Timely/Untimely: The Rhythm of Things and the Time of Life

Timely/Untimely: The Rhythm of Things and the Time of Life Felix Ó Murchadha (National University of Ireland, Galway) Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 2018), pp. 178200 This article presents an understanding of time and temporality as adverbial. In normal discourse we speak of time as a condition of action, thought, and events: to intervene in a timely fashion, to live anachronistically or to be before her time. Adverbially understood, time is experienced in terms of an oscillation between the timely and the untimely. Crucial to this is rhythm, and access to time so understood is acoustic rather than visual. We hear time, we do not see it, or if we do see time we do so only through its rhythmic, acoustic, and indeed musical structure. Discussing the Book of Ecclesiastes, philosophers such as Nancy and Lefebvre, as well as music theorists, this article articulates the different rhythms of the timely/untimely. It shows time as a living rhythm between the “energy of beginnings” and mechanicity. Cet article présente une conception du temps comme adverbiale. Dans le discours normal, nous parlons du temps comme condition d'action, de pensée et d'événements: intervenir en temps opportun, vivre anachroniquement ou être avant son temps. Le temps adverbialement conçu est vécu en termes d'oscillation entre le temps opportun et le temps inopportun. Le rythme est crucial pour de telles relations et l'accès au temps ainsi conçu est plutôt acoustique que visuel. Nous entendons le temps, nous ne le voyons pas, ou, si en effet nous voyons le temps, ce n’est que de part sa structure rythmique, acoustique, et même musicale. Cet article énonce les différents rythmes de l’opportun et inopportun en traitant du Livre de l'Ecclésiaste et des philosophes tels que Nancy et Lefebvre ainsi qu’ à des théoriciens de la musique. Il montre le temps comme un rythme vivant entre «l'énergie des débuts» et la mécanicité. Time is both ubiquitous and elusive. The structure of human experience is temporal. Action and thought, entities and places are all temporally constituted, yet we find great difficulty in saying what time is. Thinking time as something, as an object of some sort, or even as a container in which things are, leads us to paradoxes about time. This is not surprising as we live time not as an object or a thing or even as a container, not as anything designated by a noun, but rather as that which is constitutive of an action, an occurrence, a state of being: time as adverb. In normal discourse we speak of time not as a thing, but as a condition of action, thought, and events: to intervene in a timely fashion, to be in time with one another, to live anachronistically or (conversely) in a manner which is prescient, to speak prophetically. Adverbially understood, time is experienced in terms of an oscillation between the timely and the untimely. That is to say, time is experienced primordially as movement and the manner of being in relation to movement. Time understood adverbially is that quality of an action which 2 responds to what is called for with respect to the temporal aspects of past, present, and future. To be timely or untimely is to act or not act toward a situation in a manner which perceives and relates to the situation in terms of how it is appropriate to act now or to delay action for a later time, or to have acted or not in a certain way. In each case the timeliness/untimeliness of the action is a matter of its responsive structure. Furthermore, such a responsivity is sensitive, or should be sensitive, to situations manifesting change. Only a relation to change is timely/untimely and only that which is experienced as changing can be understood as timely/untimely. Crucial to such relations is rhythm, and our access to time so understood is acoustic rather than visual. We hear time, we do not see it, or rather if we do see time, we do so only through that which we see in its rhythmic, acoustic, and indeed musical structure. This article attempts to think time and temporality on the basis of such oscillations of timeliness/untimeliness. As timely/untimely, thought and action intervene in the world not as a quantity, but rather through time as felt—felt as a movement, felt as the rhythm of comingto-be and passing away. Timeliness/untimeliness names the experience of the now as passing and coming-to-be seamlessly, or as exposing that passing and coming-to-be is an issue, a question, needing to be resolved. Timely/untimely is rhythmic in showing the now to be an issue of life, of lifetime, but one which is in constant tension with the tendency toward mechanical iterations. Understood in this way time is always time for…, time of…, time which is timely or not for this and for that, but by the same token time which moves cyclically while reintegrating the interrupting moment continuously into a new cycle of rhythmic motion.1 This article is divided into five sections. The first section begins with an ancient text which thinks time as timely/untimely, namely the Book of Ecclesiastes (I). Following an analysis of this text, the centrality of rhythm in such an understanding of time is identified and the dual tendencies of rhythm toward life and machine are discussed in terms of music and a phenomenology of hearing or listening (II). Section three then discusses the affective nature of such a rhythm of listening, revealing a dialectic of economical timeliness and ecstatic untimeliness which are explored in terms of the figures of prophet, opportunist, and lover (III). I would like to express my appreciation to the audiences at the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy Annual conference (2015) and the “Living in Time” International Graduate Research Conference at University College Dublin (2015) for the lively discussions of this paper. I also benefited very much from the comments of the anonymous reviewers. 1 “Timely” and “untimely” function as both adjectives and adverbs. Although generally used today adjectively, “timely” has the (now archaic or obsolete) adverbial meanings of being in good time or being seasonable, opportune (OED). But even used adjectively, “timely” has the sense of qualifying an action, an event of change. It would not make sense to speak of a timely stone, a timely town, a timely person; rather, “timely” qualifies nouns which substantialize verbs: timely transactions, timely reflections, timely apologies, etc. 3 These different modes of timeliness and untimeliness are then discussed with respect to three modes of time in the philosophical and religious traditions of Greece and Judeo-Christianity: chronos, aion, kairos (IV). The paper then ends with a recapitulatory conclusion (V). I. A Time for Killing; a Time for Loving It is striking that the most sustained discussion of time in the Hebrew scriptures—in the Book of Ecclesiastes2—is one which asks not about the nature of time, but rather reflects on the effects and affects of time, time as timely and untimely. Time is understood not as something, but rather as the power to call for response and the appropriateness or not of that response. The Book of Ecclesiastes takes the form of reflections on wisdom, put fictionally into the mouth of Solomon, and begins by stating, “Sheer futility: everything is futile!” (Ecc., 1:2)—all human effort is futile because it is transitory and what is done will be undone: “[T]here is nothing new under the sun” (Ibid., 1:9). Early in the text we come across reflections