Time, Ethics, Intelligence

8/4/2019 Time, Ethics, Intelligence

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Time, Ethics, IntelligenceEd Keller : Columbia GSAPP Summer evening lecture 2003


My grandmother used to leave me cautionary notes when she was still alive. Two that I savedwere about time:

Always Remember: One step at the time.Time: there is little enough of it, and none to waste.

Ethics is about how to act towards other beings and things. Intelligence is what hopefullygoverns those actions. Time is what it all takes place in. My grandmothers advice was aboutthese things. Id like to extend it to suggest that there is a possible relationship between a veryspecial breed of time- complex time- and an evolutionary ethics. Ill try to establish what I meanby complex temporal structures, ethics, and all this in relationship to architecture, cinema, andeveryday life.

At its heart, this is a manifesto. I've been driven to search for evidence and the effects of what Iam terming 'timefolds', complex time forms, chronomorphologies, and all my diciplinaryperegrinations have orbited somehow around this attractor. My intuition has been that onecould find very definable techniques that would produce in bodies a greater propensity forawareness: since this text/manifesto is a platform I am creating for future work- my own aswell as others', I will risk it and even say- a greater propensity for kindness and growthindividually and as a culture.


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This position has beenexhaustively rehearsed by manywriters, artists, filmmakers, andarchitects- the most influential onmy thinking includingAlmodovar,Tarkovsky, Marker,Wong Kar Wai, Tschumi, Deleuze,Serres, and Bakhtin. I hope toshow examples that demonstratethe presence of folded time andthe value of such a time: atemporal site where a readiness forperceptual evolution has beencreated.

Richard Baily image

Architecture is a cultural manifestation that physically externalizes certain aspects of such a

memory structure, while still depending on virtual aspects of the memory to activate [ toprogram, if you will] the form itself. More recently, historically speaking, externalizations andcrystallizations of language , cinema, broadcast media and the internet have allowed muchfaster regimes to operate.

I will argue that in fact there are unique chronomorphologies that exist within each of thesesubstrates- or more accurately, which are produced by these systems.

Indeed, these chronomorphologies can only be understood as systems of awareness andintelligence. Awareness in that they respond to outside stimuli; intelligent, in that they becomeaware of their response, and self regulate.

Implicit in the ideas of thinkers like Deleuze is the concept that linked to such a range ofchronomorpologies are a range of ethics as well as simply forms.

This emergent ethics- this ethology- can be measured according to the kinds of nuancedawareness that are encouraged when each system or form encounters another.

Proust: The Soul

There are some passages from the openingpages of Proust's In Search of Lost Time

which recently stunned me. I could not helpthinking of Raul Ruiz' amazing film TimeRegained, which cinematicallyinstrumentalizes some of the collapses of timethat Proust experienced and recorded in hisnovel.


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'When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him thechain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the orderof the heavenly bodies. Instinctively he consults themwhen he awakes, and in an instant reads off his ownposition on the earth's surface and the time that haselapsed during his slumbers; but this orderedprocession is apt to grow confused, and to break itsranks...Perhaps the immobility of the things thatsurround us is forced upon them by our conviction thatthey are themselves and not anything else, by theimmobility of our conception of them. For it alwayshappenedthat when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in anunsuccessful attempt to discover where I was,everything revolved around me through the darkness:things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleepto move, would endeavor to construe from the pattern ofits tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to

deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the locationof the furniture, to piece together and give a name to thehouse in which it lay...Then the memory of a newposition would spring up, and the wall would slide awayin another direction...

I have edited much of the minute detail out ofthis passage to get at the minimal core, which Ifind moving for two reasons. The first being itsaccuracy in depicting the fluidity of perception,identity and memory; the second beingProusts vision that somehow, many layeringsof time could superimpose with each other inan ineffable yet completely real coexistence.What could be the mechanism for thiscoexistence? what would be theconsequences of our ascending into it, or itsdescent into us, such that more and morememories live within us?

How could we sort these memories and give them meaning? What could we do if we hadaccess to a range that we normally do not? Can we accept the thesis that living bodies, or thesubstance of the earth, the sea, the sky, the sun- are actually diverse bundles of time? And

then, what can we do with that idea?

