By Sarah-Jane Field
I have been exploring Sophie de Grouchy and empathy in connection with Cameron J. Buckner's (2023) reference to her writing in From Deep Learning to Rational Machines: What the History of Philosophy Can Teach Us about the Future of Artificial Intelligence. This blog does not mention de Grouchy, but writing it allowed me to see clearly how de Grouchy potentially links to related themes and connections that have been showing up in my work since I began studying a decade ago. Looking back through earlier feedback, I found the following comments (I won't cite the author for privacy reasons):
If you are minded to make further changes an interesting and, to my mind by far the most persuasive yet paradoxical thought about temporality comes under the heading of deconstructing the metaphysics of presence (Derrida). Briefly, we think of the real as just what is present to us – occupying the same time and space. But the present is inconceivable without the past and future to frame it, and inconceivable with past and future as a point of transition from one to the other. Post-structuralists will call it a gap, a cut, or caesura to signal the idea that the present is absent.
and
The peculiar, not to say weird notion at the heart of your discussion is that discontinuous narrative forms are somehow skewing time (2017).
It seems that in 2024, I may have finally responded to those comments. I might include the text I've written, or an edited version, in a publication alongside some of the other related fragments, thoughts, images that I'm collecting on my personal Miro Board.
For notes on Sophie de Grouchy and Buckner, please visit my blog.
Image from ongoing work titled Made with AI – Colour Assignment: The Circular Life and Death of Images (2015-Now) made by blending my archival photography projects with images created using various image-generating models released since 2022. What do I lose, what do I gain, when I give my history to the latent spaces of the apparatus?
The Gap and the Wave
Hannah Arendt’s modern age is not the same as the modern world (2018[1958]; 6). In The Human Condition, Arendt writes about the modern age from within the modern world, which, in her framework, only begins when the modern age ends. The modern age describes the period that came about in the 17th century, considered by most linear thinking Westerners to have birthed contemporary science. Newtonian science evolved, and towards the end of Arendt's modern age, as the modern world took over, it turned quantum. It is out of quantum mechanics that the atomic bomb emerged.
The atomic bomb affected time. It stopped it. Then melted it.
Arendt identifies a threshold between the two – the modern age followed by the modern world – with the explosion of atomic weapons[1] & [2]. It is a linear construct.
The physics and technology that have since evolved have changed how we interpret ourselves, the landscape in which we exist, and how we respond to reality. It has taught us that as we invent and develop it, it invents and develops us. Importantly, we have become aware that reciprocal feedback loops between our techno-media-sciences influence sensation, affect and action, as well as our sense of time and temporality.
While Arendt describes a linear progression, what might be called Imperial time[3] (2018) from one age to the next, she is acutely aware of the cyclical order of existence (2018[1958]; 17) describing how an “individual life […] cuts through the circular movement of biological life.” But historically, the modern age is followed by the modern world, and in a sense they are mortal, even though traditional concepts can and do pass over (2006[1961];25).
Nevertheless, we humans living in the Now are adapting to a shift, where linearity, perhaps even notions of mortality[4], may be losing the authority they once had; perhaps more so than since the birth of writing (McLuhan, 2010[1964]; 90-96) commonly thought to have influenced our perceptions and the subsequent way we structured and understood existence. Lately, we have increasingly internalised the patterns and movements (Hayles, 1999; 26) of our technologies, much of which is entangled with quantum-inspired techno-science, and that dominate our age or rather, constitute the diffractive age in which we now exist, and which may not have been conceived of without the science that produced the atomic bomb in the first place.
Diffractive Temporality
We live in an age of diffraction[5] & [6]. By that, I mean living in the moment of multiple paradigms in an ongoing relationship to histories and potentialities. Our particular techno-scientific moment has encouraged us to conceive of reality as wavelike, rather than constituted of separate and isolated elements. Diffractive temporality may seem like an academic toy. But of course, Arendt’s description of linear time, or Azoulay’s imperial temporality persist as realities. However, as Azoulay points out, such an understanding is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘inevitable’ and advanced technology makes this more apparent than ever.
