non-quantitative

.

I love you”

I suppose that scientists would find something to measure-in my brain, my heart, my bloodstream, on my skin-when I say

I love you”

And based on their measurements they would conclude

Yes, you love. And we may objectively say you love this much.”

Several fields of science base their observations and experiments on measuring. Measuring has become the upmost celebrated and objective mode for the progress of humankind. Yet, it presupposes quantity. Considering measuring as a technology that humans deploy to relate to the world, collect data and solve problems, this technology renders any human and non-human body and any relation to the world measurable. It turns everything into quantitative entities that can be subdivided or added up according to a standard unit of measurement.

“We humans didn’t always keep precise, objectively measured time” (Clark, 2003, 40). This single sentence shows that measuring relates to precision and it entails objectivity. Calendars and their use evolved alongside clocks.

One story goes like this:

We perceive earth’s rotation around the sun as the flow of time. We precisely measure it and subdivide it into equal units according to a standard measuring system of minutes and hours. We accurately depict earth’s movement by devicing (sic) a calendar. This planning-machine tracks time and properly coordinates human action. The machine is unquestionable because it is based on accurate measurements of an existing phenomenon. It is objective because it is unquestionable (Latour, 2014, 2). Hence, there is no reason why all social individuals would not and could not use calendars.

.

Another story goes thus:

Each year a tiny portion of this rotation cannot be accounted for within the standard measuring system. To correct this flaw, a leap year adds one day to the regular 365-days calendar for every four rotations of the earth. The discrepancy occurs when trying to fit a celestial orbit into a deviced measuring system of minutes, hours, days. Which shows that a single mechanism, a single measuring system, cannot be applied to the multiplicity of worldly entities: bodies, orbits, sensations, relations. And I suspect that objectivity, which derives from precise measuring, means nothing more than standardization.

.

.

.

Measuring time has been invented and it is in use. The attitude of Western societies that accurate measuring is objective, and the omnipresent clocks and calendars render the fact that they are deviced technologies almost invisible. And because of that they often resist control of the user. They overshadow my firm belief that there is something other to time than measuring it.

Let us imagine that

time is like love

human beings insist on defining it

on devicing ways to measure it

and manifest its quantity

although love is a non-quantitative entity.

.

.

I do not know if you have been loved excessively, if you have been stuffed with love in your life. Perhaps. But this much I know […] that no one (no woman!) has ever thus… THUS is for me neither a measure of weight nor of quantity […]”

(Tsvetaeva, cited in Sidiropoulou, 2014)

.

In this excerpt of Marina Tsvetaeva’s (Russian poet) correspondence with Pasternak and Rilke, “thus” is the answer to how one loves, not to how much one loves. Similarly, French philosopher Henry Bergson starts his Time and Free Will by pointing out that common sense attributes magnitude to subjective facts, which are actually related to intensity (Bergson, 1950, 1-4). By saying “I love you more than or less than”, I use more and less, which refer to magnitude, to describe the intensity of a subjective feeling. Likewise, Bergson continues, time is falsely viewed as quantity. Instead, he presents time as duration, the succession of interweaving qualitative states of consciousness (Bergson, 1950, 75-139).

Time is like love

there is a how in love

there is a how in time

there is something other to time than quantity.

There is a how in time

how we share time with other human and non-human bodies

how we coexist.

How refers to experience of time

How humans practically dialogue with manifestations of temporality in everyday life

How implies agency of the user.

.

.

.