Proust is showing us from the anthropocentric point of view that there are indeed certainoverlaps of time which take place... and that there are ways of constructing a section throughthose overlaps which would be valuable. Thus, the idea is not just choosing the most valuablebundles of time and memory to preserve: but the construction of the most vital method orprocedure for this storage and analysis.


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Built into the process for Proust is a gentle oscillation between the erasure of identity within apowerful subjective memory, and a more awake state in which one senses that one isremembering. The awareness of awareness. It is a valuation of the act of remembering asmuch as the individual memory itself. This mechanism might be one byproduct of the kind ofcomplex time that Proust provides us as evidence.

Raul Ruiz, Time Regained

Apropos of this, a passage of great interest in Deleuzes Cinema One is the brief subchapter,'towards a gaseous perception'. Delueze describes three categories of perception- static,liquid and gaseous. He classifies the gaseous as an evolutionary end state produced bycertain filmic techniques:

What montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry perception into things, to put perception into matter, so thatany point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far theseactions and reactions extend.'

This clearly implies that an alternative subject could emerge from montage. He goes on toarticulate certain kinds of montage which will align themselves more readily with the production

of such an alternative subject; and concludes by ascribing an ethical program to the gaseousperception:'... if the cinema goes beyond perception, it is in the sense that it reaches to the genetic element of all possibleperception, that is, the point which changes, and which makes perception change, the differential of perceptionitself......This is the programme of the third state of the image, the gaseous image, beyond the solid and the liquid:to reach 'another' perception, which is also the genetic element of all perception...a determination which is nolonger formal or material, but genetic and differential. We have moved from a real to a genetic definition ofperception.


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This range of cinematic devices has parallels ineveryday life, and in lived space. If we acceptthat spatial and programmatic devices producesdefinable kinds of perception, and that thesemodes of perception work with the computationand intelligence, then it might well be possiblethat certain kinds of time align themselves morewith freedom than others.Koudelka photographs


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Paul Ryan Relational Circuit concept image

TIMES TopologyWhen I speak of chronomorphologies, I'm discussing a wide range of temporalcategories and substrates: the different registers in which time is inscribed;

externalized time or internalized time; Subjective time: human time, perception tied to emotion,and to action; Macroscopic and Microscopic time; General time or local time; measured time,Chronos, and unmeasured time, Aion [Derrida's Lavenir, Negri's 'to-come']

Not only are there manifold registers within which time is inscribed- but this inscription takes ona form. It would be better to try to evaluate that form from a topological point of view.

Stephen Barr in his 1964 book Experiments in Topology said thattopology is curiously hard to define... (it) started as a kind of geometry but it hasreached into many other mathematical fields." "In one sense it is the study of continuity: beginning with thecontinuity of space, or shapes, it generalizes and then by analogy leads into other kinds of continuity- and spaceas we usually understand it is left far behind.... A topologist is interested in those properties of a thing that while

they are in a sense geometrical are the most permanent- the ones that will survive distortion and stretching.


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Sagrada Familia, Doug Diaz photograph

As defined by Barr [op. cit.], topology is a science and philosophy useful to identify theboundaries and continuities in the world. To mark where, for example, bodies end and otherbodies begin. In this sense, the complex forms produced by topological investigation are most

useful when understood as abstract systems that find a manifestation at many scales in thematerial world. They are DIAGRAMS that precede any technological solutions, and exist asimmanent relationships that constantly seek 'form' to realize the pure potential they attempt toembody.

There is a neoplatonic component to the topological relationships : by assigning materialbehaviors, proclivities and tendencies to the 'diagram,' the investigation progresses accordingto the inconsistencies that matter itself introduces into the equation. Not a compromised andcorrupt matter, as some strains of Gnostic thought would see the 'form' bound by; but atranscendent matter, the very delays of which impart a new vitalism to each instance of the'diagram'. These delays are similar in property to what M. Serres calls bundles of time, timematerialized, congealed, imbricated in matter... I quote at length from Serres The Origin ofLanguage: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics:

