Time-ing

William Hunt

There 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

point and stretched out in another [sic].” As infinitesimal singularities (0/0) that determine each other, the two sides of the relation never actually coincide or fall together. As Connor continues his description, he begins to follow a presupposition that betrays the immanence of time-ing: “The field of play winks and shimmers, opening and closing, actual and virtual, with these wrinkles and pockets of opportunity.” What interests me here is the use of the terms “actual” and “virtual.” It seems like Connor is conflating the idea of the “virtual” with what he later describes as the “plentitude of original possibility.” Here, Connor is presupposing the immanent real by means of the possible. When Gilles Deleuze develops an idea of the actual and the virtual, it is precisely this presupposition which he is trying to escape. In Difference and Repetition he writes that the possible is “understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible... Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it.” The possible is thought of as the means by which the real becomes real (a series of possibilities where one passes into actuality), but the defect is that these possibilities are determined retroactively in the real...the possible presupposes the real, constantly displacing the latter and subordinating it to a conceptual identity. The introduction of the virtual and the actual, in place of the possible and the real, eliminates this defect in that the virtual is fully real insofar as it is virtual. If Connor’s description of the field of play as “actual and virtual” is conflating “virtual” with possible or potential (even in whatever colloquial sense), then he is framing the differential relation between the players (dx/dy) as already fully determined, relegating their actions to a retroactive integration or differentiation of the determined function. In Dialogues, Deleuze distinguishes between the actual and the virtual: “This distinction between the virtual and the actual corresponds to the most fundamental split in time, that is to say, the differentiation of its passage into two great jets: the passing of the present and the preservation of the past.” Following Henri Bergson, this thought of the actual and the virtual locates the past as immanent to the present . Connor’s invocation of the “plentitude of original possibility” presupposes the real present (time-ing) and determines a future in advance in the form of an image of possibilities, however multiplicitous, when really, and this is the pleasure of playing, the function actualizes itself as rhythmic singularities by means of the virtuality of the past that is immanent to the present (time-ing 1 and 2). In the “wink” and “shimmer” of the relation (dx/dy), the change in the variables reciprocally determine each other, not as a derivation but as the actuality of the function. This is not a matter of mathematical metaphor, but rather a thought of calculus in its etymological sense, from Latin meaning a “small pebble” used for calculation or measurement. In this sense, possibility can be seen in its defects: I could swallow the pebbles, they could disappear or turn into a cup of coffee. The more important idea here is probability. In a calculus (etymologically), rhythmic singularities (1) are always rhythmic coordinations (2) in the sense that the determination of a relation is a para-meter (a measuring beside) where virtual probability allows for an assumption of stability—the rules of a game, creative traditions, my assumption that the pebbles will not spontaneously divide themselves, my assumption that I will wake up tomorrow. We could say that training or practice is a familiarization with these probabilities such that new problematics can be developed and actualized in real, immanent time (time-ing). Improvisation could here be posed as the para- metrical stance or calculus of acting. This stance occurs in and as time-ing (1-3) but is distinguished as a different use or play of the latter: on a plane of immanence everything is everything, and yet at the same time I can find joy in a particular tempo, or sonic/ visual arrangement.

John Coltrane’s 1964 A Love Supreme is an example of this stance and, I want to claim, constructs a superposition of time and love. The final track “Psalm,” is itself a differential relation that opens a space of resonance and becoming, in which one is alone — together in thought and material, the entire body winks and shimmers. In the liner notes, Coltrane tells us that the track is “a musical narration of the theme, A Love Supreme which is written in the context; it is entitled ‘Psalm.’” In the recording Coltrane plays a melody that rhythmically coordinates with (narrates) the syllabic rhythm of the textual theme, dividing his voice between language, in its inscriptive signification, and the human phonē, in its a-signifying sonic register. To read the text (or to know it) and listen to its narration together is to take up an improvisational stance and join the calculus that Coltrane(’s band) actualizes. The textual theme proposes an idea of immanence, but one that is different that of time-ing, as it is located in God. Coltrane writes: “Words, sounds, speech, men [sic], memory, thoughts, fears and emotions —time— all related...all made from one...all made in one.” He continues, “thought waves-heat waves-all vibration - all paths lead to God. Thank you God.” I cannot help but to read this list of singularities as progressive: (1)the words that we are reading; (2)the sounds through which they are narrated; (3)the speech that is divided between the previous two and superimposed back onto each other non-cumulatively; (4)the singular human being and its experience of memory, thoughts, fears, emotions; (5)a textual line of “—time—…” in our context this could be rewritten as “time-ing.” The space of resonance that Coltrane’s playing/recording and writing opens is not something to be looked at, or even listened to. Rather, it is a radically open extension of the indeterminate calculus, where words, sounds, humans (rhythmic singularities), superpose onto each other, retaining their absolute singularity while simultaneously contemplating the immanence that undermines all difference...love...— time—...time-ing...0+0+0+0+...=0...idem-potency...

Gilles Deleuze attempts to outline a similar space in his final writing, “Pure Immanence: A Life....” He writes, “the Life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a ‘Homo Tantum’ [human only or human-as-such] with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude.” There is no secret to John Coltrane’s time-ing. It is freed from any concept of internality and externality and as such plays with itself, between composition, improvisation, reading, writing, listening, etc. However, the absolutely singular openness of both time and love that Coltrane expresses is not only found in his playing: even the rhythmic coordination of the sonorous and the visible (in headphones, in screens, in impairment, in work, in the ordinary, everyday, etc.) is undermined in its pure immanence by its own time-ing and by its own love-ing. As Amiri Baraka puts it in Black Music: “but what is the object of John Coltrane’s ‘Love’... There is none. It is the sake of Loving.”