No More Learning

14Augustine: Later Works.
15Yorick'sWorld: ScienceandtheKnowingSubject.
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IV
WTTTGENSTEINIAN TIME
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11
The Ontology of Time
The previous chapter was meant to show how the measurement of ourselves in the measurement of time makes the variety of syntaxes we use and inhabit visible or audible as semantic (or symbolic) systems. A sustained reading ofthe Wake, tracing through the grammatical shifts that enact time as an aspect o f the limit between sense and nonsense and between ourselves and the text, precipitates a version o f the same crisis that Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, which I earlier claimed informs Eliot's poetics. I asked, "how do we stand 'before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world, o f time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (iii. 21). Finnegans Wake shows that this crisis, as it was for Adams, threatens less the world or our language, as our status within both. I suggested earlier that the vanishing o f any intentional target for Wake&n language (pointing as it ostensibly does at the vanished person asleep) both picks us out as its target (again exposing a crisis about how we constitute our world as ours) and displays itself as an intentional mechanism within which the world emerges as the shifting limits between grammatical and symbolic relations. Finnegans Wake is a temporal descriptionofthehumanmindenactingthisvanishingintentionality. Thisdescription(or enactment) o f time instigates and demonstrates as way o f thinking toward the limits o f sense. This thinking is what I understand as the construction o f a theological language
and stance, traced along a complicated interwoven epistemological limit described by skeptical doubt, science, and a resistance to the ontological claims o f poetic metaphysics,
Notes for this chapter are on page 492
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Vico'stermforthemythologicalimaginationsofmoreprimitivepeoples. Thetranslation of thinking into an enactment of time was systematized along a single continuum (as opposed to the shifting multiple times in Finnegans Wake and Philosophical
Investigations)byHegel,especiallyinthePhenomenologyofSpirit. Iwillnotinvestigate Hegel's phenomenological dialectic here, but I will use an aspect o f this dialectic as a path from Finnegans Wake to PhilosophicalInvestigations. This aspect ofthe
Phenomenology should be understood as elaboration ofthe becoming ofmind (both historically and philosophically) through the intentionality o f the dialectic, an intentionality describedbyourinteractionswiththephenomenalworld. Iwillbrieflydescribeapattern o f temporality (although for Hegel this should be understood as becoming and not time)
that unfolds subjectivity through a shifting intentionality.
Augustine's description of the dialectic from mind to soul describes an
hermeneutic education, as does Finnegans Wake, that remakes our human stance toward the world and God by remaking the forms within which we configure both this stance and the world. We discover God and ourselves within our language and practices. One way of understanding Wittgenstein is that he constructs a dialogic dialectic of fragments between our practices within language-games and totalities (from sentences to form(s) of life). Dialectic might sound misleading within its sense o f linear movement toward truth, missing the circular and repetitive perambulations that describe (or that the reader is forced to follow in) Philosophical Investigations. I use it, however, to describe the way in which any entry into the landscape of philosophical problems and ordinary language enacts a path from some problem to others through alternative descriptions. This path
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may return to the same problems again and again, but even in this circularity these problems change shape and color. The nature ofthis change (something I will discuss in the next section) alters the nature of our relation to the world described by these problems by and in our language, and thus provides a picture ofa kind oftemporality. Wittgenstein spoke with approval of the dialectical method:
. . . the dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work. But it should not try to find, from two propositions, a and b, a further more complex proposition, as (C. D. ) Broad's description implied. It's object should be to find out where the ambiguities in our language are. (74)1
These ambiguities shape the world because we inhabit them, and through them our inhabitationoftheworldbecomesvisible. Thus,ourthinkingabouttheseconfusions,ata fundamental level and as it does for Hegel, describes the limits in relation to which we live. ThepictureofhowWittgensteinthinks(orwrites),therefore,displaystheworld. The depth ofthe world is equivalent to the depth ofhow we think (not necessarily ofwhat we think). 2
The problem o f time can be understood as the problem o f the specious present, our phenomenologicalexperienceofchangethatfigurestheworldasflux. D. Stemhas shown how Wittgenstein's grammatical analysis developed through his analysis o f his own temptation to first construct a phenomenological language of our momentary experience (in response to the skeptical temptation to say that only the present exists, and thus only my present exists). 3 Wittgenstein realized that a claim like "all is flux" is a misuse of 'flux': "Language can only say those things we can also imagine otherwise"
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(Philosophical Remarks, 54). 4 Wittgenstein's analysis o f 'all is flux', however, always proceeds from the assumption that it is a phenomenological description ofthe world, in whichcaseitisnottruethateverythingisincontinualflux. Theleavesareblowninto spiraling relative to the branches to which they are attached. In addition, as a phenomenological description the claim that "all is flux" describes our sense of the present constantlyescapingourgrasp. InPhilosophicalInvestigations,Wittgensteinrecalls Augustine's description ofthis passing:
Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty o f the task consists in this: our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". (PI? 436)5
There is a confusion here between "all is flux" as a description o f our experience (which is false) and as a description of the ground of the world, as if from the ultimate End (which is nonsense). Why imagine the world from the End? "All is flux" opposes and can be negated by our identity or being. "All is flux" expresses the fact that the we can be lost intochange. Itneitherdescribestheworld(asmetaphysics)orourexperience(as phenomenology), but the fundamental limit in relation to which we organize our being as something opposed to the world. The kind o f writing which describes this limit (that often describes or has the form of a log on a river) is history. What my analysis of the
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temporality ofFinnegans Wake partly was to show was that one way o f describing our involvement in language is as time.