..the organism is a barrier of braided links that leaks like a wicker basketbut can still function as a dam. Better yet, it is the quasistable turbulence that a flow produces, the eddyclosed upon itself for an instant, which finds its balance in the middle of the current and appears to moveupstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed elsewhere. And experience shows that there is noflux without eddy, no laminar flow which does not become turbulent.(5) Now, and here is the crux of thematter, all times converge in this temporary knot: the drift of entropy or the irreversible thermal flow, wear andaging, the exhaustion of initial redundancy, time which turns back on feedback rings or the quasi-stability of


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eddies, the conservative invariance of genetic nuclei, the permanence of a form, the erratic blinking ofaleatory mutations, the implacable filtering out of all non-viable elements, the local flow upsteam towardnegentropic islands-refuse, recycling, memory, increase in complexities. The living organism, ontogenesisand phylogenesis combined, is of all times. This does not at all mean that it is eternal, but rather that it is anoriginal complex, woven out of all the different times that our intellect subjects to analysis or that our habitsdistinguish or that our spatial environment tolerates. ...All the temporal vectors possessing a directional arroware here, in this place, arranged in the shape of a star. What is an organism? A sheaf of times. What is aliving system? A bouquet of times.

It is indeed surprising that this solution has not been reached more quickly. Perhaps it seemed difficult to intuita multitemporality. We willingly accept, however, the fact that the things around us do not all share the sametemporality: negentropic islands on or in the entropic sea, or distinct universes as Boltzmann described them,pockets of local orders in rising entropy, crystal depositories sunk in ashes-none of these things disturbs us.In a completely new sense, the organism is synchronous for meanings and directions, for the continuous anddiscontinuous, for the local and the global; it combines memory, invariance, plan, message, loss, redundancy,and so forth. ... The organism is fixed on top of a temporal converter -no, it is a converter of time. This isperhaps why it is able to learn about systems differentiated by their individual time..

Here perhaps we find one of the key themes to extract from Serres. An organism can functionas a leaky dam for time- in fact for multiple times, each directed along differing channels offlow. Time flows through words, through space and matter, through thought. Thus our taskwould be to understand how the dam functions to trap certain flows of time- which couldmaterialize in behaviors, or images in the world, or space- and to then through manipulation ofthese leaky dams, change the flow- create a clinamen- alter the homeorrheses in the system.the chreods. The stabilities.

'Everything transpires as if the central problem of information theory was resolved, automatically, by livingorganisms. They can be described as apparatuses which produce language from noise and information.... Ifthe integration levels function correctly as partial rectifiers and transform the noise of disorder into potentialorganization, then they have reversed the arrow of time. They are rectifiers of time. Entropic irreversibility alsochanges direction and sign; negentropy goes back upstream. We have discovered the place, the operation,and the theorem where and with which the knots of the bouquet are tied. It is here and in this manner thattime flows back and can change direction. Due to the numerous reversals of the temporal vector, the

fluctuating homeorrhesis acquires a fleeting stability. For a moment the temporal sheaf makes a full circle. Itforms a turbulence where opposing times converge. Organization per se, as system and homeorrhesis,functions precisely as a converter of time. We now know how to describe this converter, as well as its levelsand meanderings, from whence come anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable.

COMPUTATION

Following this discussion of time, computation can be redefined as the processing ofinformation and energy, such that those flows can be chained to external systems, some ofwhich are reversible, others irreversible. It is the processing of signal and message.Computation is what happens when you feed energy or information into a system, and thenextract a result. Meaning emerges when that result is plugged into another computationalchain.


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Andromeda Strain Stills

One of the implications for us here is that increased complexity within organisms or complexsocial and material systems adds information back into the overall world system. In the mixingof simple time structures with more complex time structures, information is added. A variety ofpeople have argued that the living system is uniquely suited to reverse the effects of entropyand add information back into the loop.

NIN concert footage

To quote Piero Scaruffi:

Entropy is a measure of disorder and it can only increase, according to the second law ofThermodynamics. Information moves in the opposite direction.

Most things in this universe, if left alone, simply decay and disintegrate. Biological systems, instead, appearfrom nowhere, then organize themselves, then even grow-


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This leads to the "two arrows of time": the behavior of physical systems pointing towards entropy increaseand therefore disorder increases, and the behavior of biological systems pointing the other way by buildingincreasingly complex structures of order.

The Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger, one of the founders of Quantum Mechanics, first proposed theidea that biological organization is created and maintained at the expense of thermodynamic order. Lifedisplays two fundamental processes: creating order from order (the progeny has the same order as the

parent) and creating order from disorder (asevery living system does at every metabolicstep, eating and growing). Living systems seemto defy the second law of Thermodynamics. Inreality, they live in a world of energy flux thatdoes not conform to the closed-worldassumptions of Thermodynamics. An organismstays alive in its highly organized state byabsorbing energy from the environment andprocessing it to produce a lower entropy statewithin itself. "Living organisms feed uponnegative entropy": they attract "negativeentropy" in order to compensate for the entropy

increase they create by living. Life is"negentropic". The existence of a livingorganism depends on increasing the entropy of therest of the universe.

In 1974 the biologist (and Nobel prize winner) AlbertSzent-Gyorgyi proposed to replace "negentropy" bythe positive term "syntropy", to represent the "innatedrive in living matter to perfect itself".

I would argue that more contemporary views ofnon living matter can find the equivalentcomplexity and negentropic events that previous

thinkers have ascribed to living systems.

In our current rapidly evolving technologicalframework, it is obvious why computation is an avenue for this idea of negative entropy: PCs,new ways of working, communicating: wireless and internet networks, the crowd and powerrelationships that cities historically established and modulated now reinvigorated by a newmoblity and a new intelligence.

Contemporary research and theory surrounding genetics and quantum physics indicates moreand more that life has already been a complex computational engine for millions of years- forexample, cutting edge theory suggests that our own perception, memory and cognition reside

not only in the neural pathways and firings, but in the quantum field effects taking place withinindividual neurons and between neurons. In fact, this thinking suggests that what we call lifeis actually an emergent tendency of inert matter: chemical interactions, electromagnetic fields,atomic bonds. Architecture and urbanism could be seen as a low resolution version of thiscomplex system structure. I would argue that they are complex enough to play a part in thenegentropic process- the syntropic process- and are growing ever more capable andintelligent.


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INTELLIGENCEI use the term intelligence here in a more machinic sense, as the processing of information andenergy, and not anthropomorphic intelligence. Consider the intelligence demonstrated by agene pool during its survival over generations, or the intelligence of a cultural structure likerock and roll. intelligence is useful as a concept only when connected to what a body, what asubject, what a population can do, and how aware that body is of its actions.

ETHICS

BODIES in action images

As has been rehearsed by Deleuze in his writing on Spinoza, trying to understand what anybody can do gives us a starting point for how it can affect other bodies, and be affected itself.

This concept of intelligence is also a good definition of an ethical system based on emergentproperties, rethinking the entire concept of ethics as an in progress and evolutionary system.If we do that, and then ground this dynamic ethic as best we can in notions of individual andgroup well being, we might be able to slowly move toward a new definition of freedom, onewhich would be based on choice, power to act, and intelligence. This is why I groupIntelligence, ethics and power together. intelligence is the modulation, the self recognition ofone's power in the world: and ethics is the regulation of one's power to affect or be affected.

We seek forms which allow preexisting 'clusters' of social structure to migrate, for example,into a new site, and remain coherent [topology is useful here again]. Or, contrariwise, to


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discover what extremes of boundary change would establish a definitive rupture in theeconomic or political relationship that a particular architecture or urbanism is evidence of. Thecollapse of boundaries, their transgression through commutation, implies a TRANSLATION ofinformation, and possibly loss or increase of information.

Topology is concerned with how stable a system can be as it undergoes transformations- howmuch of its identity it can retain. A systems identity is based on how much it can remember- orhow much it can maintain a coherency over time. The ability of a system to span time is onemeasure of its ethical capacity.

The connections between unpredictable economies, social relations, and global systems wecan hardly comprehend speaks of the need to INVENT new ways to research theserelationships- to see them, to test them, and finally to propose the value in them.Can we think of an ethical action in the city today, which supports both the absolute inviolabilityof the individual identity, yet places that identity in the web of collective intelligence?

POWERPower in its simple form is the ability to exert force out into the world, changing configurations.