on time, and in the course of this the author speaks of time in terms of the timely, the seasonal: “There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under heaven” (Ibid., 3:1). Everything has its time, but in this sense there is an inherent indifference in time: there is a time for loving, but also for hating, a time for killing, but also for healing, a time for peace, but also for war. There is here a certain fatalism which seems not far away when we think of time: things will happen in their own good time; we may have the capacity to be aware of time in its passing—through remembering and hoping, mourning and despairing—but “we can grasp neither the beginning nor the end of what God does” (Ibid., 3:11). The timely is the seasonable, is that which fits with a cycle that appears indifferent to human meaning. The author of Ecclesiastes begins with birth and death, planting and reaping, and ends with war and peace. There is inherent here a recurrence, a constant return and renewal. This is the recurrence of nature, the passage of the seasons reflecting back to us who have been given an “awareness of the passage of time” (Ibid.): our own mortality. To sense the passage of time is to sense its indifference. The cyclical nature of time so understood is both comforting and fateful. It is a time of sprouting and growth, but also of decline and decay. That which shows in spring dies in winter; nothing in nature lasts except nature itself. 2 All biblical citations are taken from The New Jerusalem Bible: Study Edition, (ed.) H. Wansbrough (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994). 4 Such a time has its normativity—this is the time for this and that—but one which has to do with the appropriateness of the “time for,” such that both war and peace, both killing and healing, both loving and hating are allowable, indeed, are called for at different times. To act in relation to such a time is to act with sensitivity to the situation in which we find ourselves, to know what the season is. In other words, to act well in time so understood is to act in a timely fashion, not to apply universal (read: atemporal) rules. Understood as seasonal, time is for sowing, in which the success or failure of an enterprise is tied to the time of the cycle in which we find ourselves. These cycles may not have the same type of regularity with respect to killing, say, as they do with respect to planting, but the same normativity applies: killing is permitted (even called for) in times of war, or perhaps even appropriate in times of infirmity, and there are seasons for hunting and killing certain animals. In all of these cases there are appropriate times. A man convicted and sentenced to death is to be killed, but at a certain time; if the executioner were to go into his cell and kill him the night before the appointed time, this would be unlawful. In time of war killing is permitted; after a ceasefire goes into effect, it is not. What is crucial here is that the timeliness of the act requires sensitivity to the normative structure of time. Understood normatively, time is not a neutral measure, nor can its repetitions be understood in terms of any cosmic necessity (as, say, that which governs the early cosmic speculations of pre-Socratic philosophers), as can be seen by the easy manner in which the writer moves from sowing to killing. Rather, time is understood as that which calls forth an action that is appropriate or not based on the extent to which it is timely, i.e., one that is true to “this” its? time. In this sense, while we can speak of time as objective, the author of Ecclesiastes does not conceive of time abstracted from the locus of responsivity in which it is perceived. Time as objective or subjective, as noun or verb, is only to be understood on the basis of how it normatively requires from us a mode of action, which is that act (of sowing or killing or peacemaking) as appropriately responding to what is being called for. The experience of time here is an experience neither of something simply objective nor of a subjective process of consciousness, but rather of the manner of responding to a normative prescription instantiated as a particular season. To be untimely in this context would be to act out of season. But ultimately, for the writer of Ecclesiastes, such untimeliness is futile, because the timely, the seasonal, is ultimately mortal time, the time of death: fateful time. And this we cannot evade: “We do not know when our time will come: like a fish caught in a treacherous net, like birds caught in the snare, just so are we all trapped by misfortune when it suddenly overtakes us” (Ecc., 9:12). The untimely, 5 which loves, or kills, or sows out of season, appeals beyond the mortality of fateful time to another time, a time not subject to the normativities of the season. To think or to act in an untimely manner is to understand the goal of action and thought not in terms of appropriateness to fatal time, but rather in terms of its disruptiveness toward that timeliness. The untimely is thus provocative; without the possibility to be accepted by the governing ethos as true, it seeks to be acknowledged as significant. Heralding the unknown, the untimely tends toward upsetting the complacency of knowledge: not a refusal of time but a listening to another rhythm of time which discloses the rhythmic nature of seasonal time and the contingency of such rhythm. The untimely disturbs, disrupts, dislocates the temporal rhythm in which “there is a season for everything.” This is not so much a breaking with rhythm as a breaking from the present rhythm, a becoming irregular of that rhythm, which, as Henri Lefebvre says, “only happens, individually or socially, by passing through a crisis.” But such irregularity is itself of rhythm: “[D]isruptions and crises always have origins in and effects on rhythms.”3 II. Rhythm, Life, and Machine To think the relation of timely and untimely we need to think first not of things, but of that which governs the timely/untimely relations to things. To act, be, and occur temporally is to have a certain flow. Such a flow is a relation of “before” and “after” in which passing away and coming-to-be are experienced in relation to one another as expectation and recollection, hope and foreboding, mourning and satisfaction. Such temporal experience has been understood musically from Augustine to Husserl and beyond—indeed, music can rightfully be termed the “art of time.”4 But while music has been employed as an example to illustrate time, here I wish to appeal to a musicality of experience. While music may be made up of melody, harmony, and rhythm, only the last can be employed freely beyond the realm of music strictly speaking. This is not to say that rhythm is inessential to music, but rather to suggest the phenomenal essentiality of musicality. In other words, if we think experience in its temporality, experience is irreducibly musical. The rustle of the trees in the forest, the thrumbling of the cars on the highway, the bustle of the supermarket on a Friday after work, the stillness of an autumn evening outside my window—for me as one experiencing them all of these are in their 3 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, (tr.) S. Elden and G. Moore (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 44. 4 Andrew Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London: Continuum, 2007), 122. 