Where do spacing and timing happen? Two movements in the loss of cosmological innocence

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DOI: 10.1177/1350508404047250 2004; 11; 759 Organization

Niels Viggo Hansen Cosmological Innocence

Where Do Spacing and Timing Happen? Two Movements in the Loss of

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Where Do Spacing and TimingHappen? Two Movements in theLoss of Cosmological Innocence

Niels Viggo HansenUniversity of Aarhus, Denmark, and Knowledge and Research Center forAlternative Medicine

Abstract. A general feature of late modernity is the extension of a certainkind of critical awareness of constructedness, which used to be aimedonly at the acts and beliefs of non-modern institutions and collectives butis now returning home. We realize in practice, and to an increasing extentin theory, that we live in a world whose features—times and spaces, forinstance—are constructed. This is a loss of what could be termed‘cosmological innocence’, that is, of a naive trust in e.g. spatial andtemporal structures as simple representations of the world as it is. Thispaper explores the loss of innocence, arguing that it is a wholesome andenriching experience, and investigating how we can avoid a tendency toend it all before it gets really interesting by assuming 100% guilt onbehalf of transcendental, non-worldly human subjectivity. To counteractthis, the paper proposes a process metaphysical approach, which mayallow us openly to share the joys and perils of constructing worlds alongwith other kinds of participants in the cosmos. Key words. cosmology;space; time

First Movement: Devouring the Factory ClockThe Church of the Pantheon in Rome is one of the oldest buildings in theworld still intact enough to perform its original function, and is probablythe largest piece of antique architecture to do so. It probably owes itsimmortality to two things. One of them is the invention of a technology

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not usually associated with antiquity: the cupola is made in one hugepiece, out of concrete. The other is its popularity with the citizens ofRome: early Christian rulers are said to have given up plans of demolish-ing it and converted it into a church. It is still quite obviously a templefor the cosmic-religious synthesis created at the short culmination ofpagan antiquity: the all-embracing sun god in the middle and the entireantique pantheon arranged in a circle around him, interpreted as hisemanations.

The Pantheon also embodies antique time: the opening at the top of thecupola allows the Sun’s rays to circulate within the temple, from sub-deity to sub-deity, so that the whole temple is in effect a sundial as well.The orderly array of sub-deities, many of whom used to be associatedwith local orders with cults and calendars, beneath and around a centralsun god also represents the construction of a united cosmopolitancalendar—a chrono-political structure that explicitly draws its legitimacyfrom something cosmic, something of this world. This worldly con-nectedness, beautifully manifested in the hole in the ceiling, is what Iwant to focus on; it is what Christians and moderns have worked hard topurge from the construction of time.

The Pantheon thus exemplifies a politics of time, something we havehad at least since late pagan antiquity. However, the history of modernityis intimately connected to a different chrono-political model, which hasbeen gaining power since the merging of Christianity and Roman impe-rial power. This has a radically different tendency from the cosmic,circular structure of the Pantheon. St Augustine (1991) makes the famousdistinctive leap away from time based on movements of the celestialbodies, even the sun, to an abstract, linear time.

I should note here that it is not just the invention of abstract time andspace that is at issue, although abstraction is certainly involved.1

Antique, cosmic time also had its abstract expressions. If there is aparticularly significant ‘leap’ in Augustine it is one of faith or trust in, ordelegation to, the transcendent: time passes, not because of the nature ofthings but because of a power beyond nature. The idea of an original,natural ‘lived time’ can be seen as an attempt at countering a temporalpolitics rather than just a form of abstraction, as I will outline shortly. Iwill also try to show that it is on the right track but insufficient.

Just like abstract mathematical models of time and space, non-astronomical clocks based on moving earthly parts or materials wereknown in antiquity, but the ideal of disentangled mechanical timingbecomes much more powerful once it becomes the project of approximat-ing pure time, no longer a second-rate copy of astronomical time. Onething this Christian–modern construction of time as pure and evenlypassing can do is to organize work in ways that remove it more and morefrom local, traditional and even, to a large extent at least, biologicalconstraints. In short, pure time can turn work into a resource. St Augus-

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tine probably had no idea what he had set in motion, but his notion ofpurified, fleeing time reaches its full expression in the modern Protestantwork ethic implanted in some of us, where not only the sun but even thealarm clock is unnecessary: the abstract idea of working hours isenough.