But POWER in its Foucauldian sense is not something that a single body with a will organizes-it is more a range of possible actions and outcomes that seek a technical, a physical outlet tobecome real in the world. This does not necessarily mean that power always resides inphysical systems, and in fact it could be better understood as a balance between virtualsystems and material ones. Nonetheless, power is something that organizes bodies. How wechoose to engage it is a key ethical question.

ARCHE-CINEURBANISMS

Superstudio image


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That gives us a generalized introduction to the network I'd like to draw between time in all itsforms, intelligence, and ethics. A few weeks ago I gave a brief talk about the work we aredoing in our office, developing an online computer game with film, comic, and urbanintervention components; Im not going to talk about that tonight as the examples I will go overhave more to do with a broad stroke definition of the complex temporal structure.

One of the questions that remains is this : How do we get FROM TIME INTO SPACE?

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

PARSIFAL: " I move only a little, yet already I seem to have gone far."GURNEMANZ: " You see, my son, here time turns into space."

The whole landscape becomes indistinct. A forest ebbs out and a wall of rough rock ebbs in, through whichcan be seens a gateway. The two men pass through the gateway. What happened to the forest? The twomen did not really move, they did not go anywhere, and yet they are not now where they originally were.'Here time turns into space.

from VALIS, PK Dick

Decerteau images

Michel Decerteau's idea of ethical time in his text The practice of everyday life is illustrative ofthis. The cycle from matter to time, back to matter, is one that takes place every moment, oncountless levels of reality. As systems meet each other, exchange information and energy, andprocess these exchanges to form temporary or lasting alliances and new structures.

DeCerteau, of course, is concerned with a specific branch of these new systems- he'sinterested in systems that process time such that an emancipatory structure will emerge inhumans- in individuals and societies. This idea of locating the points of escape- theopportunities for a person caught in a preexisting set of relationships to become aware of their

bounds and to pass thru them- is implicated in the topological idea of time that I have beendeveloping.


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All about my Mother image to Start

Let's consider the film All About My Mother by Almodovar.The film tells the story of Manuela, a mother in her early 40s who has a stable life in Madridwith her teenage son Esteban, the happy result of a turbulent relationship some years earlier in

Barcelona. In the beginning of the film we see them together in their relationship in Madrid,and we then see his sudden and tragic death. The story plays out her return to Barcelona torecover the lost time of her life there with her late sons father. She is reunited with some of thepeople that she knew, as well as meeting an entirely new range of characters who begin torecapitulate both the earlier stages of her life, when she was an amateur actress, and alsoseveral other stories which had, as she put it, marked her life.

Allabout Eve images


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The structure of this film is amazing as it overlaps Mankiewiecz' film All About Eve [which is onits own a nesting of time systems and stories cascading thru each other] with the play ' AStreetcar Named Desire'- extracting core themes, character traits, and events from bothsource texts and redeploying them in new locales and situations. Manuela herself acted as ayounger woman in Streetcar, where she met Estebans father; on the night of her sons death,they see the same play together; and later in the story Manuela joins the theatre group andacts once again in Streetcar.

However, it goes much beyond that. In All About Eve, the main character Eve is drawn as afairly one dimensional creature- fascinating in her compulsions, but limited in scope. On theother hand, in All About my Mother, the main character Manuela is nuanced in herexperiences, and her desires and responses to her situation.

Although on the surface she seems to 'imitate' Eve's path of initiation into the life of the theatre-she has a radically different set of motivations and responses to her new location.Manuela is a more COMPLEX individual, perhaps because she's internalized moreDURATION than, by comparison, EVE.Her reactions to her situation are more embedded with not only raw time- but with certain kinds

of moral choices and responsibilities that this time allows her to be aware of.

It's possible to follow Manuela's experience of time through this film and see how her decisionsand memories are constantly folding the present and the past into each other- and how thecircumstances of the situation are embedding the layers of reality in the characters' lives into apreexisitng structure found in All About Eve and Streetcar named Desire... these preexistingstructures operate as archetypal stories, as well as codings of power relationships which beginto enforce DESTINY and FATE.

