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Living (with) Technical Time

From Media Surrogacy to Distributed Cognition

Duke University, mbhansen{at}princeton.edu

This article proposes that time is not so much constituted by time-consciousness as given by technical inscriptions of time (including those performed by time-consciousness). The `digital gift' of time that comprises one fundamental mode of this giving of time correlates with Aristotle's conception of time as `the number of movement according to the before and after'; more specifically, it furnishes a minimal form of temporal difference — a minimal before-after structure — that proves useful for exploring how the experience of time has changed today. The article argues that we increasingly live time not, as philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues, through neo-Husserlian temporal objects like the cinema that model the flow of time through our consciousnesses (or our brains), but rather with the aid of artworks that eschew the objectal in favor of the processual. In works like Wolfgang Staehle's Empire 24/7, Pierre Huyghe's L'Ellipse and Lynn Kirby's Six Shooter, we confront open-ended digital structures that provide us with a technically-specific mediation of the minimal before-after structure and allow us to participate in more heterogeneous enframings of time that move beyond the temporal ratios of human perception. The article closes with a brief discussion of contemporary Chinese art that serves to broaden the proposed `digital aesthetic' of time beyond the `digital' construed narrowly as a concrete technical platform.

Key Words: Aristotle • art • digital technics • Edmund Husserl • Pierre Huyghe • phenomenology • Wolfgang Staehle • Bernard Stiegler

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 2-3, 294-315 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103109


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