Hegel, at the beginning ofthe Phenomenology, in "Sense-Certainty", generates the initial stages o f becoming out o f and through an involvement (containment, stances, and actions within and towards) in cognition, akin to that which 1 describe here as our involvement in language. This involvement, however, is understood to be defined by our cognition, and functions within a vast array o f technical distinctions (concepts, ideas, T , subjectivity, and so on) describing the relation between human knowledge and the phenomenalworldastheymakemanifesttheAbsoluteintheirinteraction. Hegel,inthe
Phenomenology ofSpirit, attempts to construct a condition in which the logic of relation that figures a subject knowing an object dissolves into a fundamental temporality (of course, he understands this as a discovery and not a construction). 6 The Hegelian dialectic drives to replace things with relations. Even at the beginning ofthe phenomenology, or at the beginning of the history of our knowing in "Sense-Certainty," being becomes history: "the dialectic o f sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history o f its movement"(109). The universal categories defined by language in sense-certainty, T, 'Now', Here1, and 'This', become the surrogates for subjective being. In the chapter following "Sense-certainty" the dialectic through an ontology o f perception will dissolve these universals into qualities. Similar processes continue throughout the Phenomenology and effect the dissolution o f Being as identity into the Becoming o f time. When reading Hegel in this way, one begins to sketch a metaphysics o f time that defines the ontological necessity o f History understood as the interaction o f temporality and representation (i. e. ,
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cognition). Hegel configures representation, both as our cognitive understanding and as texts or objects, within a subjectivity dissolved through its knowing, thinking within the containing processes ofbecoming in Time. Hegel understands this configuration to be literally the history o f the world derived from an ontology o f time that underlies the conditions for knowing.
11. 1 Knowing time
History, the representation o f time as what is past, pretends to answer an ontological question that Wittgenstein, in the Brawn Book, breaks down into an underlying grammatical confusion: "Where does the present go when it becomes past, and where is the past? "(108). In this question, one has mistaken the "present" for a "thing" and thus one has constructed a conceptual logic, a sentence, by means o f a false analogy between saying "the present event passes by" and "a log [on a river] passes by". Wittgenstein is concerned about exposing the infelicitous form o f relating time and objecthoodthatmakesthesekindsofquestionsinsoluble. Onecansaymore. This mistaken analogy is one in which an intangible idea is objectified and subsumed within the category o f objects. Time has not been sublated into another term, or condition, but is
translatedintoitsantithesis,intothatwhichitnegates. Howthenisthisfalseanalogyto be distinguished from the many "new similes" that Wittgenstein uses to clarify philosophicalconfusion? Oneisfacedwiththeneedforsomesystemofevaluationfor correctness or falsity.
Wittgenstein's answer:
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We are inclined to say that both 'now' and 'six o'clock' refer to points in time. This use o f words produces a puzzlement which one might express in the question: What is the "now"? ' --for it is a moment oftime and yet it can't be said to be either the 'moment at which I speak' or 'the moment at which the clock strikes', etc. , etc. Our answer is: the function ofthe word 'now1is entirely different from that of specification o f time. This can easily be seen if we look at the role this word really plays in our usage of language, but it is obscured when instead of looking at the
whole language game, we only look at the contexts, the phrases o f language in
which the word is used. (BB108)
One must determine the function ofthe word "now", its use in the total language game used to talk about time. One must understand that the relation between "today" and the date is like that between "a hammer and a nail", and not like that between "a hammer and a mallet". A hammer and a nail are both elements within a specifically defined practice. Analogically, they both have a meaning within the same language game. A hammer and a mallet, however, are both elements of different, although parallel, language games. Wittgenstein's claim, therefore, is that the relation between 'today' and the date function within a single language game. I want to say, however, that today functions in a language game with yesterday and tomorrow (A-series). Any date functions in a language game of specific dates, a history (B-series). Wittgenstein's argument, therefore, attempts to dissolve this difference.