6 distinctive rhythms, in the musicality of their being.5 We feel and hear, indeed even see, rhythm in speech, in movement, in nature. More specifically, rhythm seems to arise from life—musical rhythm is based on imitations of and sympathetic variations on rates of heartbeat and breathing. Plato refers to this when he defines rhythm as “order in movement”:6 not an order imposed on movement, but an order immanent to movement itself. Rhythm is not a particular action but the quality of acting: to act is to act rhythmically, which is to say to act in temporal relation to others and the situation within which I find myself. Timeliness and untimeliness are modes of being with respect to the differing temporal rhythms of life. To appear in and through rhythm is that which is first heard rather than seen and touched, or rather is seen and touched as that which is heard. Echo is the founding mythic character here. It is Echo, traumatized by Narcissus’s rejection, who loses the very possibility of speaking of and from herself, and can only re-sound, can only resonate that which comes from elsewhere. In listening we are all echoes, resounding chambers of sounds which, coming from elsewhere, form us as hearing/listening selves,7 bearing within ourselves the mark of that traumatic lack of speech at the heart of all infancy—the human speaks out of and through an in-fancy (an inability to speak) such that her ability to speak (not simply in language, but also in music) is the original acculturation.8 In hearing we are already set in rhythm. In attending acoustically nothing appears as solid; rather, things appear out of relations of resonating in which we find ourselves in various states of attention and insinuation. Such attention and insinuation is possible for us as beings who not only hear but also listen, and in listening attend to a coming-to-be of sound out of silence. This is not to say that we begin from silence, but that the silence we “hear” is only subsequent to the sound, as that past of the sound which was never present to it: the silence (of that which we hear) is only subsequent to the sound (like the beginning of a musical piece). 9 In this sense, temporal experience is always strongly John Russon refers felicitously to this as the “music of everyday life” and discusses it in terms of harmony and melody as well as rhythm. See his Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 16–22. 6 Plato, Laws, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, (ed.) E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, (tr.) L. Cooper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), §665a. 7 See Ferdia Stone-Davis, Musical Beauty (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011), 166: “[T]he body is open to music: music doesn’t simply enter through the ear but infuses the body through its vibration. It causes it to ‘resonate’.” 8 See Giorgio Agamben, “An Essay on the Destruction of Experience,” in Infancy and History, (tr.) L. Heron (New York: Verso, 2007), 50–60. 9 “These sounds (which are called silence only because they do not form part of a musical intention) may be depended upon to exist. The world teems with them, and is, in fact, at no point free of them. He who has entered an anechoic chamber, a room made as silent as technologically possible, has heard there one high and one low— the high the listener’s nervous system in operation, the low his blood in circulation. There are, demonstrably, sounds to be heard and forever, given ears to hear.” John Cage, “Composition as Process,” in Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 23, [https://pg2009.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/composition-as-process-by5 7 retrospective or rather “retroacoustive”:10 the past is that which comes after the present, is born out of the present. The silent is the silence of a sound or a composition of sounds, the nothing out of which sound emerges: a nothing which is apprehended as a possibility of sound. But this nothing is nothing by excess rather than by lack: an overflowing which we hear in resonating from a source which remains (temporally) distant. But while the sense of hearing, as that of sight, is a sensation of distance, sound cannot be kept at a distance. Sound penetrates me as a perceiving (hearing) self, resonates through me, bathes and—in certain cases—tortures me. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, “Sound…is not first ‘intentioned’: on the contrary, sound is what places its subject, which has not preceded it with an aim, in tension or under tension.”11 However, in listening to something, I am attentive to that which is not sounding, that which is rather traced in the sound—namely, the sense or meaning of the sensed object, the mix of sound and sense.12 In listening, I am attentive to something which is outside of itself in that to which I am listening, “something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as and other than itself, one in the echo of the other.”13 In other words, my attention is focused on the arising out of a rhythm of that which calls my attention to itself. Listening is never toward that which is present, but is rather an “in the presence of,” whereby sound is localized only in the sense of having a source— which, however, is present merely through a translation into spectacle, and a retro-spectacle at that.14 Further, in listening to a conversation, the waves on a seashore, or the emptiness of a subway station late at night, a multiplicity of rhythms resonating with one another form for me a rhythm, sometimes of harmonious symphony, sometimes of cross-rhythms, but in each case appearing for me as soundings in which things are first and foremost virtualities—virtual movements through and in space, enveloping me, the listener; and only through an effort of reification and detemporalization are they “reduced” to localizable and manipulable things. To listen to the rhythm in which things appear for me is to listen musically. This is to be understood in two senses: the act of listening to rhythm is proto-musical, and music performs a phenomenological reduction that allows us to reflect philosophically on what occurs in listening. Music is here understood as that human creation which allows us to discover the john-cage.pdf], accessed Oct. 24, 2016. I would like to thank Férdia Stone-Davis for pointing this passage out to me. 10 We listen backwards; our listening is always coming too late. 11 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, (tr.) C. Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 20. 12 Ibid., 6–7. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 See Ibid. 8 world of tone and rhythm, as that artistic form (including within it poetry and dance, as well as instrumental music) which opens us to the musicality of nature and everyday life. What is of issue here is the structure and logic of tone and rhythm which forms the manner in which we hear the world, in which the world is audible to us. In his book Pourquoi la musique [Why Music]?, Francis Wolff imagines a cave similar to that of Plato, except Wolff’s cave is of sound rather than vision. The prisoners in an aural rather than visual cave could only make their world comprehensible by an act of production: making sound.15 To understand the world of sound is not to see through the eyes of the intellect or to reflect on the paradoxes of sense experience, but rather to engage in the activity of making sound and rhythm, to engage, first in a rudimentary fashion, in the art of music-making. In the absence of such activity there are sounds, but these are indistinct—the boundaries of inner and outer cannot be drawn; there is no distinction between the real and the imaginary. As Wolff puts it, “In the temporal sequence there is no point of reference which would permit the individualization of events [of sound],”16 and while colour and form are immediate qualities of things, sounds are aural qualities of events. It is only through an act of making sounds that these events can be reproduced in an ordered manner, one which individuates the sounds and their relations to each other. In this sense, music performs a reduction of the multiplicity of aural impressions—the noise all around us—to the sounds which constitute them, and orders them in tonal relations. This is a peculiar reduction because it operates neither actively nor by reflection, but rather by the production of sound as tone. Music performs a reduction in another way too. It places sound beyond the level of the actual (in the sense of physical causation) and brings it to the level of the imaginary or the virtual where the relations of sound to one another are no longer relations of simple physical causation, but are relations of sense in which the one sound motivates the other.17 In listening to a piece of music, I am not attending to the manner in which each individual sound is caused by the instrument playing it, but rather by the manner in which one sound causes or leads to another, that dynamic relation of tones through which melody is formed.18 To hear musical Francis Wolff, Pourquoi la musique ? (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 44. All subsequent English translations of this text are mine. 16 Ibid., 36. 17 As Roger Scruton puts it, this is achieved by “attending to sounds without focusing on their material causes.” Roger Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” in Philosophers on Music, (ed.) K. Stock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 229. 18 The relation of cause here is that which Husserl describes as the “lawfulness of the life of the spirit,” namely, motivation. Understood as such, perception receives expression or rather “expression and expressed as a totality” in “concordant experience.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book II, (tr.) R. Rojceiwic and A. Schuwer (The Hague: Springer, 1990), 245. 15 9 meaning is to follow the directionality of sense, anticipating the next note guided by an aural understanding which hears meaning in the tones being played. This is to say that in hearing I am attending to a particular kind of incompleteness: while visual incompletion is overcome through addition—I walk around the desk so as to see it from every angle—aurally “what is lacking must appear in place of what is given…the auditory—incomplete can become complete only by the fact that what is lacking succeeds to the datum…. [As such] to hear incompleteness is to hear time.”19 Listening in this way is an awareness of a meaningful pattern in sound which operates potentially by a relation of waiting on the future sound. The necessity of these relations depends not on the discrete and physical causal actions whereby sounds are produced, but rather on an imaginary web of relations that receive their sense from a dynamic relation in which the sounding of one note is virtually suggested by the previous one. Indeed, as Wolff states, “[T]o understand a piece of music is simply and wholly to hear that imaginary causality.”20 Such a causality is imaginary in the sense that the one note contains within it the notes which arise virtually from it in the course of the melody, forming as it were an aural image which is temporal rather than spatial, musical rather than pictorial. Music reduces the things of our everyday world to three phenomenal structures: melody, harmony, and rhythm. Rhythm is that element of music which most clearly structures the temporal constitution of the musical piece and most clearly attends to time as timely/untimely. Rhythm is a matter of repetition which sets up a pattern. This occurs through accent and stress. Rhythm can only become homogenous at a certain limit; its repetitions are of strong and weak beats, long and short times, silences, intervals, resumptions, regularities of movement. As such, rhythm happens as differentiated time, as qualified durations. 21 Even when a monotonous repetition objectively occurs, we tend to hear the repetition rhythmically. In so doing we tend interpretively to transform the mechanical into the living, monotonous sound into the movement of dance or speech. What we find in the roots of rhythm are two elementary tendencies, those of life and of mechanicity; and alongside these tendencies are two elementary forms of our being-rhythmic, those of speech and of dance. Attending to rhythm happens through a sympathetic act of the body, a living of the rhythm in the body. Scruton refers to rhythm as the “virtual energy that flows through the music and which causes me to move with it in sympathy.” 22 Prior to music, pre-musically, this virtual energy guides and 19 Viktor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 253. Woolf, Pourquoi la musique, 162. 21 See Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78. 22 Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 231. 20 10 moves my attention. As Andrew Hamilton puts it, “[T]he experience of musical rhythm does not only involve experiencing music as behaving like a human body; it also involves experiencing the human body as behaving musically.”23 In speech and in dance the body lives such rhythm; in these two primal modes of interacting, speaking to others and ourselves, and gesturing toward each other in attitudes of welcome and refusal, our meaning cannot be abstracted from a certain cadence, a step and a tone, which either places us in time with the world around us or appears untimely, out of step, taking the wrong tone. Furthermore, this cadence is equally constitutive of the self’s waiting on its own return, waiting for the sound of its own voice, for the downward beat of its feet before rising again. Rhythm is the simultaneous moving toward the other and waiting for itself. The rhythm of such situations, in its twin modes of dance and speech, indicates a struggle between liveliness and spontaneity on the one hand, and mechanicity and automaticity on the other. Rhythm through its repetitions gives way to measurement, to metre (the regular measure of a beat), but a mechanical performance would be judged unmusical. This is not simply an aesthetic judgement: it refers us to an underlying sense of rhythm and metre in our autoaffective and hetero-affective perceptions of movement. Manifest in this is time as machine, as clock, as metronome, and time as slow and meandering, as hurtling and deranged, as playfully discordant, as majestically flowing. Life and machine: these two possibilities of human existence which lie at the root of human experience make such human experience possible in its temporal structure and subject the self to the power of time. Indeed, the difference between life and machine is itself temporally structured. As Bergson puts it, [T]he more immediate the reaction is compelled to be, the more must perception resemble mere contact; and the complete process of perception and of reaction can then hardly be distinguished from a mechanical impulsion…. But in the measure that the reaction becomes more uncertain, and allows more room for suspense…both promises and threats defer the date of their fulfilment.24 It is precisely in this hesitation in the face of promise and threat that a temporal interruption is possible, which interrupts the mechanism of habit, the “closed system of automatic movements.”25 23 Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 144. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, (tr.) N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (London: Zone Books, 1991), 32. 25 Ibid., 80. On this theme of hesitation, see Alia Al-Saji, “When Thinking Hesitates: Philosophy as Prosthesis and Transformative Vision,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 50, no. 2 (2012): 351–61. 24 11 Important here is the consideration of habit. Even the most “automatic” responses are learned, embodying pre-understandings of the world; they are rhythmic responses to the world perceived as having certain rhythms. Such learned responses, while rooted in expectations of continuity, are nonetheless, and precisely as expectations, open both to disappointments and to being excited by novel elaborations and transformations. But such openness to novelty and disappointment is covered over by a rhythm which becomes flat, mechanical, automatic. In such a rhythm the future is simply the space of the further iteration of what has been. Reduced to the mechanical beat of the metronome, such a mechanically metric rhythm would suggest not so much the pulsing of the heart as the ticking of a clock. In this context, Scruton contrasts “ostinato rhythm, in which the relentless beat subjects the music to a discipline that might have nothing much to do with its melodic and harmonic movement, and rhythm which adapts to and takes its accents from the musical movement.”26 The mechanical is the adaption to a regularity which knows no deviation: relentless and stubborn (ostinato)—a single directedness which loses all sense of direction and comes to resemble death itself. Indeed, in analyzing the death drive, Freud speaks of “a vacillating rhythm” whereby one group of drives “rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life [death] as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so to prolong the journey.”27 The mechanical rhythm is displaced by that which expresses life—or in Freud’s terms, by that which expresses the pleasure principle—and rediscovers what the music theorist Moritz Hauptmann, in speaking of the metrical accent, calls the “energy of beginnings” (Energie des Anfangs),28 in which a rhythm is projected onto the next note from the previous note(s). Indeed, it is not so much that rhythm requires energy, as that all energy seems to have a rhythmic structure.29 To recognize a rhythm is to recognize a mode of beginning, a way in which the subsequent is determined from an origin which is truly sensed only retrospectively or retroacoustively, in the metrical sequence to which it gives rise. It is in the interruption of the automatic series that a seam appears between past and future, between passing away and coming-to-be, such that a decision arises between a predictable, mechanical, dead rhythm and a rhythm which violates expectations, encounters new elaborations, or expresses life anew. It Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 237. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 11, (tr.) J. Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 313. 28 Moritz Hauptmann, Die Natur der Harmonik und der Metrik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1873), 228. 29 See Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 65. 26 27 12 is precisely in the recognition of this seam—this moment of decision, which is not a moment outside time but precisely a moment in rhythm—that the rhythmic self recognizes the difference of timely and untimely. Such a recognition is that of the temporal flow of the living being as the intertwining of living and mechanical rhythms. III. Different Rhythms—Affectivity Rhythm is never simply singular. The rhythm of listening is a listening to rhythms (plural): the electric currents buzzing around us in an office building, the drilling into concrete in the roadworks on the street below, the people around us each with different rhythms of heartbeats and breathing and desire and disappointment, the rhythm of my voice and my inner voices. This multiplicity of rhythms can harmonize for a moment in a symphony of attention: in a moment we can all be gathered by the cadence of an idea, of a piece of music, of the lilt of voice, or of a body (gymnast, dancer, hockey player) in glorious motion. But those moments of unity are exceptional, and in any case do not exclude (indeed, on the contrary) the diversity which constitutes them. There is, though, a fundamental sense of unity between rhythms which forms a constitutive rhythm of life—the rhythm of economy: supply and demand, give and take, do ut des. This powerful rhythm is what Gaston Bacherlard is referring to when he talks of the undulations of moral duality: “Personality lives according to the rhythm of conciliation and aggression…I respect in order to be respected.” 30 This moral economy is governed by timeliness. The timeliness in question is a kind of dance, where I freely move toward the other in the understanding and confidence that the other will move toward me.31 This timeliness is based on timing, where all parties freely place themselves under the rhythm of the dance so as to be in union with one another. The gentility of such a dance is based on a commonality, in the end a familial bond (gentilis: of the same family). But not every dance is like that, nor every speech. Bachelard speaks of repose and of calm, rhythmic breathing at a “slower rhythm, that is easier both to monitor and to impose.”32 But what of those occasions when someone, some occasion, or some place “takes your breath away,” where the rhythm of your breathing is no longer under your 30 Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectics of Duration, (tr.) M. M. Jones (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 134. As Schiller expresses it with reference to 18th century English figure dancing, “Everything has been arranged so that the first has made room for the second before he arrives.” Quoted in Scruton, Thoughts on Rhythm, 240. 32 Bachelard, Dialectics of Duration, 136. 31 13 own control? This Dionysian moment has a rhythm that is all-encompassing and unsettling. Such a rhythm is not structured economically; there need be no other person inspiring this rhythm and, if there is an external inspiration, then that person is one whose engagement draws me to stand outside of myself, literally to be ecstatic. Ecstatically losing myself in the rhythm, unheeding of any substantial self, unthinking of preserving that self, such a rhythm transcends the conatus essendi in a temporality which is inappropriate, cannot be made proper, cannot be made anyone’s own. This is a time of liveliness, where the energy of beginning comes from an origin more past than any present of mine. Economical timeliness and ecstatic untimeliness are two opposing rhythms of time. To make these more concrete, it may be helpful to turn to three motifs which manifest these two rhythms in different ways: the prophet, the opportunist, and the lover. These are not exclusive, as other figures could be used to discuss the rhythms of the timely/untimely in their oscillations, but in each case and in different ways the timeliness or untimeliness of the actions and feelings of these figures bring to the fore a rhythm which is otherwise obscured in the everyday living of temporality. That two become three here hints at a dialectical structure, and