Diffractive temporality may be equated to the ‘eternal return’.
Just as ocean waves lap onto the shore, patterns are recognisable, but each time the wave lands, it does so slightly differently, leaving traces in the sand and intra-actively weathering the environment of which it is a constituent part.
Waves have depth. They move constantly. They exist everywhere all of the time. They transform. They are cyclical.
In Between Past and Future (2006[1961]; 10), Arendt employs the same concept when she urges her readers to forgo linearity, separability and isolated concepts[7]:
…not only the future—“the wave of the future”—but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder and of whose dead weight the living can or even must get rid in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, “the past is never dead, it is not even past.” This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past.
This challenges the “imperial temporality that was imposed” (Azoulay, 2018) on reality so rigidly during Arendt’s modern age, and to a greater or lesser extent since the invention of writing (McLuhan, 2010[1964]; 88-96), and which insisted that people “believe[d], experience[d], and describe[d] interconnected things as if they were separate, each defined by newness” (Azoulay, 2018).
The Gap
Along with diffractive temporality, the science which underpins the Now potentially speeds up our experience of time. In Pure War, Paul Virilio (2008[1983];82) sums this up in simple terms; “Before you had to leave in order to arrive. Now things arrive before anyone’s leaving”.
In Time Lost, Instantaneity and The Image Dorothea E. Olkowski (2003) expands on this as she distinguishes perception from affect from action. Olkowski tells us we live in a world of images and the body itself is a “sensory-motor image” (Ibid; 29). Action is not perception. Perception is the understanding of reality as a series of images. Affect is a response that reflects on images (these may be visual, auditory, or gustatory (Ibid; 32))[8] inside the body and beyond, in the real – of which the body is a part. Images, drawn from memory or else, less often, novel, can subsequently result in responsive action – we feel something, an affect, and then an image emerges that prompts us to action; that action may manifest as a further image or more likely an assemblage of images.
Olkowski goes on to argue that this process has throughout human development taken a moment – in other words, it has resulted in a gap. Today our technical systems, as Virilio also warns, have impacted our sense of temporality by reducing time for reflection and creativity, prompting us to action more quickly. Not only does this speed up action, but it also has the effect of standardising and limiting the diversity of images we have access to and are likely to generate.
The temporal images we select will be those most useful to our projects, but in our haste and self-indulgence, we will draw upon the same images again and again. Bypassing creative reflection we respond to the world more and more hurriedly. Drawing on the same images over and over again allows us to speed up the process until we begin to act like single-celled creatures, responding with lightning speed to the stimuli around us (Olkowski, 2003; 30)
Social media interactions are surely one of the most obvious real-world examples of this, not only in the rancorous and thoughtless responses we have all become so familiar with over the last two decades but in what can be seen as dwindling variety and experimentation. And in the challenge of finding the revolutionary and the heterogeneous. (I am in the process of writing about this elsewhere and will refrain from exploring this in more detail. But suffice it to say, as has been argued, social media's economy of likes along with its immediacy, likely has a reductive and homogenising effect).
What Olkowski and Virilio are concerned with is the diminishing, already ephemeral gap between past and future; the moment of potential escape which not only enables planning, but also a fraction of time outside the tyranny of signification – a rigid attachment of meaning to symbols. This is a paradox because it was phonetics, according to McLuhan (2010[1963]; 93), that expanded the gap in the first place, leading us to “act without reacting”. But in Olkowski’s (2003) reading, the gap provides us with a sliver of time before the law of words and structures impose themselves on being.[9] It is in this gap where all that we are exists for a fraction of constrained indeterminacy (2003; 35) before aspects become signified to this word or that. This moment includes the multiplicities and paradoxes, where we might experience ourselves and the world without fragmentation, representation or dualism, and which might include empathy and pure violence, reason and passion, creation and destruction all at once. It is also from where the human (or post human if you prefer) emerges. Arendt (2006[1961]; 12-13) writes:
The gap, I suspect, is not a modern phenomenon, it is perhaps not even a historical datum but is coeval with the existence of man on earth. It may well be the region of the spirit or, rather, the path paved by thinking, this small track of non-time which the activity of thought beats within the time-space of mortal men and into which the trains of thought, of remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time.