Alienation

Times and spaces are aspects of the way collectives and collectiveenterprises are organized, as the close pre-modern coupling of cults andcalendars shows. Currency, time and space once carried the explicitstamp of originating heavenly or earthly agencies, but the Christian–modern trend has been to take the agency ever further out of thisworld.

As Hegel analyses the movement of alienation, it is intimately con-nected with the exteriorization expressed in the hypostatization of anabsolute, disembodied time, just as it is connected with the inter-iorization of the pure subject. But what Hegel is after is to point to thepossible and necessary overcoming of alienation, which consists in morethan just a return to the original innocent state before the construction ofclocks and time: we can and must grasp it and devour it, take itsconstruction upon ourselves as our own self-expression.

Marx seems only partially to grasp time as a basic category andpolitical instrument in the accelerating mobilization, exploitation andalienation. In any case he seems to take it as simply given that there issome kind of true measure of time in which a true measure of ‘value inuse’ is produced prior to exploitation. Much more importantly, however,Marx has shown alienation to be a very concrete structure in the processof work itself, which channels itself into an exchangeable commodity.This of course requires it to be measured in exchangeable units—itrequires the function of the generalized factory clock whose readingsshould ideally be available wherever there are work resources. Nowhereis the political meaning of process-independent time expressed moreclearly than here: the construction of a measure enabling the exchange-ability of as many aspects as possible within the form of life.

Since the problem of alienation lies in this deep—but historicallyvariable—characteristic structure of work itself, there is no radicallytransforming solution without a transformation in the way we organizework, in the very dynamics whereby networks are built and extended forthe increasingly dominant practice of measurement and exchange, insuch a way that the two poles of subjectivity are produced and repro-duced: labourer and consumer. A genuinely new politics of time is onethat will digest and transform the factory clock and the currency unit,abstract time and abstract value, the sense and power of the processes ofmeasurement in both respects.

Where Do Spacing and Timing Happen?Niels Viggo Hansen

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Opposition to AlienationThis sheds an interesting light on the classic aesthetic opposition toexternalized, spatialized time. This opposition is able to locate the core ofthe problem of the politics of time with great precision, but it is impotentwhen it comes to the establishment of an alternative, because it simplydenies constructed, externalized time as a veil of illusion covering a trueinternal reality. And because this internality is still constituted as oneside of alienating temporal politics, it can grasp this internality only as apure time of consciousness, feeling or intensity, perfectly expressed inthe idea of ‘quality time’. Philosophical expressions of this romanticreaction against the abstract and utilitarian organization of time andproduction still abound—a particularly grandiose expression of it isHeidegger’s notion of original, authentic Zeitlichkeit, or temporality(Heidegger, [1927] 1993), but there have been recent strong expressions,for example in the work of Hubert Dreyfus.

The attempt to incorporate this ‘reaction’ in temporal politics in reallife can take the shape of avoiding the technical and metrical whereverpossible and shifting the focus towards the human, subjective andorganic—as in the desire to abandon a hectic career and settle on asouthern beach or village, or the wish to work less in order to have timefor children and self-realization. This is certainly desirable, but it doesnot basically transform the politics of time because the issue is so easilysettled at the other pole of the modern construction of temporal politics:time–money, work–consumption. It becomes, for example, a week ofholiday quality time on a sunny beach, which may be nice but is not atransformation; if we consider the amount of work and other resourcesset in motion in order to bring it about, it certainly does not counteractmobilization. Indeed, the romantic reaction can fit well in the function ofmaking alienation bearable for groups who might otherwise have had thepower and creativity to change it. On the other hand, the aesthetic turncontains not only the moment of enjoyment but also the ideal of expres-sive work beyond the form of repetition compliant with the generalizedrelation of measurement and exchange.

Another well-known form of reaction in temporal politics is the onethat keeps the factory clock but transfers the exchange of units of moneyand the working time it regulates from private capitalists to the state ascapitalist. Apart from the fact that this alternative form of organizationhas recently lost most of its once considerable extent, leading to a surgeof rather unthinking trust in the desirability and efficiency of privatecapitalism, I suppose we can also say of the grand experiment of statecapitalism that it has taught us the important lesson that the basicrelation of work cannot be changed that way.

(I am not saying that Marxism is only about temporal politics. But, asmentioned above, temporal politics is central in Marx’s diagnosis ofcapitalism. And even if the 20th-century attempts at installing Marxism


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at the state level certainly failed in terms of temporal politics and inmany other respects, I do not see why we should accept the notion that itwas a complete failure. Would the distribution of wealth in the West haveimproved so much if private capital had not been under pressure from arival form of organization—a phenomenon similar to the Catholiccounter-reformation?)