'Today' and date can function in a single language game--as in 'today's date'. 'Today' and the date can also function as different expressions of how one figures oneself
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as part o f a history. (They can also work as analogues for events: thus the shift in English from a date [June 6] to T have a date' [an assignation or appointment] uses 'date' as a metaphor for the event. This is, ofcourse, a different usage of"date" and thus its logic does not counter that described by Wittgenstein. ) Time is itself not actual (not an entity) butanobjectiveeffectintertwinedwithourperception. Iamusingactualand'objective' here in a way descended from Frege:
A thought, admittedly, is not the sort o f thing to which it is usual to apply the term 'actual'. The world of actuality is a world in which this acts on that, and changes it and again undergoes reactions itself and is changed by them. All this is a process in time. We will hardly admit what is timeless and unchangeable to be actual.
Now is thought changeable or is it timeless? The thought that we express by the
Pythagorean Theorem is surely timeless, eternal, unvarying. " (Thoughts, 372)7
Is time (a date or 'today' as words or concepts) something which is acted upon, that is changed and "itself experiences reactions and is changed by them"? And yet can we say that time is "timeless, eternal, unchangeable"? My discussions o f Heidegger's "Das Ding" and Joyce's Finnegans Wake demonstrate that time is not a concept with that kind of stability. But as a word, 'time' describes (mentions) this changing; it describes a limit. If you ask me 'what time is it? ', I cannot say 'no time' (except as nonsense or as part of a Zen koan, for example). I might say 3 o'clock, and I might be wrong. I can communicate the time, but can I communicate time? Is not any communication a form oftime, an ordered description of a process of change. This model of time as a kind of semantic process (both nested and serial: a sentence) is what undergirds Heidegger's description of
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the thing in "Das Ding". The communication oftime as a sentence (or as a language game) is always self-reflexive in that this communication manifests anyone's containment within this temporality. Such containment, however, is not expressed as the present, or as flux, or as something passing, but is itselfa grammar marking the particularity of meaning as both emerging from and resisting the totality (that is, it is not all meanings) o f language. Thus, 'what time is it? ' has as its target a specific time (or date), but as part o f a particular language game it enacts a temporal order as the limit o f my involvement within this game
(ifI do not know the time, I feel as ifthere is a pause in time, at least for the moment of my initial confusion; time has paused because I have slipped out o f the temporal order enacted by the language game. I have, however, other temporal orders which can always emerge as dominant).
Wittgenstein shows how we build ourselves into metaphysical cul-de-sacs by mistakingananalogyforadescriptionorforourexperience. Heunderstands'allisflux' to be primarily a statement about our experience translated into a claim about the world. "All is flux", just as date and today, as I have suggested, however, figures our lives as
totalities within the greater totality of change, as part of history. Speaking of Jakob Michael Lenz and a trip into the mountains o f over 170 years before, Celan in 1960 puzzles out the date on which that trip took place:
Perhaps one should say that each poem has its own 20th o f January inscribed within it? Perhaps what is now in the poems which are written today is just this: that here, most clearly, one seeks to remain mindful of such dates?
(Cited in Derrida, 310)
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Remembered behind 1960 and this speech, only 15 years before or since 1939 or 1933, is not just the loss instituted by Time or any other personification of life aging into death, but extermination;
Black milk o f daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we
drink you
(Celan, "Death Fugue")
This of course is the moment for a melodramatic pronouncement on the value of memory- - which would then be countered by a list of the abuses of history that have supported tyranny, delusion, prejudice and hatred. Art cannot redeem the past, nor can history prevent many injustices; but the dynamic between the unique, the momentary, the living and the represented that Celan finds in art recapitulates the dynamic between being and representation in historical epistemology. This dynamic generates temporality as the actual condition for our being: cognition, the interaction between subjectivity and representation, generates Time.