that would not be wholly misleading. These two rhythms weave into one another in diverse ways, but they remain in tension—a tension which lies at the heart of temporality itself.33 The prophet is the one who is inspired to speak. The prophet (nabi) is called out of her time to speak in an untimely manner, a manner which disrupts the dominant rhythm, a manner which seeks to be recognized precisely as that which cannot be reconciled with the current rhythm of time. The interruption of inspiration—the flow of another source, a source which is out of place—for a self impatient with the pace of that time which she shares with others, breaking with the norms of her situation, is untimely. To be untimely in this sense is to attempt to open up a route toward a coming which breaks with the past, which sees the present as the birth of a new future. Such an untimeliness is also timely in the sense that the situation calls for someone to speak against the dominant mode of being. Indeed, the untimeliness of the prophet operates precisely by claiming another timeliness—the prophet after all is called to speak at this time. What we have here are two temporal rhythms, two responses to what the times call for. The rhythm of the prophet’s time is one which injects liveliness into a flat 33 Crucial here is the public, indeed political, nature of the rhythms which the first two motifs (prophecy and opportunism) exemplify. The historian Reinhart Koselleck speaks of an experience of acceleration of historical time, which for Luther heralded the end of the world, and for Robespierre indicated the coming revolution. In this sense historical time becomes denaturalized, and the response to time becomes a response to an accelerating movement toward catastrophe or transformation, end or beginning. See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, (tr.) K. Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 18–19, 47, 283. 14 melody. In exposing hypocrisy, i.e., in showing the gap between present reality and the professed claims to being in tune with the fundamental sense of a community, the prophet is above all exposing the lapse into the mechanical repetition of the past, which forgets time as expressive of life.34 In claiming inspiration, the prophet appeals to the heart of his hearers, to the time of their hearts. The time of the heart is a time which expresses a rhythm of life, a time of affectivity. Speaking in the timbre of dread, the prophet plays back to his hearers the rhythm and melody of their shared time and shows in it a movement toward doom, proclaiming the traces of a future not yet manifest and reading the past in terms of a future not yet arrived. In this sense, the prophet is affectively inappropriate; and that inappropriateness shows for his hearers his untimeliness, as it manifests for the prophet precisely the urgency of his call in the sense of a timely intervention. A related figure, secondly, is that of the opportunist. He is related to the prophet because he too can come into his own at a time of crisis. 35 But while the prophet is untimely and is, even if listened to during a crisis, regularly sacrificed thereafter, the opportunist is timely. The word “opportune” comes from Latin phrase “ob portum veniens” (literally, “coming toward a port”) meaning to have a favourable wind blowing toward a port. While the prophet calls on that which is against her times, the opportunist seeks to hoist his sail as best he can to whatever winds are opportune for him. He seeks, if at all possible, to immerse himself in the rhythm of his times, often believing himself to be most attuned to them. The opportunist is remarkably sensitive to the feeling of his times—he can capture a mood, a disposition which colours the rhythmic qualities of all around it, while moulding it in his own image. Such a figure is open to the rhythms of his time; he deeply feels, above all else, the self-preserving sentiments of a community, and identifies time itself with himself and the community represented in him.36 Such a person giving himself over totally to timeliness sees reversals and failures as caused by time itself. Success is timeliness, failure is due to the time of others, to time working for others. The timely becomes undone through a “malevolent” timeliness operating in favour of a perceived enemy. Thus in Isaiah: “Because this people approaches me only in words, honours me only in lip-service while their hearts are far from me and reverence for me…is nothing but…a lesson memorized…I shall have to go on astounding this people with prodigies and wonders” (Isaiah, 29:13–14). 35 The phenomenon of crisis is a complex one in this context and goes beyond the confines of this paper. For an insightful historical overview of the different dimensions of the concept of crisis, see Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” (tr.) M. Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 67, no. 2 (2006), 357–400. Thanks to Blake Ewing for this reference. 36 See on this theme Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001). 34 15 The third figure is the lover, who suddenly and unexpectedly finds her heart no longer answering to her strategic plans ranging over a future already mapped out, but sees in an other that which somehow was always already there. Feeling herself in love, the lover in her desire responds to the excessive claim of love, which calls forth not an immediate response, but rather a hesitation on the part of the self, a hesitating in response to undoubted biological needs and interests. In that moment of hesitation, in the capacity to defer (perhaps indefinitely) response to such needs—and as such to make this a response rather than a reaction—the lover finds herself threatened with the loss of herself in a time in which her timeliness is one which no longer preserves herself, is no longer self-sufficient, is a loss of herself in the other. The lover allows herself to be drawn into affective timeliness, which is not simply to be under the power of another, but, in the case of requited love at least, to find herself under the power of a timeliness, a binding of both into a shared destiny. Such a temporal binding takes place in the absence of a third, that is, of anyone who would indicate a timeliness beyond the two in their mutual exposure to one another. The timeliness of the lovers is one which promises a future and recalls a past, prior to any self-assertion of either lover, of a mutual being-vulnerable together.37 The prophet, opportunist, and lover are each structured by the dynamic of economical and ecstatic rhythm. The prophet breaks with the rhythm of his time and is a “voice crying in the wilderness,” but he seeks response; he seeks the economy of a new dance, one which is for him already prefigured in the decadence of the present, in relation to which her calling is timely (as a calling out of decadence). The opportunist, in identifying herself with the rhythm of her time, only emerges as her message is received through the acclaim of her contemporaries; but this economy is unstable, and thus, in the charisma of her person, the opportunist can soon appear as not so much part of the economy of rhythm as ecstatically moving a whole community into an ecstatic escape. The lover’s first move of love is nothing if not ecstatic: breaking from the rhythm of all around him and from that of his own trajectory, he gives himself over to what is not yet (and may never be) real. But his ecstatic movement aims toward a new economy, one which will bind him and his lover through mutual reciprocation. Again, this economy is a fragile one, and even when it survives it may do so as an untimely being in absence from the world-time of those with whom the two lovers must be. See Diane Enns, “Love’s Limit,” in Thinking about Love, (ed.) D. Enns and A. Calcagno (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2015), 43: “[I]n the encounter with another’s raw vulnerability, with his exposed wounds and sensibilities, we open ourselves to the transforming power of love.” See also the author’s, “Love’s Conditions: Passion and the Practice of Philosophy,” in Thinking about Love, 92–95. 