Linear Conception Of Time Research Articles

Contextualizing Attunement Within the Polyrhythmic Weave: The Psychoanalytic Samba

Privileging stillness as a central strategy in the activity of the psychoanalyst is questioned as the only effective clinical strategy for optimizing a psychoanalytic focus. Stillness is demonstrated to have an array of potential affective impact as opposed to the traditional assumption of neutral impact or the creation of a space for meaning to emerge. An example of the duration of silence is used to illustrate that attention to the polyrhythmic weave of timing in the interactions constituted by analysand and analyst can prove to be at least as rich a fulcrum for generating meaning in the psychoanalytic process as a strategy of sustaining silence as space for transference projections by the analysand or reverie for the analyst. The impact of cultural practices and beliefs is further considered for how these can shape the scope and focus of analytic attention. In particular, the concept of attunement is revisited to demonstrate how a particular cultural perspective, which privileges a linear concept of time and timing, could fail to recognize the generation of subtle affective meanings from the polyrhythmic weave of timing including matching and mismatching, a more complex and richer focus for analytic attention than just a moment of matching.

The Augustinian Type of Theodicy: Is It Outdated?

AbstractIn his famous work ‘Evil and the God of love,’ John Hick suggests that the ‘Augustinian’ type of theodicy is based on an outdated worldview and ought to be replaced by what he calls an ‘Irenaean’ type of theodicy. This article examines Hick’s claim by analyzing the views of the three main theological exponents of the Augustinian paradigm on evil namely Augustine, John Calvin and Karl Barth. It suggests that Reformed theology rethinks its linear concept of time and considers the possibility that the Fall could be an event in time with an eternal significance that works both ‘backwards’ and ‘forwards’. The article concludes that weaknesses in the Augustinian paradigm can be resolved from within, and that no need exists for Reformed theologians to replace the Augustinian paradigm with an alternative Ireneaen paradigm that reject key Scriptural teachings on creation and sin.

Трансформация Мира: История xix Века. Главы из Книги

Трансформация Мира: История xix Века. Главы из Книги

HANNAH ARENDT: O QUERER E A LIBERDADE

This paper aims of this to describe, from Hannah Arendt’s pointof view the theoretical and historical route that provide the emergence of one at the three faculties of the spirit: the faculty of the will or want. Drawing initially on ancient Greece, the paper also deals with contributions of classic, mediavel and modern thinkers. In a retrospective approach Arendt examines the perception and installation process of the faculty of the will, by correlating it with the advent and consolidation of the linear conception of time, essencially from christian origins, against the background of cyclical conception of time, from Greek origins. It also reflects about the clash between the faculties of will and thinking, by following the controversy between Saint Tomas Aquino and Duns Scotus about the subject. Finally, thepaper links the faculty of the will to the idea of freedom which is rationale of human condition.

O Tempo Mítico na Conformação da Nação. O Culto a São Sebastião na Fronteira Austral Argentino-Chilena

Um dos postulados de Benedict Anderson é que se começou a imaginar a nação só quando, entre outras coisas, mudou a concepção do tempo; ou seja, passou-se do "tempo messiânico" (uma simultaneidade do passado e do futuro em um presente instantâneo) ao "tempo homogêneo" (em que a simultaneidade é transversa, de tempo cruzado, não marcada pela prefiguração e pela realização, mas sim pela coincidência temporal, medida pelo relógio e pelo calendário). Neste artigo partiremos dos relatos feitos por camponeses em Las Ovejas (Argentina) sobre quando decidiram contrabandear do Chile uma imagem de São Sebastião e sobre a confusão que fizeram ao acreditar que um guerreiro romano fosse um pastor. Dessa maneira, os camponeses do Alto Neuquén viram um soldado mártir dos começos do cristianismo como um criador de ovelhas, "e como reprodução de si mesmos". Concordamos com Anderson que isto implica uma concepção "não moderna" do tempo, e talvez tampouco do espaço. Do que discordamos, e queremos ressaltar, é que não é necessária uma interpretação linear do tempo para que uma nação possa ser pensada e constituída.