This conception of temporality suggests that poetry defines an ontologic, a metaphysical logic in a Viconian sense: "That which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all the forms o f their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in alltheformsbywhichtheymaybesignified"(NS127). Thesesignifiedformsenmeshour consciousness within a network of relations that function as fundamental ontological definitions (showing what is as what it is): the production of meaning becomes the
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production of fundamental ontology. Thus for Rilke a poem condenses a condition of being into a single word; for Celan that word is a date, the mark o f being in time, the condensation o f being into the singularity o f the moment, and thus into an assertion o f existence. The poetic representation o f being becomes a way o f marking oneself as a limit to past-time and at the same time as a mark o f the distance between a mark as an identity (as if a grave stele) and our containment within the dynamic processes of nature or languageorbiology. Historyusedtosuppressidentitymirrorshistoryusedtopreserve
identity. The moral control over history becomes confused with the sheer opacity o f time; history constructed is time constructed, or as Benjamin writes "Telescoping o f the past through the present" ("Theory ofKnowledge", 60). Such constructions express and definethepowerandidentityofpersonsandgroups. Suchconstructionscreatean aesthetics oftime.
Wittgenstein's corrective analogy that today and date are related not as hammer to mallet but as hammer to nail is correct in our ordinary usages of these words to mark time as over and against us. But the analogy fails to capture our ordinary (or poetic, which I think is an ordinary use oflanguage) use ofthese words to express within different language games our containment within phenomenal time (today) or within serial time (date). Andthesearenot,ofcourse,theonlywaysofexpressingandenactingthis containment. Inrelationtotheentiresystemoflanguage,"now"anda"log"areformally equivalent, but functionally different. They are formal identities without content, which
can both serve as targets for expressing our sense o f loss. (There are many ways o f using a
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tool, as Wittgenstein continually demonstrates. My question here is how do these tools, words and sentences, express a legitimate depth in our language? ).
What is the logic behind our false use of "now"? It is not simply that we understand the present as an object like a log, but that we necessarily represent ourselves as or attach ourselves to objects or nominalized relations, states, and identities within. This representation o f ourselves never functions within a single language game, but always as the locus ofa complex system ofrelations and reflections; it necessarily understands itself simultaneously through a variety of grammars. It is not simply the present that is objectified in "Where does the present go? " but also an aspect of ourselves (allegorized as subjectivity, soul, identity and so on), which forms the limit within which this statement does its work. "Now" like our subjectivity can simultaneously seem to exist and to have changed(vanishedintime,tobereplacedbyanother"now"). Thisis,ofcourse,different
from a log as an object, but not from a "log" as a word which is given a double existence both as referent and a marker within and o f our subjective consciousness and memory. In other words the analogy is not only constructed in order to equate a "log" with the "present", but to offer a target onto which our sense o f loss can be used to describe our relation to the world as if that worldwere also us. We invest ourselves in a chain of analogies from Time to being, from subjectivity to being, and thus from object to representation. Inthispassage,Wittgensteindefinesthelinguisticrelationshipswithin language but, at this point, he has an attenuated sense o f the ways in which we construct both what one might call our subjectivity and our loss within language.
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All representations within language can function like a form o f our subjectivity (maybe our investment in the world as an T ) . Consciousness would be the primary mode ofsubjectivity,butitwouldnotbetheexclusivemode. Itis,therefore,noteven innocuous to say "Where does that log go? " (it is no less dangerous than asking where the present goes). Once this question is phrased, this log goes the same place as "the present" goes. We do not only represent the log or the present, we represent our consciousness of these, and thus we represent our perception splitting into objects and into reflections on itself (as subjectivity, as something that can be lost). But o f course it is both object and subject, both log and the present and itself (it in a sense absorbs and becomes what it represents)andalsononeofthese. Thusnolanguagegame,whichisalsoapartof subjectivity, totalizes the subject within itself. Without this totalization subjectivity must
continually play itself between subject and object, recognizing itself as both the consciousness of the log and of a particular present which is not the same as the other presents out which it has and will construct itself (as awareness). Our subjectivity thus can recognize itself as an object and as a subject, just like it can recognize "the present" as subject and object, as ifit were a log and as ifit were not, as "now, I . . . " and a "Where did the present go? " We can invest ourselves in our use o f 'now' or the present as part of two language games; the first centered on "now" as an experience, and thus ironically as a surrogate for consciousness understood as an existential subject, and the second centered on the present as a surrogate for consciousness as an object. Both are valid because unavoidable for subjectivity to understand anything, but when they are confused one might
be tempted to picture the present as a log on a river.
