Feeling Time. Amit S. Yahav
but only slightly less disturbing daily realities of nonstop digital interfaces and consumerist opportunities. In Crary’s account, it seems, romance has been so thoroughly internalized by realism that the historicist chronometric consciousness has come to seem like a suprahuman and hermetic principle. Crary clearly intends to be a provocateur, amplifying the familiar into the uncanny as a way of moving us to recognize—as gothic novels aimed to do—the grave risks our ordinary lives currently run. And while he is aware that twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies only intensify and more fully realize the logic of capital and of disciplinarity launched some three hundred years ago, he also suggests that the kind of breaks for reconnecting with the various rich rhythms of durational experience that sensibility found in aesthetic pleasure, fellow-feeling, and judging have become increasingly rare. With the advent of televised entertainment and screen interfaces that are available almost anywhere and any time and that keep us connected to markets and to work, with the almost complete commodification of nature into remote and specially designated preserves, with an extremely capitalized art market that makes access to aesthetic pleasure rare and expensive, with friendships often conducted through screens and electronic messaging, and with judgment often reduced to consumer choices—the opportunities for pauses and our capacities for using them to recover thick and various human rhythms have significantly diminished. Moreover, if it was the very act of reading that the culture of sensibility believed could activate these capacities, then today we spend less time reading elaborate discursive strings, and fewer of us spend time in this way. Our exposure to a compositional experience of the world is diminishing and since, as Ricoeur reminds us, we still “have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things” (2: 28), this is an especially frightening prospect.
“And yet … and yet” (2: 28), Ricoeur insists, and I agree. For Radcliffe and her contemporaries, occasions for transforming the chronometric into qualitative, profoundly human durations also seemed to demand—and to be worth—a struggle. It is not only that the apocalypse has been developing over at least three centuries, as Crary notes, but also that it has been recognized as the more specific threat of an end to human time for most of this period. We seem never to tire of telling stories about our end, and perhaps with such relentless narration of the threats to our endurance, we defer the end and enhance the qualities of the time that remains.38 That we are an age of crisis is part and parcel of the modern sense-making form, Frank Kermode reminds us.39 But it may also be that the machines, just like Defoe’s cannibals, do not seek to annihilate us, but only insist that we share our duration with them. This is a possibility I explore in this book’s coda.
Chapter 1
Composing Human Time
Locke, Hume, Addison, and Diderot
FINDING IT IMPOSSIBLE to define time through intellectual inquiry, St. Augustine turns to experiencing the reverberations of his own duration in a prayer which he compiles of quotations from various psalms. The move to a self-evident existential duration entails for Augustine not only naming poetry and voice, but also performing both the act of composing and the act of reciting. When duration cannot be defined, it is exemplified in artifacts constituted by compositional activity and sensible experience.1 In this chapter I trace a similar move in a number of eighteenth-century English discussions of time where the focus on how we come to know duration turns into the suggestion that more than coming to know it, we come to feel it, and that we come to feel it when we listen to music, or read essays and novels, or converse with friends. Music, novels, and conversation—like Augustine’s prayer—solicit the senses as well as the capacity to recognize and form temporal patterns.
A while ago Georges Poulet argued that eighteenth-century empiricists came to understand temporal continuity as a human fabrication arising from the ways in which our minds seek to integrate instances of sensory experience. For the empiricists, Poulet explained, “intensity of sensation ensures the instant; multiplicity of sensation ensures duration.”2 Poulet’s compact yet wide-ranging study offers an overview of the emergence of temporal phenomenology from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. He argues that the break with traditional Christian paradigms launched by the Renaissance introduced duration as a conceptual problem that gave rise to a burgeoning discourse—both philosophical and literary—on the nature of time and its relation to experience. Endurance came to be understood as a conceptual difficulty that calls for human—rather than divine—explanations. In Poulet’s account, seventeenth-century discussions conceived of such human time as a succession of durationless instants whose continuity must be repeatedly asserted from without. For “the seventeenth-century man,” he writes, “duration is a chaplet of instants. The creative activity alone permits passage from one bead to another” (14). By contrast, eighteenth-century discussions began to understand continuity as in and of itself a human fabrication and to examine the possibility of a more organic relation between instants and duration. And while eighteenth-century culture was concerned with positional relations of disjunctive moments, Romantics conceived of each moment as though it encapsulated a linear span; nineteenth-century writers emphasized causal relations among moments; and twentieth-century authors conceived of the moment as a nondeterministic potential. Poulet’s survey remains highly suggestive; it also, however, leaves many specificities unexplored. He usefully emphasizes the importance of intensities and multiplicities in eighteenth-century empiricist discussions of time, but these discussions also persistently raise questions about how such intensities and multiplicities combine to support temporal experience. One pressing question they raise is whether the instant counts as temporal or atemporal. Another is how exactly durational multiplicity relates to and differs from intensification. Yet another regards varying models for integrating multiplicities.
In this chapter I track these questions as they are explored in John Locke’s and David Hume’s philosophies of time and in Joseph Addison’s and Denis Diderot’s comments on discursive compositions and durational experience. In these early sensationist and associationist works, we find various models for understanding the qualities of the instant and the compositional organization of durational multiplicities. Locke famously defines our primary temporal experience through the succession of our ideas, but we will soon see that while his explicit argument focuses on measurement of lengths and presumes the instant to be atemporal, the examples he presents point up sensations and intensities that turn the instant into a part of duration and sway the discussion from estimations of quantities to assessments of qualities. In Hume’s analyses of time, we find a more direct exploration of such durational qualities not only highlighting the durational intensities of the instant, but also qualifying the associative strings that integrate moments into temporal expanses. And in Addison’s and Diderot’s comments on literary aesthetics, we can trace links between durational qualities and an active crafting done by discursive compositions. For Addison and Diderot, durational media such as essays and novels come in numerous genres and forms whose effects variously shape readers’ temporal experiences.
Duration as the Succession of Ideas: Locke and Hume on Quantities and Qualities
For most historians of philosophy, Locke’s contribution to understanding time seems minimal: popularizing Isaac Newton’s distinction between absolute and relative time while focusing on duration’s sensible approximations. Nonetheless, in both popular and academic writing in England throughout the eighteenth century, Locke’s discussion of “Duration and Its Simple Modes” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) was a constant touchstone. As we will soon see, Hume relies on Locke’s initial definitions, and Addison frames his notes on time as a popularization of Locke’s views. And as we will see in subsequent chapters, Edmund Burke founds his durational aesthetics on both direct and indirect polemics with Locke, and Laurence Sterne quotes and misquotes Locke’s Essay in his experiments with narrative duration. These appreciative revisions recognize tensions between Locke’s arguments and his suggestive discussions of examples, pushing the experiential turn that the Essay inaugurates beyond the predominantly quantifying approach that Locke takes. For if in his arguments Locke focuses on the stipulated agreements by which we measure time’s expanse, his examples highlight