“The trouble is”, she goes on to say, “that we seem to be neither equipped nor prepared for this activity of thinking, of settling down in the gap between past and future.”
Olkowski (2003; 36) concurs but laments that our lack of preparedness prompts us to give that moment over to technology when she says,
The question of the order of the image is also and more importantly, a question about the nature of life itself as politics and perception come, to a greater and greater degree, to be organized by technicity, an organization which functions so as to eliminate pleasure and pain by abandoning affective, temporal life.
To conclude, please visit my Miro Board and, in any order you prefer, read a short story, a brief synopsis of Raised by Wolves (2020-22) and a description of Richard Wrangham's (2019) Goodness Paradox.
Bibliography
Arendt, H. (2006) Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought. New York: Penguin Books (Penguin classics).
Arendt, H., Allen, D.S. and Canovan, M. (2018) The human condition. Second edition. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press.
Azoulay, A. (2018) Unlearning Imperial Sovereignties, Fotomuseum Winterthur. Available at: https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/series/unlearning-decisive-moments-of-photography/ (Accessed: 14 July 2021).
Barad, K.M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bataille, G. and Lovitt, C.R. (1979) ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, New German Critique, (16), pp. 64–87. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/487877.
Berges, S. (2023) Sophie de Grouchy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/sophie-de-grouchy/ (Accessed: 2 July 2024).
Buckner, C.J. (2023) From Deep Learning to Rational Machines: What the History of Philosophy Can Teach Us about the Future of Artificial Intelligence. Oxford University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197653302.001.0001.
Burgess, A. (2013) 1985. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago press.
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the image. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Olkowski, D.E. (2003) ‘Time Lost, Instantaneity and The Image’, Parallax, 9(1), pp. 28–38. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1353464032000047972.
Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. (2008) Pure war: twenty-five years later. New and updated ed. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e) (Semiotext(e) foreign agents series).
[1] Anthony Burgess also writes in his tribute to Orwell’s 1984 (titled 1985 (1978; 3) to avoid accusations of plagiarism) that the ‘twentieth-century nightmare’ began “With the first use of atomic bombs, developed with urgency to finish speedily a war that had gone on too long.”
[2] It does well to remember that “science is not an abstract entity: it is constantly reducible to a group of men living the aspirations inherent to the scientific process (Bataille, 1979; 68).
[3] “Suggesting that the origins of photography go back to 1492 is an attempt to undermine the imperial temporality that was imposed at that time, enabling people to believe, experience, and describe interconnected things as if they were separate, each defined by newness” (Unlearning Imperial Sovereignties, Azoulay, 2018)
[4] Think of digital afterlife or the quest for immortality from the transhumanists.
[5] To conceive of a diffractive age and the notion of a wave-like paradigm, it will be helpful to see Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway where they describe diffraction as a metaphorical and theoretical tool (Barad, 2007: 71-96). Barad’s interpretation, grounded in quantum physics, focuses on the interconnectedness of phenomena, rather than fixed and isolated separations of classical Newtonian mechanics. This can be read alongside Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (2010 [1964]: 88-96), particularly his discussion of the shift from the visual to the auditory, where he discusses the rise of an 'auditory world'. Together, they provide complementary perspectives perception is shaped or alters according to technological and epistemological shifts.
[6] “The new philosophical framework I propose entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts, that support such binary thinking including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, indemnity, embodiment, objectively, space and time” (Barad, 2007; 26)
[7] Barad explores the significance of “Iterative reconfigurations of spacetimematter relations” to ethics (2007; 242-3).
[8] See Nail’s Theory of the Image (2019) for a comprehensive thesis on an expanded definition of the image.
[9] A law, which in my experience, as I went through a divorce, was misogynistic, ancient, and falling to bits (See Miro Board).
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