All About my Mother sequence

As one example- the link between the moment just before her son's death in Madrid, to amoment just as she is entering a theater in Barcelona some months later; in the first moment,her son secretly observes her as she is waiting for him; in the second moment we seeManuela looking from the entry to this second theatre, seeing in her memory her son lookingat her; clearly she knows that he had been watching her several months before- just beforehis death- but she could only know this in retrospect, perhaps by reading his handwritten

journal.


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This loop is tied to her decision to go see the play again. But it's more complex than just that.She sees the play again and understands it more clearly, because she herself played Stellawhen she was a young amateur actress. Her memory loop is embedded in a previousexperience where she met her husband, the father of her young son, who dies.

How does repetition begin to work with this sequence? Almodovar sketches out a very specialkind of repetition in this film. It is a repetition which suggests that only thru the actual repetitionof lived experience being placed against a kind of TEST repetition- the repetition ofstorytelling, over and over again- can a person reach the level of awareness and calm thatManuela has reached. How can she even survive after having gone thru what she has gonethru? Because she's rehearsed these moments in several layers of reality: in the direct, real,physical reality of her own experience- already modulated by the narrative of Streetcar- thenin the acting of the play itself when she was in her 20s- then in the realization of some of thethemes of abandonment from the play as she herself flees her life in Barcelona for a new onewith her son in Madrid- then 17 years later as she sees the play again- then two months lateras she sees the play again, with yet a new set of eyes-then as she embodies the life of EVE, in her own life- to the point where Huma's lover even

mentions that Manuela is playing the part of EVE to steal her role-and finally her own confession, which places her in a unique and much more aware place thanEVE could possibly be at the end of All About Eve.

Because Manuela has lived through so MANY MORE cycles in the time space loop thatdeCerteau presents us with- and because each of these cycles has depended on a set oflayers- some real, some fictional, some present and some only in memory- she's developed amoral and ethical awareness- and a capacity to act- which EVE is simply incapable of.Although ALL ABOUT EVE is a film set in a folded, looping time, the time it encompasses isonly that of the mind of the narrator Addison- whereas the loops that ALL ABOUT MYMOTHER establish arc out into multiple dimensions.


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All About Eve Mirrors

ALL ABOUT EVE does not neglect the evolutionary capacity these time loops provide, ofcourse. Other characters in ALL ABOUT EVE do evolve- Margo, for example.But EVE herself is trapped in a closed loop, like an isolated thermodynamic system, as

impossible to escape as the hall of mirrors her own new understudy looks into at the very endof that film. EVE has not found the channel by which to use memory as an active tool torevision herself.

This moment of revisioning which Manuela accomplishes is what decerteau touches on in hiswork on storytelling and StoryTime, describing the way that an event is actually a lived storywhich has embedded within it multiple layers of reality and of power.


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Labyrinth Topology image

Why does Dionysus need Ariadne or to be loved? He sings a song of loneliness; he cries out for a fiancee.Dionysus is the god of affirmation, but a second affirmation is needed if affirmation itself is to be affirmed. It has tobe divided if it is to redouble. Nietzsche indeed distinguishes the two affirmations when he says: "Eternalaffirmation of being, eternally I am your yes. " Dionysus is the affirmation of being, but Ariadne is the affirmation of

affirmation, the second affirmation or the becoming active. In this way, all of Ariadne's symbols change theirmeaning when they refer to Dionysus rather than being deformed by Theseus. Not only does Ariadne's songcease to be an expression of resentment and become an active search, that already affirms ("Who are you...Is itme, me that you want? All of me?" ), but the labyrinth itself is no longer the labyrinth of knowledge and morals; itis no longer that path taken by he who holds the thread and will kill the bull. The labyrinth has become the whitebull itself, Dionysus the bull: " I am your labyrinth." More precisely, the labyrinth is now Dionysus' ear, thelabyrinthine ear. Ariadne must have ears like those of Dionysus to hear the Dionysian affirmation, but also to sayyes to this affirmation in Dionysus' own ear.

-Deleuze on Nietzsche

So we return to the idea of the structure of time and the dialogues that it can encourage.Time as a topological field exists within matter , which we no longer define as a duality in

relationship to memory, but always folded inseparably into the virtual.Always one inside the other, infinitely.

