Moji odgovori na upitnik Touch Me Festivala 2014.
Nešto o vremenu.
1. What is your specific interest in the notion of time?
I am interested
in time as something that we cannot know, I am interested in lack of knowledge
about time, our impotence with respect to time, how it is possible although we
have no idea about how it happens, I am not interested in how to diminish but
how to augment its mysteriousness. In a novel I am currently working on, a
character from our 21st century goes back into the 16th
century, but this is treated as something normal, that needs nothing nonordinary,
for example, time machine. The facility with which this kind of exception is
implied and accepted should remind us of the facility with which we accept the
existence and duration of time itself, in the sense that if a trip into the
past is nothing more mysterious than the common life in the present, then
perhaps only the present is more mysterious than a trip to the past. That
living in the present, our spontaneous “use” of time, requires no particularly
outstanding technology to enable this, does not mean that someone else or
something else has not invented this technology already – it has been invented
by our brain and nature itself, and we make use of this technology free of
charge, spontaneously. Living in the present, and generally in time, is not in any way something
natural, necessary or logical, rather it is a specific invention, artefact or
specific technology.
And so if we are
not amazed at spontaneous life in the present, then we need not be amazed at
spontaneous travels into the past, for the both of them are equally mysterious,
unnatural, “supernatural” phenomena. This is actually a matter of a classic
procedure: by the introduction of something speciously impossible or fantastic
(in Bulgakov, for example the devil comes to the Soviet Union), attention is
diverted to the fantastic or supernatural nature of what we have taken for
granted (in Bulgakov, we recognize that Stalinism is more incredible, even
fantastic, than the devil). We have to
increase the mysteriousness in order to more easily understand that what we accepted
as something normal is in fact far more mysterious, in fact, something
abnormal. The world in which we live
does not have to be the way it is, it is in fact extremely weird, “created” in a certain way, even if there is no creator,
which is still stranger than if there were one. A world without a god is more
mysterious, more supernatural than a world created by a god (in the divine
world there are in fact no secrets, for everything can be explained very
simply, by god having “thus wished”.
The main
character in my novel meets the world before him not to see it, reveal its
secrets, but to erase the present and treat it as past. This is heightened by his literally
travelling into the past, into the 16th century, following Michel de
Montaigne on his journey around Europe, not to get there (be there), to understand,
reveal, discover, understand, conquer, but rather, not to be there, to understand nothing, to find out nothing (not
even Montaigne himself would he ever set eyes on). In some sense, he is travelling
to cancel out his own journey into
the past, and then notwithstanding his trip
to stay in his own time, the whole time determined by memories of the
present, the world of the 21st century ; he exists only as
incapacity, as a kind of failed relay
station, which actually broke down because of his own power, the power to
travel through space and time. So the immediate
present and spontaneous life are something that he has to recall (and of course distort via this recollection) to
approximate to himself: present is always something that you have to bring back.
Spontaneous
perception and actual existence are not things that have to be taken for
granted, but things that you have to work hard at, that have to be maintained
(like some kind of technological device) and that accordingly often go wrong.
The present is a hard, complicated and repetitious job, a drill, that then often yields false or poor results, so the main
character in a novel most often sees very weakly, fuzzily and wrongly.
Everything in front of him is distorted and he often observes just monochrome
empty surfaces or a glitch. Mere
existence is also a drill during
which what is being worked on can go wrong, and even at an ontological level there
are no warranted results, it is not for example clear whether the character has
really travelled off into the past or whether he is in some artificial world,
in a computer game or an experimental digital film, or whether it is about a
hallucination. Space is a glitch. Time is a glitch. Existence itself is a
glitch.
2. Biological time, quantum
time, spacetime, synchronicity, ethernity, astronomical time, linear time,
cyclical time, time perception, telepresence etc. are some of the notions we
are connecting with time. How do some of these concepts correspond with your
own projects and research about time and what processes, methods or results are
significant for your work?
All of these are
very serious and imposing conceptions, attempts without self-irony for the
truth about time to be discovered. I am not interested in the truth about time,
rather the power of illusion of time, and about how everything happens notwithstanding
the fact that all we have out our disposal are illusions. Truth and illusion are
equally effective resources for being in the world, which is fairly amusing.
For me time is something amusing, something that asks for play and laughter.
3. What is time?
Of course I
don’t know that, but my illusion about time goes like this. Time is a machine,
a device, a kind of application for a sequential processing of data (in the
broadest and not only in the digital sense). Time is an interface (again in the
broadest, non-digital, sense), a mediator between us and the raw data down
there. Space is a phenomenon that appears at an atomic and molecular level,
where two different things cannot occupy the same place, for which reason time
can exist here only in one direction (the sphere of the arrow of time, as it is
called). But time processes data at the sub-atomic level too, where there is no
space, and time can go in both directions; here everything happens non-locally,
it is completely just the same if something goes on next to you or light years
away. So, at least two kinds of time are known to us – irreversible and
reversible time, which implies that there are lots of other kinds. Some are coupled
with space, others are not. It’s likely that there are some very weird
combinations, and everything occurs at once. Time at once exists and does not
exist.
4. What are your thoughts on the
absolutism (Newton’s absolute time and space) vs. relationalism (Leibniz/Kant)
debate?
Absoluteness of
time is too much of an objectivist idea (which implies that time has to be the
way it is, and actually it does not have to be), and a relational understanding
of time is too human, too anthropocentric, but time does not depend on man,
human time is just one of the sub/versions of nonhuman time. And so both
concepts are poor, if you believe in them but are useful as intellectual
signposts.
5.
Besides these two fundamental Western approaches to time, which theory/ies of
time would you single out?
All ideas that
poke fun at time I find interesting, ideas that, by way of this funny glitch,
reveal everything time is not. As I
said, it is illusions and not truths that are important to me. Since while you live in it, it is impossible
to discover what time is, the only thing you can find out is what time is not.
The only thing you can do is to mess around with your own incapacity, increase
it, expand it, stretch it and scratch it. It is actually fascinating that our
ignorance is much more important for our survival and existence than our
knowledge. Without any problems we have existed on this planet, although the
whole time we have had no idea about what life, time, space, awareness and
existence are. Nescience is our main strength, and we share this strength with
all other beings, who also without any awareness function perfectly in the
world. The subject is not the one that
is supposed to know, knowledge is always
outsourced; knowledge happens, it
is what happens to us. So the
“knowledge” of time or about time is
also always already outsourced, something that happens to us because
“something” else, not us, knows how it is done.
Time is a clear and constant reminder that some vast knowledge goes on
behind us and through us. We are at base inter-passive. In sitcoms someone laughs on our behalf, in
life, “something” (maybe some dark, anonymous Levinasian il y a, „there is“) creates
our time instead of us, that “something” even lives instead of us, lives us. We are left to live what is
available to us, i. e. our illusions, so that “something” else could be
concerned with real things, probably incomprehensible to us. Time is there to put
as aside, to chuck us out of the real game.
But that does not mean that our illusions are themselves illusory, they
are very real. That’s fairly amusing.
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