So neither aesthetic recreation nor redistribution of wealth has basi-cally modified the modern politics of time. All of this is perfectly inaccordance with Marx’s diagnosis of alienation as something that couldnot be modified without transforming the basic concrete relation ofwork.

Beyond Alienation and Opposition?However, it is obvious that the markets of work themselves have started ametamorphosis in several important respects. A growing number ofemployees in the richer parts of the world are themselves capitalists aswell. Moreover, an increasing part of their work involves managingstreams of work, money and other resources, that is, the construction ofthe generalized factory and factory clock: in this ever more refinedsystem, aspects of life that used to be local and internal—child care, forone—can be ‘lifted out’, measured, exchanged, marketed. The clock isbeing transformed into more and more complex and flexible systems forfacilitating and regulating the exchange. In particular, telework isexpanding rapidly. Large groups are gaining greater freedom to enfoldwork in family life and self-realization projects. Other and even largergroups are being marginalized in a paradoxically intensified alienation bynot working for wages, or by low-status telework without the company offellow workers.

A genuinely new politics of time must recognize the powerful ramified,complexified and rarefied factory clock as our own doing. We must, asHegel said, sublate and elevate (aufheben) this time, or what is now thismonstrously ramified rhizome of times, by taking it upon ourselves as ourfree expression. Making this timing part of ourselves may seem a redun-dant piece of advice; we are already co-originated with it to such anextent that we cannot really extract an original, pre-scientific, pre-technological humanity in ourselves. So it could seem that such anaffirmative strategy means simply giving up all resistance to an alienatingpolitics of time extending its network of ever finer tentacles ever deeperinto our being. On the other hand, the idea of resistance thus given up isthe one that assumes a core being that we could possibly defend. Sincethere is not, we can instead grasp the possibilities of poetic co-construction of the strange new compound phenomena.

Perhaps there are already patterns of a new politics of time in the air.Perhaps it is true, as Latour (1997) has argued, that we are already verycompetent at handling and navigating a plurality of complex, co-constructed networks of spacing and timing activities. In other words, if


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Latour is right, in practice we are quite aware of the constructedness ofthe networks of measurement, exchange and control. But in order to ownthat awareness we still need to articulate an explicit metaphysics of timethat could reflect this competence, one that would be able to ‘devour’ theclassical metaphysical structure that still fixes the polarities of work andconsumption and the standardizing metrics of time and value in ourmodern self-understanding.

If we can express an affirmative participatory perspective on the worldas process—without much timing or with a lot of it, as the case may be—we may be able to assist a move towards an open-eyed, pluralist,ecological, democratic politics of time. Rather than trying to revertromantically to an ideal of ‘original time’ (‘human’, experienced ororganic time), we need to move on, with open eyes, to the production oforders, showing maximal creative respect for the multiplicity of otherorders. It is not in order to be efficient constructors, and not in order tostop the activity of constructing, but in order to participate in it with suchrespect and creativity, that we need problematizations of the politics oftime. These need to be articulate enough to stand up to the strongmovement of a metaphysical politics of time, starting with Augustine andculminating with Newton, and paradoxically strengthened by romanticreactions at least up to Heidegger.

But why is it a concept of process that plays such a pivotal role? It hasbeen pointed out by several authors that, if we want to be able tounderstand the way technological and social networks and relations getconstructed, we need to move our conceptual focus from the apparentlystable product to the process of its making. So it is becoming commonknowledge that processual thinking in this epistemological sense (thatwe construct something for ourselves which is then the structure of theworld for us) is a necessary step if we do not want to be hopelessly naive.However, I would like to argue that it is nothing like enough. This is whythere is one more movement in this story.

Second Movement: Admitting the KinshipThe understanding of times and spaces as things that are produced andmaintained in concrete processes in the middle of the world is cosmo-logical and runs counter to a modern desire to be cosmologically inno-cent. This, I think, is why the terms spacing and timing have a fascinatingrebellious ring to them. The important cosmological implication of thestudy of timing and spacing as worldly activities is not just the realiza-tion that we are not innocent in the sense that we—humans—areinvolved in the production of structures of the world such as time andspace. What is even more important is that spacing and timing happenhere, in the middle of a cosmos full of other processes and agencies withtheir own rhythms and ideas of order that must be negotiated with,


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depended on and subdued. It is a colourful, promiscuous and cruel kind ofcosmogony we are involved in, and we ourselves are engendered in it.

