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Duration is the the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and
swells as it advances?real duration gnaws on things and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. Henri Bergson
We can go a little further and stretch the phenomenology by saying that the new is spacious, it has an extension, its like an incompressible cloud. The cloud has the quality of containing the present and the just past, because the present always points to the past. In the description of phenomenology we call that the ?retention,? the now is like a glob that moves and thus leaves a trail behind. That trail shows you that things are simultaneously in the present and already in the past. Retention is not memory: memory happens now. I remember the face of my wife now. Remembering in the now has its own retention. The paradoxical quality of retention is that it is the past now: it belongs to the past, but is still happening now. And then there’s the side of the now that is the expectation or the construction of the future, which we call the ?protention.? One has to examine one’s experiences carefully. For this trail of retention and this stream of protention are very subtle, but very important. As you see, the lived experience teaches you that time has a three part structure now, retention and protention. Francisco Varela “The Deep Now”
Even in a fully mature market economy, remember, commerce is still periodic. Sellers and buyers come together for a brief moment to negotiate a transfer of goods and services and then they go their separate ways. The rest of the time is free of market considerations and commerce. Cultural time-noncommodified time-still exists. In a hypercapitalist economy, however, steeped in access relationships, virtually all our time is commodified. For example, when a customer buys a car, the real time relationship with the dealer is short lived. If a client secures access to the same vehicle in the form of a lease, his relationship with the supplier is continuous and uninterrupted for the duration of the agreement. Suppliers say they prefer ?commodifying relationships? with their customers because they provide them with ongoing connections that are renewable and at least in theory, perpetual. When everyone is embedded in commercial networks of one sort or the other and in continuous association by way of paid leases, partnerships. Subscriptions and retainer fees, all time is commercial time. Cultural time wanes, leaving humanity with only commercial bonds to hold civilization together. This is the crisis of post modernity.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access
The reality of time has been replaced by advertised time. Peter Weibel
In the beginning, real events were counted and measured: the
movement of the sun and clouds, the burning down of a candle.
The water clock and the grandfather clock counted and measured
real, visible and physical things. Our clock, which is based
on the movements of the stars in the cosmos, measures the length
of the interval between two successive culminations of one and
the same fixed star. This is the equivalent of one rotation
of the earth, one day, 24 hours, 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds.
The time measured by the clock is thus incorporeal and abstract.
A clock counts only a certain class of event. It measures the
length of an interval of time which remains constant. This enables
us to tell the time of a day. What is measured in the flow of
time is thus not real events, but abstract entities like seconds,
minutes and hours. The introduction of time was a process of
abstraction. The intervals and lapses of time measured by the
clock are at an abstract, formal. Indeed, mechanical nature.
The clock has made time abstract and mechanical. Time is measured
and represented by a machine, a technical mechanisms. In truth,
however, our concept of time itself is already abstract and
mechanical. I can only represent the passage of time by a mechanical
clock because our concept of time is the counting of hours and
events. Numbers rule time. The moments of measuring time and
counting the hours enable time to be expressed in terms of numbers.
This is the basis of capitalism, which has recognized that time
is not only countable but also profitable.
Peter Weibel “Chronocracy”
The city of the future will express the beauty of confusion. Kazuo Shinohara
There is no history, but only a public duration. Charles Peguy
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