37 16 In each of these concrete instances, timeliness/untimeliness relates to time as hesitating between passing away and coming-to-be, both of which constituting modes of attention in giving over to a rhythm through identification or breaking with that rhythm for the sake of another. In each case the heart is at play. Temporal experience is that of the heart in the sense that it responds rhythmically to the situation. Each of the figures discussed—prophet, opportunist, lover—respond affectively to this temporal rhythm and attempt to express life in and through such rhythm in their different ways, striving all the while to escape and overcome the mechanicity of time. In these modes of timeliness/untimeliness temporal experience comes to expression, accentuating modes of temporality which have been philosophically and religiously expressed as ways of being toward the past and future as they form a now in which the decision of rhythms occurs. IV. Modes of Time: Being Timely/Untimely The tensions discussed to this point between liveliness and mechanicity, ecstatic and economical, timely and untimely find expression in the three words which indicated time in Ancient Greek: chronos, kairos, and aion.38 These words speak of different modes of living between the timely and the untimely: different times of life, different ways of living time. These modes expose different rhythms of time, different ways of being in and in relation to the futility always lurking within our temporality. Chronos, Aristotle tells us, is the measure of change (kinesis). 39 Measure may be understood here as the mechanical measure of the clock or the metronome, ultimately the measure of a measuring mind. But such measuring is not neutral; it is an attentive awareness of the flow of time, a flow in which things are effected by time. Time is the cause of destruction, Aristotle says, because time is the number of change and change involves decay. 40 In measuring time as chronos we are implicated in that which we are measuring: we decay along with the object of our measuring. Like a soft drum beat behind all the melodies of life, time as chronos measures my decay and the decay of all around me. In a mood of sorrowful resistance or tranquil resignation, that which comes to be is measured as it passes away. But measuring It would be beyond the confines of this paper to relate this discussion to Giles Deleuze’s account of chronos and aion in The Logic of Sense, (tr.) M. Lester. (London: Continuum, 1989). The account given here draws on the author’s accounts of kairos in The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) and accounts of chronos, kairos, and aion in A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 178–98. 39 Aristotle, The Physics, (tr.) R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), §220b14–23. 40 Ibid., §221b1–2. 38 17 change as destruction or decay implicitly takes time as unchanging for the measure, it implicitly sees things within time in terms of things which always are, which are eternal, and as such, outside of time. Precisely here Aristotle short-circuits the account of time by understanding aion etymologically as “always being” (aei on), which indicates its meaning as “eternity”— the standard translation of this word in Plato’s Timaeus. In doing this, Aristotle hides a richer and more suggestive sense of the word. In one of the Heraclitus’s famously enigmatic fragments (B52) we read, “Aion pais esti paizon pesseuon. Paidos he basileie.” Diels translates aion as “lifetime” (Lebenszeit): “Lifetime is a child, who plays, placing pieces here and there on the board: kingship of the child.”41 Although aion has the meaning of life-time, it is in the sense of liveliness, a time of life-energy, thus referring to the time of the young rather than the old. This sense of liveliness is understood here by Heraclitus in the intensity of a child playing a game as if nothing else existed. The play of the child gives expression to something of ontological priority, namely, the giving over to play, which contains a moment of pure liveliness. 42 The child plays with pieces of a board game (pesseuon). As every game, it consists in motion, in this case locomotion. The motion comes from the child. The pieces with which he plays receive their motion through the child and the happening of the playing. In the motion of the pieces through the child from here to there, earlier and later arise. This “earlier” and “later” exist simply in the motion itself: only while the pieces are in motion is there an earlier and later. What is important to notice here is that there is no teleology in the game: the game does not serve some end outside of itself. Play has no reason outside of itself.43 The board game happens in the motion of the child; it has its origin not so much in the pieces which make up the game, as in the playing child, in the intensity of its play. It is no accident that this character of intensity of play is to be found in the Greek word which characterizes life: zoe.44 This word is formed with the root za, which functions as an intensifier. From this origin zoon means an intensification of being, whereby being is not dispersed but concentrated. In this there appears a lightness that has something godly, which is alluded to by Plato in referring to god as a draughts-player.45 In 41 Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Zürich: Weidmann, 1996), 162; my translation from the German. The German reads: “Die Lebenszeit ist eine Knabe, der spielt, hin und her die Brettsteine setzt: Knabenregiment.” 42 This echoes Gadamer’s thesis that play is not metaphorically used in relation to nature, but is rather perhaps primordially found there. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, (tr.) J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 105. 43 See Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reasons, (tr.) R. Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 113: “Play is without a ‘why’ [Das Spiel ist ohne ‘warum’].” 44 See David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 14–15. 45 Plato, Laws, §903d–e. 18 this lightness the in-tensity of play changes over into an ex-tensity which, following Henri Bergson, one could characterize as explosivity.46 In the Christian Scriptures47 aion is used in the sense of ages, a sense that harks back to another sense of aion as an “age” or “epoch,” which arises and in time loses its aion, its lifeforce. For the New Testament writers, aion is not one age which leads to another, but rather the age of the world understood as the world of all of human history and the time of that world, the time which comes to an end. Time now is that which ends, that which is finite. In such an understanding, existence enacts a time that has the possibility of being beyond world-time because, as eschatological time, it bears the creative life of the origins of the world. This is what St. Paul calls kairos. Kairos is time as life, as living, not the explosivity of young life reflecting the full liveliness of the cosmos (aion), but rather the rendering asunder of a life, of the life of an existent, such that past and future become radically open to rethinking, reliving, and revision. Such eschatological time is that which happens in a moment and radiates through past and future, transforming time into history and natural cycles into the linearity of salvation. The linearity of the latter is not that of an arrow going ever forward, but rather of a light shining outward in all directions. The past is not undone, but is seen as if for the first time, from the kairos. 