myth of the Kets typifies, according to Murad Akhundov, ‘the overwhelming majority of cosmogonic myths’, including the Sumerian Nammu, the Egyptian Nun, the Indian Asat and the Babylonian Apsu.² Marie-Louise Von Franz, in her survey of creation myths, cites a North American example: ‘In the beginning there was no Sun and no Moon and there were no stars. Everywhere there was darkness and water.’³

Water recurs as the description of a state before the formation of the universe due to its amorphous nature: it represents the formless, indefinite disorder out of which form and order are created. Mircea Eliade cites a Polynesian cosmogonic myth: ‘in the beginning, there were only the primordial waters, plunged in cosmic darkness’. The supreme god Io ‘expressed the desire to emerge from his repose. Immediately, light appeared.’ Form is instituted in the act of creation: ‘Then he went on: “Ye waters of Tai-kama, be ye separate. Heavens, be formed!” ’⁴ The material world itself is often described as emerging from a primordial state lacking definition and the properties of matter. From the Achomavi people of North America: ‘In the beginning there was water everywhere and the sky was clear and cloudless, but suddenly a cloud formed in the sky, condensed and changed into Coyote.’⁵

The pre-existent state before form and matter was also a condition without time. For the Maya of Yukatan, ‘in the year and the day of darkness … when the world was still sunk in darkness and chaos and the earth was covered with water’, time did not yet exist: ‘there were no days and no years’. Time, space, the world of matter and humanity come into being through an act of divine sexual union: ‘one day appeared the Stag-God, who had the name of Puma-snake, and the beautiful Stag-Goddess who was called Jaguar-snake. They had human shape and great magical power; they united sexually and from that the world originated.’⁶

In some ancient mythologies, the initial void or formless state is given form or structure by a human quality or imperative. The cosmogony of the Rigveda states: ‘In the beginning there was only water, and in the water was a living germ. Out of this living germ everything was born through Tapas’ (desire). This first germ was the ‘earliest seed of spirit’ which brings ‘the force of heat’ to a universe ‘indistinct and fluid’, ‘covered up by darkness’.⁷ A Japanese creation myth narrates a similar primordial state containing the seed of the familiar world: ‘Of old times the Sky and the Earth were not yet set apart the one from the other … All was a mass, formless and egg-shaped, the extent whereof is not known, which held the life principle.’⁸ A Chinese creation narrative from the Han period describes the emergence of the finite material world from an earlier disorder: ‘Before heaven and earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous … The Great Beginning produced emptiness and emptiness produced the universe. The universe produced material-force which had limits.’⁹ These limits include the borders of the material world and the time and space experienced by mortal humans.

Mythological time and space

The conceptualisation of time and space in mythology entails a dual focus: there is the time and space experienced by the social group, but also, more profoundly, there is the time and space of the spirit-world. Hunter-gatherer societies narrated their belief in spirit-ancestors or spirit-creators in their oral traditions, handed down through generations of story-telling; the spirit-world was also given visual representation in art, which generally served a ceremonial purpose. This bifocal sacred/profane sensibility within traditional cultures relates directly to their understanding of time and space. The territory occupied or traversed by a particular tribe could be controlled by social rules and restrictions, but this geographical territory represented only one surface aspect of the space known to the group. Everywhere this territory was thought to be infused with spiritual presence. The spirits of ancestors were deemed to dwell in a metaphysical space adjoining the material space; the spirit-world thus animated the landscape. Totemic centres were perceived as sites of great positive spiritual energy, so that the land in many positions had a ‘bipresence’ in which two different registers of space mingled.¹⁰

Certain specialist individuals, such as shamans, were considered to have the power to traverse both spatial planes, for the benefit of the group. In order to cure an ill member of the tribe, the shaman self-induced a trance-like state, often through physical deprivation or the use of hallucinogenic drugs. In this transformed state of consciousness, the shaman was empowered to travel to the spirit-world, traversing great distances of spiritual space, engaging totem spirit-animals or ancestors, in order to find a cure for the individual dwelling on the terrestrial plane. The two versions of space – the worldly one encompassing the unwell individual and the spiritual one into which the shaman ventured – are two aspects of the same event, in a world characterised by dual presence.¹¹

The spirit-world entered by the shaman constitutes another region of time as well as space. It was believed that the shaman’s soul or spirit may journey through other worlds for a period of many years on its quest; this temporality, measured in earthly time, may correspond to a duration of only several hours. A Chukot Eskimo myth cited by Akhundov expresses a dual layering of time and space: a shaman travels through distant lands on different levels for two or three years, returning home to find that his children have grown old, as decades of local time have passed. Seeing his aged son, the traveller falls dead and disintegrates into dust.¹² This myth not only features the divergent temporalities of the two worlds, but also operates as a warning that for a human to leave his own time and space for too long ensures death.

Mythological time has other important features. The primary aspect is its orientation to the past, to the time of spirit ancestors. Narrated events of the mythic past exist in and explain the present, and can also guide the future. Rituals are performed so that an event from the mythical past may be acted out and kept alive; the present and future are ‘perceived through the structure of the past’.¹³ In the phrase made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths are ‘machines for the suppression of time’.¹⁴ The ancestral events continuously described through oral narration are understood not as ‘history’ – consigned irretrievably to the past – but as foundational events existing simultaneously in past, present and future.