Composing Time: Zeno's Arrow, Hindemith's Erinnerung, and Satie's Instantanéisme

The concept of linear time as an irreversible succession of events dates back to the late 18th century. Though fundamental to the experience of music written thereafter, time's pure linearity was dented by technologies of mechanical reproduction during the early 20th century. Imagining possible temporal zigzags provided modernists such as Paul Hindemith and René Clair with mechanical paradigms through which to explore the manipulation of time and motion—as infinitely divisible properties—in the decade that witnessed Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, the first radio broadcasts, and an increasing addiction to Edison's Duplex Telegraph wire. Apart from the modernism that exists on the historical timeline, this essay looks for a structural homology between historical and musical events in attempting to establish a distinct “modernism of time” for the 1920s; it argues that differing concepts of time were reflected in certain pieces from the early 20th century. Hindemith's one-act operatic epigram Hin und Zurück (1927) plays with conceptions of time as a narrative of reversal from domestic disaster to “happy beginning.” The music, running forward and backward, evokes different processes of memory to illustrate this “Time Axis Manipulation” as it is intuitively lived by the stage characters. Clair's contrasting Dadaeque film Entr'acte (1924), set to Satie's music, is an illogical picture sequence that also embodies a construction of time, Instantanéisme, but denies that it can be understood. Both works were conceived as proportional, imperfect mirror forms, indicating an implicit temporal reversal, though from antithetical perspectives. Drawing on the master paradigm of Zeno's arrow, this enquiry explores qualities of musical and visual time as both construction and manipulation of the modernist imagination.

Les propriétés temporelles des noms abstraits à l'exemple des formations à préfixe « -inter »

The present paper deals with teniporal properties of noun phrases whose head is a nominal lexical item with an interaffix. The whole description is based on the linear concept of time. The key notions used in the following account are precedence in time, momentary thing, intewal and coincidence. They originate from mereology. If the interprefix is added to a continuous nominal root, the whole noun phrase designates two identical states of affairs or two homogenous activities. The teniporal relations holding between them are characterized in terms of overlapping of two intervals. As for nouns that represent non-continuous notions, the interaffixation results in naming two simultaneous events. The chronology of the latter is described in terms of coincidence of two momentary things. The paper comprises necessary definitions and numerous examples.

Law’s Time, Particularity and Slowness

The article compares law’s time and its effects on how we understand and approach law and legal interpretation, to other concepts of time. It explores two trends: one, asking for a disruption of a chronological and a linear conception of time that could contribute to an acceptance of the notion of multiple truths and fluidity of meanings and the other, supporting the notion of slowness, where difference and particularity can be explored and recognised in contrast to law’s speed, universalisation and generalisation. It contemplates how events and interpretations of art can illustrate a way of disrupting chronological time, and by lingering, of showing greater attentiveness. The article investigates and tentatively suggests other ways of or attitudes to legal reading and interpretation, always keeping the limits and the violence of the law in mind. Artist William Kentridge’s observation that ‘[t]he more general it becomes, the less it works’ stands central to the concern with particularity.

Progress and technology: their interdependency

This essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between progress and technology. It demonstrates that progress cannot be separated from technological improvements because improvements are believed to be the result of progress, and technological improvements cannot be conceived without progress because progress is believed to be the result of improvements. The idea of technological progress lies deep in the historical past, and can be found as early as the Greeks. Thinkers, such as Bacon, Descartes and Marx, who gave their support to the idea of progress in reference to technology, are analyzed, as are other significant factors, such as the cultural and historical importance of Christianity, which introduced both an eschatological interpretation of history and a linear conception of time. In conjunction with the ideas discussed above, technological progress is sustained by its own mythology, which extends and perpetuates the idea of progress indefinitely into the future.

The two faces of time

Speaking of a ‘lack of time’, do we mean the same ‘thing’ as the variable ‘t’ in a graph of some time-dependent development? The following article tries to show that both concepts are extreme examples of the two sides, or faces, of the single phenomenon of time, as common and trivial as it is mysterious. Scientific, numerical time is considered first, followed by the time of the common human experience, the time in the present. It is on the basis of this curious ability to ‘keep in presence’ various events that follow one another, that the scientific concept of linear time has been established and, with it, the possibility to measure the time for scientific and practical purposes.