In an attempt to strengthen not only the first but also the second senseof loss of cosmological innocence, I am going to play with an awkwardphilosophical question: if space and time are results of constructionprocesses, where and when do these processes themselves take place?However, in order to ask this question in a way that is meaningful andpowerful enough, I need to consider the modern distribution of responsi-bilities and acknowledgements between humans and other participantsin the cosmos.

The Non-modern Vice of CosmologyCosmology is about the entities that populate a universe and the order oftheir configuration. It is about what is actually there in a world, about thethings in themselves. It is not about phenomena or appearances—notabout the way things appear on the horizon of some subject or life form—but about the drift and the stuff and the order of what is there. Telling ameaningful story of the cosmos also means accounting for the way ourform of life, any form of life, any collective, with its things, agencies andorders, connects with or emerges from orders around, inside, above,below, before it—whatever may be the nature of the world, whateverweird, wonderful and terrible processes we may be embedded in.

A central aspect of modern correctness (or, better, the dominant way ofdistributing roles and legitimacies, which Latour has characterized as theModern Constitution) is a ‘humble’ attitude towards the cosmos: weclaim to know only what appears to us and can attribute sense and valueto things only in terms of human needs and projects. Cosmology is a verynon-modern kind of enterprise, as already pointed out by Kant, themodern thinker par excellence.

Of course there is the important exception of modern physical cosmol-ogy, that is, the late 20th-century development of a discipline within thescience of physics, extending the treatment of laws, particles, forces andparticularly space and time from the local to the global in the widest andwildest sense, and particularly to the birth of space, time and structurealtogether. It is taking modern physics to its wildest limits. It is spec-ulative, it is fun, it has enormous powers of fascination for physicists aswell as for everyone else. This makes it an extremely important ally inthe raising of funds for accelerators and other Big Science installations. Ithink it is pretty obvious that this power arises precisely from the statusof late modern physical cosmology as an exception—a relaxation, aloophole, perhaps a dialectical self-negation or an embryonic internaldestabilization—in the modern a-cosmic attitude.

So I maintain that this ‘cosmology’ is a singular exception to thedominant modern tendency of avoiding the cosmic, and it is significantthat this exception is strictly confined within a discipline that has


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acquired the highest status in the hierarchy of modern sciences: funda-mental physics, the purest and simplest science, the one tainted to thesmallest possible extent by the impurities of local conditions and theconstraints imposed by particular system types and environments, not tomention interests. And, even in the case of this attractive exception, thereare modernizing forces that pull the enterprise away from the attractionsof cosmology in a strong sense. First, there are frequent expressions ofconcern about the extension of theories into times, spaces and conditionsso far beyond any possible experience as being too obviously andstrongly speculative—and hence blurring a contrast with empiricallyungrounded speculation, which is important for self-understanding asholders of a modern, scientific worldview. Secondly, and more inter-esting, there is a drive within the speculations of modern physicalcosmology towards the transcendence of cosmology into the paradigmat-ically modern enterprise of epistemology. At least in some of its versions,the so-called ‘anthropic cosmological principle’ (Barrow and Tipler,1986) amounts to taking the cognizing human subject as the ultimateground of cosmic structure.

This, of course, echoes the classic modern move made in philosophyby Kant: the subject is very much involved in timing, spacing and otherformattings of the cosmos, but from a pure place, completely beyond andbefore cosmic content, and in a way that is completely independent of itswill, attitudes, history, anything—and thus beyond any real or dangerousor committed involvement with the cosmos. This is the very sophisti-cated kind of innocence known as transcendence, which is much moredifficult to lose, but I believe the work presented at the conference onwhich this journal issue is based is a very good shot at it.

Copernican Shifts, Centres and EdgesI am not going to enter into a detailed discussion of Kant here. All that weneed to play with at this point is his powerful idea that space, time,causality, etc. are universally present structural elements of everything,not because they are in things themselves, but because things are alwaysgiven for a subject and a subject must format things thus in order for themto be available for it. For Kant, there is no question of different times andspaces; there is one kind, corresponding to the coordinates of classicalphysics, which must be already installed for there to be anything toexperience or handle, that is, for there to be any thing. All that isimportant here is that the structures of time and space are given a prioriin and with the subject—nothing in the world, and nothing that thesubject can do in the world, can affect them.