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Meaning, therefore, is not only referential in pointing to objects, as in Frege, but is referential in pointing to the self; Thus if Wittgenstein says that Freud did not discover the unconscious but instead introduced a new vocabulary within the grammar o f psychological discourse, then what he is saying in essence is that we construct our subjectivity within a particular grammar. (The entire Phenomenology is such a grammar, and thus in order to move the subject from a representation to a recognition o f itself as an other, to a simulation ofthe other as itself and thus into being, and so on into "Absolute Knowledge", Hegel's grammar must be complete and absolute). This does not mean that our subjectivity is that grammar, but it is constructed within it and in relationship to it, but
t also exists outside of it, existing as the need to construct ourselves within that grammar (there would be no need to effect this construction if we did not also exist outside o f this grammar).
Wittgenstein constructs temporality within the linguistic logic of metaphors, but elides the relation between temporality and subjectivity. Thus he ignores the way in which the existential reality oftime and loss is enacted within the grammar of speaking abouttime. Hegelconstitutesbecomingalsowithinasystemofrepresentation,butasa form o f subjectivity.
Representation does not capture being, it is rather what being is when understood as an object, an identity. Our movement from our intention to our representation defines Beingassuch. ThismovementiscompletedintheHegelian"AbsoluteKnowing"through the final actualization o f the potential categories o f identity first constructed in sense-
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certainty: 'Now', Here', 'This', and T. The movement of Spirit in "Absolute Knowing" falls into three moments:
1) the object o f consciousness "presented itself to the Self as vanishing": as an other whose being within the knowing o f the Self is necessarily unstable and changing. This is the condition of "sensuous things".
2) theobjectispositedasaThingbythesubject: throughakindofapperceptive projection, or what Hegel calls an "extemalization of self-consciousness". The identity of the object expresses or reflects or forms the identity o f the subject, i. e. the willing and knowing which is what being is in its "absolute essentiality"(792).
3) amomentsuchthatknowingandbeingexistbecausetheyhavea "meaning"[Bedeutung] "not only for us or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself. . . self- consciousness knows the nothingness of the object,. . . , because it externalizes its own self --for in this extemalization it posits itself as object, or the object as itself, in virtue of the indivisible unity o f being-for-seIf. "[788]: the relation between self-consciousness and its object, between us and our object, is defined by its meaning, i. e. its significance as an expressionofourbeing. Thisisaxiologicalontology,inthattheobjectgainsatruthvalue
through its significance [Bedeutung] and relation to us: its value as our reality.
This extemalization is a representation in otherness, that is also the object itself, necessarily an element in both its being and our being, and thus within the "unity o f being- for-self'. The movement from meaning to representation ignores the conceptual aporia separatingrepresentationandintentioninHume'scritiqueofinfiniteregression. Instead, Hegel understands that our movement is a movement into the subjective constructs o f our
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representation. Time arises through our representation ofwhat lias been' as 'now1, which must be surrendered to our memory in order to be replaced by the now that is but which we cannot know as now except when translated into a representation.
Self-consciousnessisin"communionwithitselfinitsothernessassuch. Thisisthe movement of consciousness, and in that movement consciousness is the totality of its moments. " Consciousness is constituted by the temporality that it creates within the fissure between intention and representation.
Thus in the Encyclopedia Logic Hegel can construct Being beyond representation: [Being] is not to be sensed, not to be intuited, and not to be represented, but rather, it is the pure Thought and, as such it constitutes the beginning. (86)
Being is not an object to be grasped: it cannot be sensed, intuited, or represented as Being. The "Knowing1in Consciousness "is to be indicated only in its process of coming-to- be"(789). EvenwhenBeingapproachesthinghoodin"ObservingReason",itis"thebeing o f the T" that is a "Thing, and, moreover, a sensuous immediate Thing"(789): "The Thing is T; in point of fact, in this infinitejudgment the Thing is superseded; in itselfit is nothing; it has meaning only in the relation, only through the T and its connection with it"(791). Thus our object, knowing itself, is a 'Thing' through its creation of our knowledge of it, its relation "through the T" and its "connection with it, "which is our, really Hegel's, representation of it.
For Wittgenstein, in the Brown Book, temporality cannot be represented as a thing (as a log); which means that the essence or the form of time is not expressed in language, in the interaction of identities, which after all define thingness. Thus when we speak of
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time we do not say what we mean. Wittgenstein has extended Hegel's examination o f the failure o f language to capture the being o f objects to its failure to capture beings in general. The object fails to materialize in our saying. It exists within our knowledge only as our intention or criterion. Apparent meaning (the criterion for truth or actuality) defines the object as a potential, that which is meant and is to be actualized in our knowledge through our representation of it. As a criterion it picks out what it would mean for a particular object to be that particular object. Saying translates what meaning points to (not the object itself) into the realm of what can be known. Meaning constructs the realm of what can be said.