"The Past Is No Longer Out-of-Date":

In Michel Serres's philosophy, the "problem of time," Bruno Latour claims, not without a sense of exasperation, "is the greatest source of incomprehension." 2 Latour's statement, made in the poststructuralist 1990s and contextualized in the French intellectual tradition, invites a twofold comparative (re)thinking. On the one hand, his pinpointing, in superlatives, of Serres's "problem of time" as both the origin and the condition of understandability calls attention to a critical resonance between Serres's insight into the hitherto philosophical concept of linear time as "the most immediate and simplest esthetic projection of ordered structure" 3 and Jacques Derrida's critique of "the vulgar concept of time, from Aristotle to Hegel," as constitutive of Western metaphysical tradition privileging "the domination of presence." 4 On the other hand, his complaint about the [End Page 235] "incomprehension" of Serres's notion of time, which results--as does the entirety of Serres's thinking, according to Latour--from its being "so totally un-French, that is to say un-German, in [its] philosophical tradition," 5 implies what Maria L. Assad calls "a new philosophy of time," 6 one that is free from the much vexed "aporia" 7 at the core of "the whole of philosophical discourse on time since [Aristotle], up to and including Derrida," 8 a distinctly Serresian philosophy described by Latour as "the Enlightenment, without the Critique." 9

A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot

There is perhaps likely to be a general quickening of interest in the concepts of time and history towards the end of a millennium. Stephen Hawking's best-seller, A Brief History of Time (1988), which explains to the non-specialist the complex physics of time and space, is a manifestation of this interest. Without attempting to trace in any detail connections between scientific theories of time and those in the wider cultural context, Hawking was working on a theory which posited the dissolution of the time boundaries of the universe (its beginning and end) in the 1970s, the time that literary theorists were deconstructing the idea of linear time and novelists dramatizing this chronological confusion.[1] Postmodern fiction is often and appropriately characterized by a concern with ontological categories, an exploration of the boundaries between fact and fiction, the world and the text. Lyotard makes the basic or commonplace distinction 'between the time it takes the painter to paint the picture (time of "production"), the time required to look at and understand the work (time of "consumption"), the time to which the work refers (a moment, a scene, a situation, a sequence of events: the time of the diegetic referent, of the story told by the picture)', stating: 'This principle, childish as its ambitions may be, should allow us to isolate different "sites of time".'[2] Childish or not, postmodern theorists are often too credulous of postmodern literature's ability to disturb the reader's ontological categories, including the distinction between real time and time in a parallel fictional world, because they fail to put themselves in the position of the 'naive' (non-academic or recreational) reader whose literary 'competence' facilitates the absorption of metafictive elements into the fictional world. The novels discussed below deconstruct linear time through thematic and/or plot devices, but it will be argued that where postmodern plot disrupts causality and coherence to a significant extent, the 'story' (here meaning both the temporal-causal chain of events and 'yarn') will suffer as will its potential to disrupt ontological-chronological categories. The concept of linear time, or 'classical' time, can be found in Aristotle's Physics, although its very existence as a divisible entity is immediately called into question: 'The following considerations would make one suspect that it either does not exist at all or barely, and in the obscure way. One part of it has been and is not, while the other is going to be and is not yet. Yet time -- both infinite time and any time you like to take --is made up of these.'[3] This time can be objectively measured because 'change is always faster or slower, whereas time is not; for fast and slow are defined by time -- fast is what moves much in short time, slow is what moves little in a long time; but time is not defined by time, by being either a certain amount or a certain kind of it' (p. 371). It is, however, dependent on motion: 'For it is by means of the body that is carried along that we become aware of the before and after in the motion, and if we regard these as countable we get the "now"' (p. 372). This '"now" is the link of time, as has been said (for it connects past and future time), and it is a limit of time (for it is the beginning of the one and the end of the other) (p. 375). The fact that this 'now' is both 'link' and 'limit' is highly significant for any deconstruction of time since it functions both to separate and to mediate the binary opposition of past and future. In fact Aristotle raises, though he does not finally endorse, the possibility of a radical deconstruction of linear time, when he remarks: If coincidence in time (i.e. being neither prior nor posterior) means to be in one and the same 'now', then, if both what is before and what is after are in the same 'now', things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened to-day, and nothing would be before or after anything else. …

Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison

Some few years before, a negro woman, who had incurred Legree's displeasure, was confined [in garret] for several weeks. What passed there we do not say; negroes used to whisper darkly to each other; but it was known that body of unfortunate creature was one day taken down from there, and buried; and, after that, it was said that oaths and cursings and sound of violent blows, used to ring through that old garret, and mingled with wailings and groans of despair. (Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin 565) 1 Gothic representations of slavery, like Simon Legree's garret in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, imagine a social evil that has not been laid to rest. While staged haunting of Legree's plantation predates Civil War, gothic images of slavery recur in American literature to present, marking uncanny persistence of traces of slavery long after its abolition. One important reason that slavery continues to haunt American literary imagination is its problematic involvement with one of most authoritative strands of American culture, and Western culture generally: rational discourse that comprises both abstract reason and empirical observation. In decades before and after Civil War, Western rational discourse in United States lent prestige to factual genres like history writing. In its requirements for documentable evidence, same discourse set limits on genres like slave narrative (Olney 150). Gothic fiction may seem far removed from normative genres: gothic images of slavery defy reasoned descriptions of that social institution, and imply that truth of slavery is unspeakable within normative terms. Nonetheless, gothic representations of slavery often grapple with dominant discourse they disrupt. In Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, gothic elements expose complicity between a Western scientific world view and slavery; they reveal distortions in lens through which rational discourse views world, indicating features of life and lives of Others for which Western empiricism fails to account. In recent years critics assessing modern project have called attention to link between rise of Western science and Western domination of other cultures, which is most visible in slave trade. Many find that conjunction is not accidental. Paul Gilroy describes slavery as unacknowledged premise of modern Western project (53-54). David Harvey traces roots of modern European project back to Renaissance and rediscovery of Ptolemaic maps that set viewer in an abstract position outside globe (249). Renaissance maps, Harvey argues, also laid a uniform Euclidian grid over earth, locating all places in a single space and allowing fairly accurate prediction of distances, even between places Europeans had never seen (246). Together, construct of homogeneous space and an emergent concept of linear time, which linked cause and effect, produced a strong Western sense of control (Harvey 246). Harvey argues that Renaissance maps, whose viewer's gaze could command entire earth, helped to shape a conception of nature as something to be dominated: the conquest of space [the earth] requires that it first be conceived as something useable, malleable and capable of domination through human action (254). A Western discourse that associates non-European peoples with nature places only a small step between control of nature and control of other peoples. Much as Western maps abstract viewer from world and lay an abstract grid over diverse places, scientific experiments abstract a small part of nature from multifarious interactions that naturally occur, as experiments lay scientific theory over natural events. Claude Alvares argues that while empiricism may be concerned with measuring facts, it never measures facts as they are actually found in nature or history. …

The Thematization of Time in E. M. Forster's "The Eternal Moment" and Joyce's "The Dead"

Time of itself is nothing, but from thought receives its rise . . . - Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1.459-430 Only through time time is conquered. - T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, Burnt Norton line 90 At the beginning of our century a rather apocalyptic vision seemed to pervade Western culture, mainly as a result of the spread of evolutionary theory and, even more, of the enunciation of the second principle of thermodynamics in 1850.(1) Human life appeared to be subject to impersonal laws that are utterly indifferent to its presence, and individual existence appeared to be nothing more than a small fragment in a dizzy temporal extension that began in the nonhuman and would end in sheer nothingness. Such a vision, postulated as it was by science in an epoch that gave science unlimited credit, not only threatened to nullify all moral tensions and deprive of meaning the very values on which human society rests, but seemed to foster, and even to some extent legitimize, the predominance of a selfish and insensitive materialistic ethos. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the general ethical bewilderment resulting from the disappearance of divine authority and from the scientific forecast of ultimate universal annihilation, a number of authors undertook as a moral obligation to counterbalance this dangerous tendency by affirming, in their work, the unquenchable human need for ethical values that would encourage the individual to transcend selfishness and strictly personal interest. As it was no longer possible to justify values such as generosity, altruism, self-abnegation, truth,justice, charity, and love in metaphysical and religious terms, these authors sought a solution to the problem of how to provide these values with an undogmatic and convincing foundation. They had to be affirmed in human terms, and in order to do so, it was necessary to redeem human existence, at least in part, from the contingency to which the linear conception of time as an endless, destructive flux seemed to reduce it.(2) This may be the main reason for the great interest with which the theories of Henri Bergson were received in that epoch. In Time and Free Will (first published in French in 1888), Bergson draws a distinction between two different kinds of time: the measurable, mathematical time where external events take place one after another in regular sequence, and what he calls reelle, the interior, subjective domain in which psychological life enfolds, following individual, unpredictable rhythms. He calls the first kind of time espace because, according to him, it is not a real dimension but a conceptual artifact, generated by the arbitrary extension to time of properties that apply only to space.(3) Real time, duree (duration), is to him a spherical dimension where past, present, and future coexist and continually interact, shaping each other. Whereas espace is measurable and homogeneous, quantitative in character, duration is irregular and essentially qualitative.(4) It is like a melody in which all the notes are simultaneously present, and any change that might occur at any point of it would alter the quality of the whole.(5) Contrary to objective time, whose movement, governed as it is by physical and mathematical laws, is unidirectional and irreversible, this circular dimension, ruled by imagination and memory, allows free movement in all directions of time. In Matter and Memory (first published in French in 1896) Bergson makes another important distinction, between normal memory, a faculty purely instrumental to the act of remembrance, and memoire reelle, a form of unconscious memory where past events are preserved in their original intensity. From this spiritual reservoir such events can suddenly emerge into the present and fuse with it, acquiring new and deeper significance. Bergson's theories, then, seemed to offer the possibility of a solution. As duree, time ceases to be an irredeemable destructive force and becomes a preserving element, a form of continuity out of which, through memoire reelle, the past can be called to a new life. …

