Time-ing
William Hunt
T
here is an extremely obvious, immanent wisdom in the common, almost dismissive, saying, “time moves faster when you are having fun.” It plays itself out inversely when the last minutes of an unfulfilling task grind by, or in its full positivity when an ending is repeated “one last time.” There is a sense that each ordinary, colloquial action plays out its own temporality; it is its own time-ing. This could be said in three different ways: (1) The first is as a gerund, where ‘time’ experiences an auto-affection in and as the action/ material in question. This could also be expressed as rhythmic singularity. (2) The second is the sense of the colloquial saying (something like), “timing is everything.” We could call this sense something like “rhythmic coordination” — the necessary involvement of rhythmic singularities. Between these two senses, time immanently times itself, or time is its own time-ing. (3) The third sense of time-ing is a way of immanently referring to both (1) and (2). It is the heat, the glow, the glimmering multiplicity of rhythmic singularity and coordination, yet it is not a set of all sets or a transcendental container of the immanent. It is the third sense of time-ing only sequentially, and in effect flattens the first two senses as the idem-potency (0+0+0+0...=0) of this ordinary time. We could say that this third sense is what Gilles Deleuze calls “aion.” This time is not the present, but runs through all time, soaking or saturating it: “Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line.” Listening to two minutes of John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space is different from listening to two minutes of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Two Part Inventions; waiting for the kettle to boil when you are late for an appointment is very different from boiling the kettle for a cup of tea before beginning to type these words. Time-ing (3) runs steadily, abstractly, through each of these scenarios and these words that describe them. In his book A Philosophy of Sports, Stephen Connor compellingly situates the struggle between two teams in terms of rhythmic coordinations or interferences. He writes: “The struggle against the other team is really a struggle against their time. One side struggles to accelerate time by gaining advantage. If I am 3—0 ahead, I will have wound the clock forward, starving the other team of the time available to them by increasing the work that they must do in it” (76). Given this conceptualization, Connor then places us in a rugby match at a point where one player is attempting to tackle another player, and the latter is attempting to avoid the former. This relation is reciprocal in that the tackling-player is also attempting to avoid this avoidance, etc.; each player is both fully embodying their own rhythm and anticipating their interlocutor’s. There is a differential relation that plays out between them, which could be notated as dx/dy — the change in x determining itself in relation to the change in y. Connor writes that, “the space of play was puckered together in one
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