The failure to say what is meant assumes that meaning is prior to saying; we can ask what is meant because this meaning is understood to exist (because it asserts the existence of a real object that is marked by our intention but not our saying), although it hasnotyetbeensaid. Onemustassume,asHegelcertainlydoes,thatoursubjectivity contains a realm o f intention separate from the realm o f manifestations, which somehow picks out an object and acts as the criterion for determining the truth o f our representation ofthis object.
In the initial stages of the Phenomenology knowledge grasps the object not through representation but through this criterion, the intention informing our language. This criterion is grounded in an identity between our being, our existence as such, and our knowing: being = knowing (74). Our knowing will be actual if the object is actual within, or as, our representation. The criterion becomes a field o f potential that defines Being and knowing within a grammar of intention activated by the subject.
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11. 2 Inhabiting time
We begin to see here the significance ofWittgenstein's formulation ofthe problem ofTime. The present is mistaken for its manifestation in the transformation ofthings or identities, and then translated into the metaphor o f movement. These manifestations, the logs rambling down the river, are mistakenly read as the meaning or realization o f Time, which functions as the potentiality (the condition) o f Being: Time = potential Being. For Wittgenstein this movement from potential to actual, because it equates two different conceptual genres, is unjustified.
We experience and know temporality, however, through the particularity of our being. This particularity should not be simply understood as our subjectivity. It is more importantlythespecificconditionsthroughwhichTimeismademanifest. Withoutthis particularity it would be impossible for us to recognize Time as change. Being becomes the relating o f this particularity to this condition o f change in order to construct the "reality" of things. (To deny this is simply to deny "things". ) Being itselfis the mediation o f this relating. Thus the log is not simply the false embodiment o f the present. It manifests the Criterion (the standard defining what qualifies as real) determining the form ofourownsubjectivityorpresencewithinTime. Andassuchitdefinesasystemof meaning; it defines the Criterion defining our inclusion within what Hegel calls the Absolute, but which is simply Actuality or reality. Time, therefore, functions as the potentiality o f form: the manifestation o f formal identity in the conceptual structure o f the
present, the limit and necessary condition ofBeing, whereas the formal identities of
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language function as the potentiality ofcontent: the feigned manifestation ofcontent in form, being in identity, which establishes the potentiality o f this content.
Any conception of time is limited by the fact that it cannot be observed as a real entity, but can only be seen to exist through extrapolation from its effect on space and matter:timeiscontingentonmaterialityandconsciousness. Inspiteoftheabstract, contingent, immaterial, non-substantive essence and nature o f time, it functions as the absolute condition and limit on our existence. Finnegans Wake transforms time (both as interpretative descriptions and enactments o f change) into grammatical shifts in order to elide this limit. Opera, in a kind of inversion, transforms time, music itself, into the forms o f plot and character, what is and can be lost through death, and, therefore, being, in order to elide this limit.
I would like to chance another excursus in Opera, not only as a counterpoint to the musicality of the Wake (the form of its nonsense), but as an investigation of how the picture o f time (a log on a river) that Wittgenstein undoes can be lodged within an introjection o f ourselves (variously conceived) within the systematic force o f change and time.
What is the seduction ofthe mind? Ivan Nagel, after identifying the thematic conflict in Opera Seria as menace and entreaty, expands their power to thematically organize opera, by analogic extension, into the ontological structure organizing the universe o f Opera:
Space and time: they stand for domination and freedom. But they also stand for a pureandimpurerelationshipintheworld. Timeisimpure,becauseinitevery
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object, every man is one thing and then an other. Thus disloyalty, betrayal become the clock o f freedom, and finally the madly accelerated hour stroke o f the modem age. ThatisperhapsthedeepestthemeofDonGiovanni. (118)
The impurity o f time is judged from the perspective o f Being understood as the ideal form o f identity. In this equation, Space (the realm o f Being as identity) symbolizes Society, butinthisitmustalsogird,standfortheWomen. Time,althoughanabstractionbuiltout ofperceived effects (and thus impure), unsheathes, bares (? ) Don Giovanni in order that he might run through space(? ), slash it(? ), defeat its dominion. For Nagel, Don Giovanni, in spite o f Catherine Clement's protest that his rapes cease to be rationalized as rebellion, represents the excess and the promise o f the French Revolution.