Kant himself used a very interesting metaphor for his transcendentalaccount of time, space and other orders as the subject’s construction fromits own pure place: the Copernican shift. Just as Copernicus gave a betteraccount of celestial movements by a radical reconfiguration that dis-placed to the periphery the entire earthly world that used to be taken for


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the centre, and shifted the sun into the centre instead, so Kant found thata radically different and much better account of the structures of experi-ence could be given with pure subjectivity shifted into the centralposition.

The image of Copernican shifting is used frequently to convey moderna-cosmicity in a way that may seem at first sight to say the opposite ofwhat Kant is saying. It is the story of the displacement of the well-knownhomely sphere of human life from the centre of the cosmos. First, thestory goes, the Copernican model of the planetary system moves us out ofthe centre of the spheres. Then, Darwin and others give the humanspecies an ordinary place amongst living things. Our entire history—withcultures, tools, religions, wars, sciences, and so on—is but a tiny fractionof the immense timescale of nature. The moral of the story is a modernvirtuous humility: we should renounce any assumption that our ownbeing, doing or preferences have cosmological significance. Of course thisfits perfectly with Kant’s point: if at the end point of the cascade ofCopernican shifts there is human dignity and an available, orderedworld, this is true only by virtue of the subject’s formatting of somethingso utterly foreign and shapeless that cosmos would be a very unfittingword.

This, on the other hand, ensures that, within the world for us, there isan order that is much more secure and provides the subject with a muchmore special place than could be arranged by friendly gods or anythingelse merely part of the world. I submit that this humility is false, is in facta cover for a megalomaniac belief in the power of human subjectivity assomething absolutely over and above this world, and that in fact we arevery dependent on such worldly allies, and also on foes and other co-constructors of the cosmos, if we are going to have any real dignities andorders.

Where and When?All of this serves as a backdrop for the question I ask in the title of thispaper. The question is all about expressing a good, strong, a-modernsense of timing and spacing and for this we need the resonance of thecosmos.

It is pretty clear that the species of spacing and timing processes thatthe papers in this issue venture to explore are mostly far beyond the kindof productions of time and space within the one kind of cosmologysanctioned by the exception mentioned above, modern physical cosmol-ogy. The practices and organizations we discuss go on in physical regionsmuch closer to the regions that we inhabit and handle, if anywhere.

The shift from time and space to timing and spacing is a kind of loss ofinnocence. I am very much in favour of the loss of innocence, but I amworried that it could be all over before it really gets interesting, if we fallinto the Kantian habit of assuming 100% guilt. This is what happens as


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soon as we give in to the temptation of saying that timing and spacing areour doing. Individually or collectively, that difference is minor.

This brings me back to the factory clock that I just said, with Hegel, weneed to devour and recognize as Spirit’s own doing. Let us say thatsomeone—myself, for instance—made the reasonable claim that thefactory clock instantiates timing of a very specific kind, producing astructure that enables certain commodities to be compared, exchanged,transported. Now, training in the critical traditions of modernphilosophy—a type of activity that often legitimizes itself just by demon-strating that it can critically expose a-modern tendencies ofcosmologizing—lures one into asking a certain kind of rhetorical ques-tion that I first thought to be so embarrassingly naive that I would notbring it up in a serious discussion of timing and spacing practices. Itcertainly is embarrassing, but thinking about it I have found that perhapswe can push it to a limit where it can begin to do useful work. It goes likethis:

If time is produced in timing activities, when—at what time—do yousuppose these activities themselves take place? Similarly, where doesspacing happen?

The question is designed to make us oscillate between two extremeanswers, both equally absurd and equally a-cosmic. One says that there isalways already an underlying true time and space—something in theorder of Newtonian absolute space and time—for timing and spacing totake place in. The other says that something is going on that is going onnowhere and at no time, because it is a precondition for space and time.So that timing would be either superfluous or impossible.

This formal dilemma is not the interesting part; what is interesting ishow the dilemma misses the kind of timing and spacing we are interestedin here. What is naive in the question is the assumption that time is oneunambiguous structure, that it comes complete with all the classicalmoments of before–after relations, passage, durations, simultaneity, etc.So, if we are to answer the naive question in a way that respects theexploration of concrete spacing and timing activities, we will have to saythat timing and spacing are activities proceeding gradually and partially,so that there can be a more vaguely determined space and time for themto proceed from, and that times and spaces can become more sharplydeterminate through them. There are ongoings and rhythms, alreadymore or less temporal, for any clock to receive and digest, and noparticular timing produces time so complete and unambiguous thatfurther timing of it—calibrations, adjustments—is unnecessary.

