Elie During

Notes: Floating time (2013)

Elie During bio: https://egs.edu/biography/elie-during/

During suggests that time is a dynamical and local dimension of concrete processes rather than a universal clock, a universal dimension of becoming in general (the latter refers to Bergsons idea of time). Time is intrinsically tied to what is happening when it is happening.

How are you together in time without any sense of global time?

What is floating time?

It is not time out of joint (shakespearean expression) which is overused lately and has become something like a mantra for the Deleuzeans.

In During’s view time out of joint is too radical and too imprecise.

Floating time is nor unhinged, it is loosened, distented and it allows time (as opposed to duration, becoming, process) to play the role of a framing device allowing for a plurality of local durations to be apprehended together –> time a coordinator

>>> min. 28

In order to loosen the grip of temporal order During suggests we shift the focus from the linear unfolding of linear order, the successive series, toward simultaneity relations.

The term floating time appears in Deleuze (who also has borrowed it from someone Boulez). The term can be found in several passages of Mille Plateux, where Deleuze and Quattari discuss becoming animals. They are interested in a notion of non measured, non pulsated time, which would allow for a plurality of diversely rhythmed durations to be nested within a single but polychronic plain of cinsistency. “A floating time against pulsed time or tempo” quote from Mille Plauteux –> floating music

The point for Deleuze is to come up with an adequate impersonation of “the time of the pure event” or the time of becoming. A time that articulates relative speeds and slownesses independently of the chronometric or the chronological values that time assumes in the other modes.

>>> chronos: the time of measure

>>> aion: a concept developed by the stoics, time that does not allow chronometric ordering (min 31, find a complex definition of aion)

During is not using the term in quite the same way as Deleuze. His issue is not with speeds and slownesses, overthrowing the metron. He is concerned with delay.

Simultaneity has a lot of fans and critiques. In literature it has been employed by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust. It became synonymous with perceptive disorientation –> shattering of experience into loosely hanging fragments (η συνδεση αυτή χωρίς πρόσημο, θετικό, αρνητικό). For them simultaneity above all meant a disruption off temporal order.

We encounter difficult in trying to think a plain of experience that is at once densely connected and full of gaps, discontinuities and intermittents. Durings challenge is to integrate simultaneity and delay, connection and separation, conjunction and disjunction.

>>> min. 57 f.f. Reference to Sartre, who, during war, realizes a gap in time (revisit this) –> maybe close to Derrida’s break in presence.