Don Giovanni is built on a temporal logic, but one in which such symbolism is less neat. I'm not sure that Space and Time can function as symbols unless this symbolism is builtoutofanontology. Nagel'sspace/timefictionisclosertoananalogywhichgathers its rhetorical strength from the ease by which any small set o f events and characters can be mapped onto a set o f oppositions.
Don Giovanni, when confronted by the Commendatore, rejects his demand that he renounce his life, his identity and his history. He rejects change, if that change includes himself. Hisrejectionofsocialnormsismorelikeanattemptatbecomingpurebeing(as opposed to impure time), in the same sense that opera itself attempts to replace the temporalrelations,outofwhichpolyphonyisbuilt,withmonodicidentities. Although Don Giovanni protects himselfas a pure identity (as opposed to change), he reduces the woman around him, the women he conquers to temporal markers. They are, as
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Kierkegaard assures us, without psychical individuality, that is, without content or subjectivity--so long as they are on this list. Don Giovanni is the Being that creates Time.
Don Giovanni's power, contradicting Kierkegaard's fiction, can certainly fail (as it does repeatedly in the opera). In being desire he can only succeed with desire: if he cannotreducethewomantonothingbutdesirehewillfail. Tobuildasouloutofthis Opera one would have to reduce it to an ontological network in which feminine repetition and negation would dissolve the form of serial time described by Don Giovanni's list into spirit.
The oddness of finding Opera as an enactment ofthe creation or dissolution ofthe mind reflects the kind o f pressure the tension between the conative forces describing animation (often figured as love, lust, desire, dread, fear, and so on) and the organizing formsquantityincreasinglycapturedinmodemepistemologicalmodelsofthinking. Music and voice or silence and singing or noise and melody can serve to enact in the kinds of unities o f form they produce to enact the analogies o f animation that philosophy and literature picture. (One could do a history of this. )
Don Giovanni values woman as woman. A woman is a piece of wax on a stove. If she melts the properties by which I knew her, her coloring, her smell, her shape have disappeared. Is it still a woman? Don Giovanni offers a woman, as a gift o f his desire, the certainty that she is not only a woman no matter what her shape or social status, but that her value is absolute, essential to her being. Don Giovanni desires the essence ofthe being ofwomen. For a woman to be transformed into her essence, however, is for her to lose her being, to become a mark on a list, to exist as this essence within serial time.
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Ifwe can believe the list, then Don Giovanni by trading a woman the certainty of absolute value for the being (her name, her identity) reduces her to serial time: Ontological map of Being creating a Serial Temporality
ife of DG: serial progression
Names of women: moments in time
Donna Elvira, one o f Don Giovanni's past lovers, refuses to be reduced to pure form, a mark on a list. She exclaims, "I must hasten . . . I must go . . . All I can feel within my breast is revenge, rage and contempt. " This refusal generates a conflict between Don Giovanni's history o f succession, where memory consists o f nothing but names on this line and the future consists o f nothing but further conquests o f women with regard to shape or size or personality, and a Donna Elvira's new history of redemption or revenge. If we place Donna Elvira's temporal path on the map ofDon Giovanni's temporal path it describes a temporal loop:
Temporal Loop (DE) and Serial Time (DG)
DE
Past
ofdesireanimatinghim. Massettosaystohim,"Letyourgentlemanmakeyouintoa
DG
Now
Giovanni pretends to be a chameleon, each mask a host for the parasite algorithm
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gentlewoman. " Everyone at first assumes that being, or identity, what a person is, is determined by the form someone takes. This mistake is what allows Giovanni to at first seduce his victims. They believe his exterior; they accept the promises and thus the offer o f transformation he gives them (to be a bride, a gentlewoman, etc. ). Clement is making the same mistake when she claims that Don Giovanni's is nothing but the clothes which Leperello puts on to fool Donna Elvira. Don Giovani is not his cloak, he is his desire. Elvira's failure to expose Leperello arises because she holds on to an ontology of identity which is conserved over time. She recognizes the real Giovanni when he speaks to her. She assumes the voice and body is the same after Don Giovani has left. Don Giovani's
formal identity is tied to the immediacy of his desire, but the identity he defends against the Commendatore and which determines his actions remains constant over time. His essence is constant. This essence can be expressed through particular formal identities (in particular moments), but it cannot be represented by those same forms. In this way Don GiovannidoesdescribetheessenceofmusicasSchopenhauerdefinesit: asa representation o f what cannot be represented in itself (the Will).