It is tremendously important that we can begin to see the cosmosparticipating, lending a hand so to speak, in the work of timing itself.When science and technology studies begin to focus on nonhumans,inscriptions, material agencies, organisms and artefacts—and not justsubjects and societies—this helps overcome a blind spot, the cosmo-


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logical spot, in modern philosophy of time. It is probably not mainly ornot at all for the sake of the philosophy of time or us philosophers thatthese studies do so—but they do open a field of sensibilities and met-aphors from which we can begin to reconstruct temporality, a middleworld between the absurd extremes of absolute, unconstructed time (thetime of Newton) and purely subjective, constructed time (the time ofKant—so perfectly congruent with that of Newton because it just turns itupside down).

Another essential building material for such a reconstruction, this timefrom within philosophy, is the development of an explicit metaphysicalconcept of process. A slowly emerging side stream of the philosophicaltradition, notably Hegel, Bergson, Deleuze and particularly Whitehead,has been working systematically towards replacing the traditional meta-physical framework of time and substance with one of process. In acatchword-like phrase, whereas we used to think that we must dichoto-mize everything into changeless pure content (substance) and contentlesspure change (time) in order to speak of things with logical clarity andconsistency, we are now discovering that it is also possible to navigate inan impure, non-dichotomized world, even without renouncing system-atic language and understanding. This does not mean that talk of timeand substance should from now on be regarded as philosophicallysuspect or logically unsound, of course, but it means that they should notnecessarily be taken as primitives; they can also be taken seriously asvery important achievements. There is no space and time here foranything like an adequate account of Whitehead’s process metaphysics,but I would like to stress one central aspect. In a world of processes,Whitehead says, there is a very general class of dynamic (‘genetic’)relations and, within it, a more specialized group or possibly severalspecialized groups of ‘morphological’ or ‘extensive’ relations. Dynamicrelations have to do with the way processes take in their environment (allmade of input from other processes, of course), take shape from it, digestit and pass on input for further processes. Dynamic relations also connectvery strongly with the dynamic inner characteristics of the processesthemselves, which have irreducible moments of becoming, striving andcreativity.

This overall picture of processuality is relevant to the business oftiming and spacing in two important ways. First, it supports and general-izes the idea that agency is not restricted to the species or society ofhumans: if Whitehead is right, agency is absolutely all over the place,although of course to degrees that can be astronomically different (asmost of us can probably confirm just by observing our own vastly variabledegrees of enthusiasm and laziness . . .). Secondly, it shows timing andspacing as very deeply connected with other businesses, to the extentthat what makes something an act of timing and spacing is not someinherent quality (such as an inherent clock or measuring rod) but the waythat certain aspects of its dynamic relations fit into a pattern of relations


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that collectively satisfy some simple formal requirements. Whiteheadtook great pains in developing mathematical models of the ways suchformal structures can arise or be cultivated in a world of processes thatdoes not come with any pre-existing clocks, rods or systems of repetition(Whitehead, [1929] 1979).

Whitehead’s process metaphysics makes it possible to answer ourembarrassing question: timing and spacing are certain kinds of organiz-ing features of groups of processes, whereby they organize an environ-ment that is already partly and multiply organized by its constituentprocesses. The more or less unanimous traits of organization that arealready around offer a way—often many ways—in which a where andwhen of the organizing activity can be pointed out, re-found, coordinatedwith others: the Roman empire, the clockwork, the landscape of trailsand landmarks, the physical states characterizing the epochs of the first‘minutes’ of the Big Bang. As a result of a timing and/or spacing activity,the corresponding kind of extensive relation becomes available, super-imposing, sometimes enhancing and sometimes blurring or destroying,patterns of organization that were already there, some of them alreadypossessing the minimal formal characteristics of the extensive. Timingand spacing, thus, are not in an untimed and unspaced world, nor dothey merely reflect extensive orders that were already unanimous andcomplete.

I end this second movement by mentioning a couple of other con-sequences that would follow from such a view of timing and spacing asprocesses going on in a thoroughly processual cosmos that lends support,on the one hand, to this kind of controlling and coordinating activity, butthat is also full of dynamic relations, which do not necessarily corre-spond to sharply defined points or sections of the resulting space andtime.