Proust's vision of a fluid reality is only one example of the way that an individual perceptioncan extend itself into time, and act as a catalyst for us in our own interactions with the world.Almodovar provides another less dreamlike idea of awareness, one based on risk, memory,and love.


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Sun image

And this is why I return to the constitution of the aware body, the individual in time and space.This is why I insist that all these discussions must be grounded in the examples of small,

everyday freedoms judged against the freedom and will of the collective.Architecture and urbanism are nothing if they stop valuing the most transient, dreamlike,intangible waves of emotion, sensation, memory, and culture, if they leave those behind for thevast flows of capital and energy which become ever more distributed globally as invisible laws.

This is yet more true today, as the social structures and collectivities that we haveexperienced for several thousand years in large cities are being revolutionized by newtechnologies which overturn our current experience of memory and social structure.


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Brandenburg gate image

Each voice will have weight, increasingly so.

This is why Negri talks about love in his text Time of Revolution.He argues that it is utterly necessary to experience the collapse of multiple times that love is-and to contextualize that in the direct experience of being the singular, utterly unique, yet in acollective political body, which is utterly diverse. This definition of love is one which can only berealized through practice, through interaction. It is a particular kind of consciousness which hasto be aware of the singular and the collective: a kind of thinking which demands the presenceof multiple times.

I've already argued that there are certain kinds of quite literal time machines that we find in themost banal everyday settings.


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NeoRealist image

These time machines run the gamut from the way we make coffee in the morning, repeatinggestures centuries old, all the way up to the structure of a social economy or use of buildingmaterials in a city. Each time machine is a set of rules for encoding, compressing, storing, and

then decoding the full range of times any object has access to.

To make a very largebuilding, for example,you will need not onlythe technical skill of anarchitect. You will alsoneed to harness greatmasses of energy-melting steel, rolling it,reforming it- as well as

huge reserves of capital,which equates to poweron a social scale. It willbe a battle.Free University

Consider an open planoffice space in a


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structure which has no columns in the space- reflecting one view of efficient office use andprotocols-which protocols will be unfrozen and utilized on a daily basis. But other flows you harnesswill not be unfrozen- the energy in the beams and columns for example, will remain trapped,slow, immanent, barring some catastrophe. The capital will slow to a crawl as it embeds itselfin the work of the construction, in the labor, in the material of the building.

Solar furnace image

Each of these components is atime machine. The office space isfaster, more fluid. The steel in thebuilding locks into place certainrelationships and possible futures.

BAILYimage

There is another story I had wanted to talk about here- Lems novel Solaris, and the twoextraordinary films that have been made as interpretations of it by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh.It is a much longer discussion, though, so I will only pass by this reference, with theobservation that all three versions are deep meditations on the problem of awareness, materialintelligence, and responsibility.* * *


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Love does not fix in place a possible future for a body, at least in its most abstract and liberating sense,or in its most politicized sense. But what it does carry with it in its function as a time machine is thepossibility for intelligence, consciousness, generosity, and the constantly evolving ethic that Deleuze

has called an ethology. This is how the experience of love works as a time machine: it brings the

possibility for a constitution of freedom forward in time and back in time- across all the times that it can

touch. It is a kind of destiny, but one which engenders intelligence and ethology.

Tarkovsky image

Some years ago I wrote several song lyrics while thinking of Tarkovskys film Sacrifice,

Dylan Thomas poems, and Eliots Quartets. Each of those artists had visions of the necessity for

commitment to the present moment, like Antonio Negri- but also open to an indefinable mysticism,which is I believe crucial. The question I extract out of postmodernismss philosophical wanderings is

this: how to sustain the aura of myth, while at the same time insisting on the brute facticity of things, the

complete relativity of values. The answer is contained in the spectra of complex time I have spoken of.

"we turn to light, the green of leavesthe truth of sun on sand and dustand whirled aside a watchmaker's bridesighs her last as the fruit's consumed...what faith could we yet bring tonurse this barkless branch-

that like water, Stone upon the ready steel-would lace through with life, and golden huesand breed a humming sanctuarythe wood rife with driving flamethe darting wing, iridescent noterebirth a myth, for human timeis only NOW."

Ed Keller

August 2003

Time, Ethics, Intelligence

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