Posted by: Johan Normark | April 18, 2012

Speculations regarding an object oriented time

In my search for a concept of time for archaeological purposes that is compatible with Harman’s object-oriented philosophy I have now returned to an old blog post of mine. The old blog post is based on my licentiate thesis which was written during my “pre-Bergsonian” period. I have earlier described the way Husserl’s model of time consciousness can be reworked to fit the archaeological record. Just like Husserl, Gaston Bachelard saw time as instantaneous, existing only in the actual. I encountered the writings of Bachelard in an anthology about time and physics and I found it suitable for archaeological purposes. Bachelard’s view of time was developed in reaction to Bergson’s continuous duration. I am not a philosopher but I believe there are some interesting overlaps between Bachelard’s view of time and Harman’s view.

Like Whitehead and Latour, Harman argues that only the actual exist. For Harman time is therefore not a flow or a continuum. It is the tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities. The “flow” is a sense of accidents on the surface of deeper sensual objects. The iceberg had a time in relation to Titanic. The time it took for the collision to occur was not a continuous flow but rather an event. Since two objects only can relate on the inside of a third object there are infinitely many times that unfolds on the interior of a vacuum-like space. As time “moves on” the objects are recomposed and they can seldom be decomposed to their former objects.

Bachelard argues that time can only be observed in instants and duration can only be experienced through these instants. Instants without duration forms duration in a similar way as a line consists of infinitely small points with no dimension. Bachelard maintains an idea of both momentary and discrete instants. The first term means that the instant has no extension and the second means that the instant is isolated from another instant. In such a view, time could be seen as having neither extension nor flow. Time is just made up of an infinite succession of discrete instants. This would also suit Harman’s demand that objects are withdrawn from their relations and that they are never exhausted by them.

As I said above, Bachelard’s view of time was largely a response to Bergson’s view on time. Bergson argues that the idea of instants belongs to quantitative science and that they are static and kills the flow of time. A discrete instant cannot, according to Bergson, produce the next instant and thus the future must be determined and continuity remains a problem. Bachelard tries to solve this problem by claiming that only nothingness is continuous, being and events make time discontinuous. Bachelard argues that if time is continuous then we see time as independent of the events that make us perceive time. Bergson, on the other hand, sees time as continuing between events, in what Bachelard sees as voids. Time is empty if nothing happens and nothingness lacks magnitude and as such it is not measurable. The instant is therefore found between nothingness and nothingness.

Time’s being is not carried from one instant to the next to form duration according to Bachelard. The instant is solitude and isolated, always breaking with the past. The “new” is something that exceeds earlier conditions because the instant does not have a history. The new cannot be new if it is connected with the past and therefore he rejects Bergson’s continuity as this means that the present is inscribed in the past. However, the instant cannot be perpetually vanishing if it is not also perpetually returning. Time is perpetually heading towards non-being as the future passes into the past through the present. The idea that something will end is therefore the foundation for Bachelardian continuity. What last from the past is what begins again. Only that which starts over again has duration. Bachelard therefore argues that rhythm, as a system of instants, is critical to the concept of time. Duration is constructed by rhythms, rhythms that are by no means necessarily grounded on an entirely uniform and regular time.

Bachelard’s notion of a consciousness is that it only exist in the act and a time that is intermittent and discontinuous by no time at all. All our memories of events are reduced to their root in an instant according to Bachelard. We have only selected memories, not of continuity. Memory needs many instants. Therefore, we never remember duration, we only have snapshots. Continuities have to be constructed as they never are complete, solid, or constant. In a way, this resembles how archaeologists create chronological tables. Thus, an artifact, a posthole, construction fill, etc. are not just objects but also traces of events. The objects are our nodes for past events in an otherwise unknown and “empty past”. We construct continuity of fragments. Bachelard argues that the tension of looking towards the immediate future forms our present duration. Both memory and anticipation comes from our habits and past and future are habits themselves, they do not exist in reality. For Bachelard, past and future are empty and do not affect time and being since they are continuous nothingness. Time is only the present instant. The present never passes since we constantly move into a new instantaneous present.

One problem with Bachelard’s view of time though is that there is a dialectic relation between the instant and nothingness. Being is thus defined from its opposite, which is nothingness. Hegel (not a popular figure in OOO), argues that being is a movement to overcome nothingness, thus becoming. The dialectic movement of opposites is the foundation of all being. However, Bergson’s critique of dialectic thinking suggests that, in order for us to understand nothingness, we must first have an idea of something full (the instant). This means that nothingness only becomes a negation and an inversion of the instant. Thus, dialectics set up contradictions on a scale with degrees which means that the instant is located in one end of the scale and nothingness at the opposite end, being a difference of degree to the instant. Degrees are believed to be homogeneous (spatial) units of measurement. The dialectics therefore confuses difference in kind with difference of degree in Bergson’s analysis. Therefore, Bachelard’s view on time is based on spatial metaphors such as point, line and void. We represent time in spatial media, but this is still not the nature of true duration. I wonder if duration even is a relevant concept in OOO?


  1. Your article is interesting.The new idea about time is , that time is an energy. and it is 3 dimensional, like gravity. In my opinion time and gravity is connected, or the same. Instead of time and space, it is time and gravity.
    Everybody knows now , that Einstein made some mistakes, Einstein was wrong. The Einstein science now is a dead end street.
    The new science that is emerging from Russia will be a big changer in the World , in every area, in energy, education, health, medicine,Etc.
    In Archaeology the new science could explain all the out of place objects, like when they find an iron nail embedded in a 100 million year old rock, or cooking pots, or gold objects embedded in millions of years old coal in the coal mine. And the new science could also explain how a 25 pound fish
    can float up a 30 meter high water fall at spawning time., or how a straw gets deeply embedded in a tree, or a green blade of grass gets deeply embedded in a salad brick wall in a tornado.
    People who live in tornado areas, often find things, they can not explain until now.There maybe a few books translated now from Russia, but there are a lot of Russian stuff in David Wilcock’s book, The Source Field Investigation

  2. I should of spelled it solid not salad.

  3. So Einstein has been outdated because of ideas coming from crackpot Wilcock? Sure… What has your comment to do with the contents of my blog post?

  4. Bergson has argued that the time of clocks, the time of physics (the variable t) is not real time but a spatialized time. Before the greek philosophical tradition, people did not conceived time as linear dimension within which events happen. See The Hebrew Concept of Time
    by Ronnie Littlejohn
    Geometry was invented by babylonean in order to survey the earth (geo – metry). The eagyptian developed it so that to create buildings.
    The geometrical world is a static world. There is no time in mathematics, it is a platonic world. Descartes invented analytical geometry. By doing so algebra was unified with euclidean geometry. The variable t provides by clocks was then available to enter geometry for the first time in history. This created the modern scientific revolution but at the cost of spatializing time.
    A spatialized time is no time, and change will never enter the platonic world of mathematic.

  5. Time, space, eidos and essence are the results of tensions between objects and their qualities according to Harman. In this line of thought space and time are not a priori categories. Harman follows Heidegger here. Heidegger argued that when we are thrown into a situation there is already something given (“the past”) from where we make a decision of how to act (“the future”). All this occur in the present. What Heidegger disliked was the series of presents, as I believe Bachelard points to. However, from an archaeological perspective it is exactly these series of “presents” that we can detect. My problem with Bergson nowadays is that the actual always is the result of a preceding past. Seldom do we have that past preserved, only snapshots. I’ll rather describe each actual moments by itself and attempt to combine them without assuming a continuity behind them, kind of Whitehead’s “becoming without continuity”.


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