Donna Elvira's ability to return and confront Don Giovanni, attributed as it is to heaven, is predicated on a ability to act over time outside o f the immediacy o f form and desire in which Don Giovanni operates. Spirit, or heaven, functions, therefore, as the guarantor of identity over time. Donna Anna and Don Ottavio both sing,
Heavens, what a noble sight! What refined dignity!
. . . . Within my heart I feel a strange emotion. . . about this unhappy woman (DE).
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Another temporal loop is exposed as Donna Anna recognizes in Donna Elvira a similar pain to her own. In recognizing herselfin Donna Elvira, she uncovers the identity of her attacker. Although Don Ottavio resists this identification because he recognizes himself in Don Giovanni (he acknowledges him as his kinsman). Don Giovanni's exposure takes place through the appearance o f Donna Elvira, but this appearance is conditioned over time, and is not constructed in the immediacy o f desire. The recognition o f pain as opposed to desire "assails" Donna Elvira "with doubt", such that the "words uttered so softly, the way he changes colour, these signs are all to obvious, they have quite convinced me. " The frame or grammar in which the actions and identities o f our characters function has been transformed into a meta-temporal grammar founded upon the collision of not just Donna Elvira and Don Giovanni, but ofthe two temporal patterns and the identities these patterns generate. When Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio call on heaven to "protect the zeal within my heart" and to avenge my betrayed heart" they are calling on an ontology opposed to the serial time built o f moments without content. An ontology constructed out ofthe immediacy ofdesire claims, as we all might, that the only reality exists in the now. The past and the future are not physically real. An appeal to Heaven constructs a reality that because it includes both past (the memory o f Don Giovani's
crimes) and the future (his punishment) recognizes a reality beyond the physicality of the physical. We recognize memory and justice as a function o f the biology o f our brains, the social and cultural structures, grammars, rules etc.
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The end, even at this point, is determined by the dissolution of Don Giovanni's temporal ontology into that of the women. This happens when a woman of the past flying
on her temporal loop intersects every new woman marked by Don Giovanni's desire: The Dissolution of Don Giovanni
DE DA [past]
moments when DG meets a woman
Once every serial moment is frustrated by a temporal loop, the woman have in effect dissolved being defined in the immediacy o f its physicality into a meta-being that transcends time: the soul. This soul is represented in the opera as the Commendatore. It is this final intersection that exposes the essence o f Don Giovanni, demonstrating that this essence, which defines his identity, is also trans-temporal, and as such is a form o f being similar to that being (spirit) which is the Commendatore. Don Giovanni materializes as a form o f spirit and thus can be captured and taken away by the soul o f Donna Anna's father.
For Don Giovanni being(s) [women] are potential markers in time. His desire and power (identity) dissolves being into temporality. The temporal loops described by the women attempt to re-constitute being within a subjectivity greater than any moment. They identify this subjectivity with Heaven, but it is simply the frame from which contradictorygrammarscanfunction. Inthiscasebeinggeneratedoutoftemporality represented by the women following their temporal loops and the temporality generated
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out o f being defined by the serial time o f Don Giovanni's list. The women's identities are not self-contained within the immediacy ofthe moment as is Don Giovanni's. They exist overtime,suchthattimeisre-configuredasafieldcreatingbeing. TheyforceDon Giovanni to fail and in that failure to cease to function as the immediacy o f desire and form. In order to overcome the immorality ofDon Giovanni they must function as logs on the river. A log built out of our subjectivity is a temporal loop dissolving along the serial
progression o f a river.
The possibility for our separation o f time and space is a result o f their mutual
dependence and indeed their unity. This unity requires that space, as substance, function as ifit were a subject moving into the objectivity oftime (the women onto Don Giovanni's list), while time gains an overarching subjectivity that asks as a great maw dissolving the identity of being (the temporal loops that finally suck Giovanni into Hell). For matter to exist at all requires a scale o f relation that cannot be defined tautologically by matter itself. Differenceisnotchange. Wereachthelimitsoflanguage,becauselanguagewhatever difference and deferral it might entail, cannot construct within itself, as anything meaningful, change itself. Language makes change a necessary pre-condition for its own
meaning. It can display it, point to it, call it names, enact it but it cannot describe it (language itself is already such a description; this is why attempts to embody time appeal to nonsense). And yet temporality is not the unutterable; it is what we utter although not what we mean. Just as narrative, or even a sentence, needs a temporal 'space' in which to unfold its meaning, being itself exists through its movement through moments. The nature of the moments cannot be described as/or through being: it defines their outline or their
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content.