Some appreciation of this multi-layered conception of time and space can be gained from a study of the art of Aboriginal Australia. Wally Caruana succinctly states the significance of art for Aboriginal people: ‘Art is a means by which the present is connected with the past and human beings with the supernatural world.’¹⁵ As practised for tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal art ‘activates the powers of the ancestral beings’; it also ‘expresses individual and group identity, and the relationships between people and the land’.¹⁶ The meaning of Aboriginal art relates to the Dreaming or Dreamtime, the European terms for Aboriginal belief in a pre-historical state including the origin of the cosmos. In the Dreaming, creator ancestors such as the Rainbow Serpent travelled across the previously formless world, creating the land and everything in it while laying down laws of social behaviour. These events were depicted in artworks originally used for ceremonial purposes, often representing spiritual knowledge available only to initiated members of the social group; since the 1970s, Aboriginal artists have painted versions of Dreamings using acrylic paint and canvas, made available to general audiences and the Western art market.

A painting will refer to a specific Dreaming relating to the ‘country’ or territory known to the artist. Symbols within the painting may denote physical features of that territory, or they may represent traces of the ancestral beings of the Dreaming; one pictorial figure may symbolise both levels at once. The painting is thus a spiritual map of the territory, encompassing both its physical and metaphysical characteristics, both its present and its past. The inherent ambiguity of this form of representation means that interpretation of the painting will depend on the viewer’s level of ritual knowledge and understanding of the Dreaming associated with the territory. The iconography of desert art conveys something of this dual register. A concentric circle may represent a site, camp, waterhole or fire; it may also symbolise the portal by which the ancestral spirit comes up through the earth and later returns to it. Straight or meandering lines may denote water courses or lightning; they may also trace the paths of spirit ancestors or supernatural beings. The spiritual map, unlike a conventional map, has more than one level of meaning, because it is depicting more than one register of time and space within the territory.

Cycles of time

Time in traditional cultures and in ancient religion was conceived not as a straight line, but as a cycle. The idea of progress, of time moving forward to an improved social state, was unknown in the ancient world, even in the great civilisations. This is not to say that innovation was impossible for the ancients; Roman engineers, for example, found ingenious solutions to many technical problems. But there was no sense that the present is better than the past, and that the future will be better than the present, which defines the notion of progress. Rather, time was thought to loop around in great circles in a process of endless repetition, and the period of greatest human happiness was generally deemed to reside in the past.

The cyclical nature of mythological time has been most thoroughly analysed by Mircea Eliade, in his study of ‘the myth of the eternal return’ and its many variant forms. For Eliade, the ritual act, in its repetition of gestures and archetypes, entails ‘an implicit abolition of profane time’, so that participants in the ritual ‘are transplanted into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place’.¹⁷ This revelation often involves a creation narrative; Eliade finds many instances in which the recital of cosmogonic myths is part of ceremonies for cure, rebirth or creativity. The Navajos, for instance, recited their creation myth in connection to cures; through this ritual the Medicine Man is able to access the spirit-world and effect a cure. The patient is transported as well, as a result of the creation myth ritual, ‘back to the origin of the world’ in mythical time and space.¹⁸

Eliade finds a similar process in the Brahmanic sacrifice ritual, which is conceived as a re-staging of the creation of the world. The ritual act ‘reactualizes the archetypal cosmogonic act’, so that the present moment is made to coincide with the ‘mythical instant’ in ‘the continual regeneration of the world’.¹⁹ The ceremonial act is a willed regeneration not only of the material world – animals and plants, rainfall and fertility – but of time itself. The cyclical conception of time allows for this inexhaustible renewal. On each occasion of ritual regeneration, ‘everything begins over again at its commencement every instant’. Eliade finds a strength and optimism implicit in the cyclical world-view, as ‘no event is irreversible and no transformation is final’.²⁰ Time recurs like the seasons; it does not fly in one direction like an arrow; the eternal return ‘reveals an ontology uncontaminated by time and becoming’.²¹

Ancient cultures construed the cycle of time as a series of ages, in which the golden age was invariably far in the past. Indian mythology held that the first age was the golden age, ‘when virtue prevailed and man lived on the fruits of the garden of earth’.²² The second and third ages entailed a decline in virtue and lifespan, while the advent of the present Kali Age brings the last and worst of the four ages, an era of sin and disease. The end of the Kali Age will be brought by fire and flood, destroying the earth; from the cosmic waters the cosmos will be created anew, heralding a new golden age. This great cycle of birth, decay and renewal will repeat until the end of time. The eastern religions further enshrined the cycle of time within the doctrines of re-incarnation and karma: in Hinduism, the soul works out its karma through a cycle of birth, death and rebirth, aiming for moksha or release from its samsara (wandering) throughout this cycle. In Buddhism, the practice of dharma offers the way to enlightenment, when the rebirth cycle of bodily existences is broken, karma is shed and nirvana – a pure spiritual state – is attained.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A Brief History of Time and Space
• 2. Theorising Time and Space
• 3. ‘No-One Is Where They Are’: Virtual Time and Space
• 4. Space and Displacement in Contemporary Art
• 5. The Big Now and the Faraway Then: Present, Past and Future in Contemporary Culture
• 6. Public Intimacy: The Shrinking Space of Privacy
• 7. Photography 2.0: Photos on the Loose
• 8. Schizochronia: Time in Digital Sound
• 9. Capsules of Time and Space: Video and Performance Art
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index