The contrast of technical time and lived time has been stressed byBergson and other aesthetically inspired critics of the modern, dis-engaged, controlling attitude towards life and nature (Bergson, 1946). Theprocess view allows us to affirm that there are dynamic streams in life—in anything, really—that will only vaguely and partially fit into schemesof extension. The kinds of process that would offer the toughest resist-ance to extensive analyses would be those of greatest complexity andcreativity, in short, those that have most agency. However, this would bea question of degree: there would always be something, much or little,that could be captured. And something else, much or little, that couldnot. Bergson’s favourite example is the ongoing, connected process of anentire human life, which is said to be available to conscious experienceonly in near-death experiences. I would like to mention the smaller butstill significant example of children learning, a process that escapescapture by sequences of singular questions, answers, etc., but is veryavailable in a mode of participation. What the process view allows us toadd is that the sequencing, controlling mode can in fact not suppress the


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participatory mode; it lives in and by it, adding another strange greycolour to the colourful life rather than reducing everything else to grey—apoint beautifully made in Latour (1997).

The process view allows us to take this even one step further. Relationsof dominance are not static; they are themselves in process. Inescapablyand insensibly, by controlling and sequencing things we modify who thesubject is. In Deleuze’s strong words, we become fantastic machines andanimals (Deleuze, [1968] 1994). Again, this does not at all have to betaken in the reductive, critical sense that we lose our true or original life.In fact, technical mediations are also the most intimate, hands-on, direct,digesting participations in the cosmos. Therefore they are our chance ofnew, more direct and complete understandings of cosmic processuality, ifwe can learn to take them this way. I believe the process philosophies ofWhitehead, Deleuze, Hegel and others provide wonderful interpretativekeys to make visible the way that bodily involvements, multiple mean-ings and distributed subjectivities emerge in the middle of technicalprojects that are, on the face of it or in their own self-understanding, allabout predictability and controllability by a fixed, immutable subject.

In drawing a few points from the more or less established school ofprocess philosophy I hope it comes through that my business here is notto impose any particular results or rules upon the study of timing andspacing from platforms within philosophy. There is at least as muchlearning to do the other way, from such studies and for philosophy. Theschools of philosophy in general are very much an expression of theaging a-cosmic modern spirit, and I think it is significant that philosoph-ical developments of concepts of process metaphysics have been mostlyinformed by new problems different from those pursued within thetraditions of philosophy—problems of biology, mathematics and physicsin Whitehead’s case. There are many other movements in the loss ofcosmological innocence to be enjoyed elsewhere.

Note1 This paper could have pursued a more familiar cluster of discussions about

constructions of time and space, namely of their fascinating formal properties,starting out, for example, with the perfect spheres of the Timaios rather thanthe hemisphere of the Pantheon, and followed the trail of Zeno’s paradoxesand Aristotle’s aporias. This would have been a discussion of the pure formalstructure as such. Here we pursue, instead, the issue of constructedness andits involvement with power, legitimacy and organization of practices. Else-where I have discussed the interaction of these two levels of the constructionof time and space (Hansen, 2000).

ReferencesAugustine ([397] 1991) Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J. (1986) The Anthropic Cosmological Princi-

ple. Oxford: Clarendon.


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Bergson, Henri (1946) The Creative Mind—An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans.M. L. Andison. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. First published as La Pensee etle mouvant, 1941.

Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York:Columbia University Press. First published as Difference et repetition, 1968.

Hansen, Niels V. (2000) ‘Time, Change and Construction’, unpublished PhDthesis; available at www.nielsviggo.net/work/phd.

Hegel, Georg W. F. ([1807] 1999) Phanomenologie des Geistes, Suhrkamp col-lected works, vol. 3. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main.

Heidegger, Martin ([1927] 1993) Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer.Latour, Bruno (1997) ‘Trains of Thoughts: Piaget, Formalism and the Fifth

Dimension’, Common Knowledge 6: 170–91.Whitehead, Alfred N. ([1929] 1979) Process and Reality. New York: Free Press.

Niels Viggo Hansen. Department of Philosophy, University of Aarhus, Denmark, andMinistry of Health, Knowledge and Research Center for Alternative Medicine.Address: VIFAB, Jensbaggesensvej 90K, DK-8200, Aarhus, Denmark. [email:[email protected]]


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Where do spacing and timing happen? Two movements in the loss of cosmological innocence

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