Notes: Alessandro Arienzo, Introduction and Time out of joint

p. 29-30

Aristotle: time and change are defined by each other. They are not identical. …in order to measure time it is necessary to have a unit of measure and this unit can only be found= in the uniform, perfect, and circular motion of stars and celestial bodies. The perception of before and after, thus of number in motion, necessarily presupposes the soul: the soul
is the spiritual counting principle and the precondition itself of a distinction
between things measured and the measure, thus, of time:

Augustine of Hippo…

p. 31

Medieval and early modern age: for a long time common people would continue to experience time as circular, representing the endless natural motion of beings, flowing up to the eschatological end of earthly corruption with the call of the world to the infinite
presence of God. Time was thus experienced as the natural flow of things in its
contrast with the stable eternity of God. In this respect, it joined the external
features of movement and measure and the internal motion of the soul.

Early modern age: many reasons time started to acquire not only a linear and quantitative description but also
a progressive overtone. Representative of these changes is the meaning of the word
“revolution” that from the circular motion of orbs came to describe a sudden rupture
in a political order.

Reinhardt Koselleck has interpreted this massive change as a change in temporalization, which is to say that the experience of a specifically “modern” time is,
in reality, the experience of a plurality of “times”.

In western modern, culture, what he
calls the “space of experience,” has become ever more distant from the “horizon of
expectation.” Experience has become less and less relevant to foretelling the future
for it is deemed impossible to extend one’s knowledge of the past into an expectation of what is to come. Historical developments on the scale of the French and
Industrial Revolutions destroyed what had been an age-old confidence that the
future could be known on the basis of the past. The acceleration of time and its
opening up to an uncertain but progressive future is therefore the main feature of
modernity.

p.32

Henry Bergson
distinguished between time experienced (real duration, i.e., durée réelle) and the
time of science. The latter is based on the imposition of spatial concepts onto time,
leading to a perception of time as a succession of separate, discrete, spatial constructs. His major work, Matter and Memory (1896), was an essay on the relation
between mind and body wherein he argues that it is only in the memory that the
reality of mind and the reality of matter converge. According to Bergson, the linear
duration of time is a fiction for there is no single temporality but many different
rhythms in time which, slower or faster, relax or thicken our consciousness of time.

John McTaggart: The Unreality of Time (1908). He distinguished two different approaches to time.

A theory:

• an image of time as a temporal line moving from the past toward the present to the future.
  *temporal properties are not permanent as time is expressed by a continuous condition of motion of instants.
• B theory is based on a fundamental difference between “being earlier than something” and “being later than something” and he named it the B theory. In this case temporal properties are stable as they can
  be summed up in the two notions of “earlier than” and “later than”.
• McTaggart’s aim was to show the unreality of time while describing the paradoxes involved in those two conceptions of time.
• three positions that can be named presentism, eternalism, and growing-past theory. *presentists time is always a present experience even when we experience memories or future.
  *growing-past theories attribute reality only to past and present while future, in its
  indeterminacy, has only a potential nature. *eternalists do not attribute any
  specific difference to present, past, and future time as the only difference in their
  experience is in the subject.

Time Out of Joint: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Time and Capitalism

p. 95 ???