48 Time is renewed—time, no longer the measure of destruction, is now the materialization of transformation. The present of the kairos is a present in relation to a transforming but obscure event, and the promise of a repetition of that event, not as darkening but as blinding. The past here—that of the event of the Incarnation—offers no positive guide in relation to the present; it can only offer a negative guide, which is to avoid complacency, not to follow the lead of those who say, “[H]ow peaceful and quiet it is” (1 Thess., 5:3). Living under such guidance is living in a constant readiness for the sudden. The sudden (exaiphnes) is no longer—as it is in Plato—the fulcrum of worldly being, holding together permanence and change, being and becoming; it rather characterizes the manner in which the eternal is made manifest in the world.49 46 See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, (tr.) A. Mitchell (London: Kessinger, 2010), 102. For the following see Gerhard Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 1, (tr.) B. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1964), 197–209. 48 The story of the road to Emmaus (Luke, 24:13–32) exemplifies this, as the kairological figure, Christ, explains in retrospect, in the light of himself, the scriptures—now more past than before, as fulfilled, but past as they could never have been present. In contrast, Greek tragedy and philosophy emphasize the necessity of the past and its acceptance. 49 On this theme see John Panteleimon Manoussakis, God after Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 64–70. 47 19 These different modes of temporality are often expressed in musical terms. The explosive liveliness of the world is gathered together by the logos in a musical unity manifest in the lyre, for Heraclitus; the kairos is proclaimed in song—the song of the angels—in which all creation is thought of as united in one choir. In both cases, the rhythm of chronos is subjected to intensification in the name of liveliness, in the name of an energy of beginning that breaks with the normal temporality and is untimely with respect to its time; but both cases also appeal to another timeliness—that of the prophets or that of the child—in the name of a life or liveliness which is not simply vain, not simply subject to the seasons and the times. This appeal beyond the tendency of mechanical rhythm in chronological time points to the recurring significance of the untimely that not only challenges the temporality of seasons and times, but does so on the basis of that sudden transformative liveliness which is inherent in the timely itself. These are not different times, but rather different modes by which time conditions actions, thoughts, and events. V. Conclusion The temporalities of prophet, opportunist, and lover, as well as the conceptions of time as chronos, aion, and kairos, are all ways in which action, thought, and event happen. They differ from one another through the different modes of rhythm by which they express the musicality of experience in different ways. Reduced to the rhythm of these modes of being temporal, what we find are different methods of intensification, forms of appropriateness, and degrees of ecstatic and economical timeliness/untimeliness, all structuring how we live time. These modes of temporal experience are primarily matters of sound, not of sight: sound is impossible without time because sound is always rhythmic; sight tempts toward a reduction of time to a sequence of immobile images, mobilized through a cinematic trick whereby the present image is forever being replaced by new ones. When listening, attending to the resonating of sounds, we hear in terms of virtualities: virtual futures and pasts without which sound would not appear at all. Within those virtualities are possibilities of beginning. Each rhythm can begin anew—can, in its development, renew the relation to a beginning always passing but not past, as this beginning is still operative in the present. In this sense, the relation of time and eternity, which has moulded Greek and Judeo-Christian thought (in different ways), is at its roots a difference in intensity; and through this difference, as the rhythm of chronos threatens to flatten out into monotony while in a moment of childlike innocence, the dynamic of temporality is repeated in the intensity of a moment. The point here is not to conflate the Judeo-Christian and Greek 20 accounts of time, but rather to show how both can be understood as deriving from the experience of timeliness/untimeliness, mechanical and living rhythm—in short, as rooted in a certain musicality.50 Chronos, aion, and kairos in different ways give sense to the dynamic of timely/untimely through a continual return to a past time. Indeed, there is, in each mode of time and the temporal experience they express, an aim toward a past which shows itself in every repetition—those of the seasons with which the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes was concerned; that of Abraham, Moses, and Isaiah, which formed the referential context for the authors of the Gospels; and that of childhood play, which for Heraclitus had kingship over world time. But this past so articulated is the past-as-such, a past which is not present, but rather out of which and toward which temporal experience radiates, like a piece of music attempting to regain the energy of beginning that is already traced in the first note. How we understand this past which was never present is perhaps a defining philosophical decision—to name just two philosophers, for Merleau-Ponty the past which was never present is nature,51 for Levinas it is the “an-archic antiquity” beyond being.52 Such decisions no longer concern the rhythm of time but rather the melody and harmony of its expression. This is not to make any claim as to the secondary nature of such questions, but rather to say that, regarded as adverbial, time appears as that which lies at the origin of experience itself, tracing in the present a rhythm which is not so much made as imitated and then incorporated. In that sense the timely/untimely shows how the rhythm of time traces within itself a source more original than those who participate in it, a time before the temporalized experience itself, of which mastery and knowledge is impossible, but which gives time for life—life, which has no other measure than the musicality and rhythm of our temporal being. [email protected] 50 Regrettably, expounding upon the differences between Greek and Christian musical experience and practice would go beyond the confines of this paper. 51 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (tr.) D. Landes (London: Routledge, 2013), 252. 52 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, (tr.) A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 144.