Accounting in Time: Organizational Time-reckoning and Accounting Practice

Although there is a well established tradition for the explicit study of time in economic (e.g. 1958; Shackle, 1981; O'Driscoll & Rizzo, 1985), organizational sociology (see review by Clark, 1985), and social theory (see review by Giddens, 1981; Blyton et al., 1989; Adam, 1990), little attention has been given to the relevance of time theories to accounting (cf. Loft, 1991). This paper seeks to redress this neglect by reviewing two main conceptions of time emphasized by sociologists as linear and cyclical and examining the relevance of these theories to the research of accounting practice. In this paper we explore two concepts of time and their relationship to accounting research. While we conclude that the majority of studies in accounting pre-suppose a linear concept of time, we seek to open and further the issue of the conceptualization of time in accounting practices by focusing upon organizational time reckoning in accounting and its relationship to issues of organizational power and conflict. Two dimensions of the politics of time are explored through examples in accounting: the first concerns the commodification of time and conflicts of temporal priority, the second emphasizes the cyclical aspects of organizational time reckoning in the structuring of temporal visioning, and the potentials for conflicts both within and between organizational practices.

A Concept of Time in a Music of Southeast Asia (A Preliminary Account)

Aconcept of in China as this was manifest in Chinese science was the object of discussion in lecture delivered by Professor Joseph Needham and published as Time and Eastern Man (1965). According to Needham, the Chinese viewed historical and biological as succession of events, cumulative, linear and algebraic, rather than geometric, system where causes bring like effects, as it was then so it is now, and so will it be forever (ibid.: 16). Contrary to Christian West where the world outlook is a unique present with an open future which would be affected by the action of the individual, the Greco-Roman world recognized cyclic view of where time would return yet again to its beginning and all things will be restored to their original state (ibid.: 46). In effect, although both China and the West lived linear concept of time, both were also influenced by cyclic view. In this matter, Needham concluded, the whole China was culture more of the Irano-Judeo-Christian type than the Indo-Hellenic (ibid.: 52). In contrast to China, the region of India and Southeast Asia was absorbed in another concept of the world, another measure of time, not linear, cause and effect entity of logic and matter, but metaphysical world with profound respect for nature and the divine for whom temples, stone monuments and stupas were constructed, life replete with rituals and ceremonies, in constant communication with spirits and deities with whom man corresponded to maintain an equilibrium with nature. In this part of the world, was recorded less in writing events and more in the erection of stone symbols, shrines, the recounting of oral literature and practice of old beliefs and traditions. A very old custom of using bamboo tubes as receptacle for cooking rice in the fire may be paralleled by corresponding use of bamboo as musical instrument, with both usages still alive today. Cultivation of rice since past millenia has not changed much and secondary burial practiced in the region since thousands of years continues on today (Fox 1970).

The Sociology of Time: Histories and Historians in the Cultures of the West and of China

The author points out that in Western culture a linear conception of time and of causality is taken for granted. This view may have to be reassessed in the future, in certain areas of physics, at least. The traditional Chinese conception of time was that events occurred in time in a cyclical manner, perhaps because of the strong agricultural aspect of the society. The author discusses how these conceptions of time arose, how they influence the interpretation of events by historians and how they are used to maintain the ideological status quo of a society.

Accelerating Advisory Opinions: Critique And Proposal

Time is a fundamental component of all social organization. Any component may be manipulated to achieve preferred outcomes, but time is particularly malleable. The concept of linear time, which allows complex sequential and conditional planning and deferred allocation of resources, is a critical part of Western political theory, for it facilitatesthe extension of present control far into the future. A peculiar genius of the law has been the elaboration of this linearism and the manipulation and supervision of different phases of future activity. Manipulation of time ia mundane legal activities has a utility per se in that it permits order and eflBciency in the complex, adversarial, but necessarily collaborative operations of groups and individuals. It is also a prerequisite to the realization of many other procedural privileges; without “enough” time, the privileges may be meaningless and even tavinting.