The images of time: An essay on temporal representation

210 Pages·2007·0.686 MB·English

by  Le Poidevin, Robin

THE IMAGES OF TIME
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The Images of Time
An Essay on Temporal Representation
ROBIN LE POIDEVIN
1
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Preface
Butpardon,gentlesall,
Theflatunraisedspiritsthathathdar’d
Onthisunworthyscaffoldtobringforth
Sogreatanobject
WilliamShakespeare,HenryV
In February 1986, the Barbican Art Gallery in London put on an
exhibition entitled Art and Time: Looking at the Fourth Dimension.
It consisted of 150 predominantly twentieth-century artworks, each
representingoralludingtotime,withvaryingdegreesofexplicitness.It
wasan intriguingandvaried collection,includingUmbertoBoccioni’s
1913bronzefigure,UniqueFormsofContinuityinSpace,RenéMagritte’s
1928 Les Reflets du temps, Salvador Dali’s 1933 The Triangular Hour,
Man Ray’s Object à Détruire (or rather his 1959 reconstruction, after
the1923original),EtienneMarey’s1887sculptureVoldugoéland,and
five series of photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 Animal
Locomotion.Italsoincludedmorerecent,andperhapsrathermoreself-
conscious works, such as Rebecca Horn’s 1984 Pendulum, which was
just that, with the unexpected variation that the object suspended was
a goose egg rather than the more usual brass disc. Hanne Darboven’s
1971 Ein Jahrhundert was one of the bulkier exhibits, consisting of
365volumes,eachof100pagesandcontainingalistofdates.Volume
1 contained every ‘1st January’ in the century, volume 2 every ‘2nd
January’,andsoon.
The exhibition was accompanied by a booklet, which contained
a similarly eclectic collection of essays, on various aspects of time
and artistic representation. It explained that one of the aims of the
exhibition was to challenge the well-known distinction, expressed in
G.E.Lessing’sLaocoon(1766),betweenthe‘artsoftime’andthe‘arts
of space’. Paintings and sculptures, such as those exhibited here, were
countedbyLessingasamongtheartsofspace:thatis,theywerecapable
ofrepresentingonlyspatial properties,nottemporalones.What many
of the exhibits appeared to demonstrate, however, was the variety of
waysinwhichtimecanbesuccessfullyrepresentedspatially.
viii Preface
When I visited this exhibition, I was a research student, writing a
Ph.D.dissertationonthephilosophyoftimeandchange.Manyofthe
artworkswereofintrinsicinterest,butmyimaginationwasalsocaught
bythegeneraltheme, and perhaps I hoped thevisit mightgeneratean
idea that could be incorporated into the dissertation. It did not do so,
directlyatleast,butitstartedmethinkingaboutthenatureoftemporal
representation,andIwasalsostruckbyoneofthelessopaquepassages
intheexhibitionbooklet,aquotationfromanessaybyErnstGombrich:
‘Whiletheproblem of space and itsrepresentationin art has occupied
the attention of art historians to an almost exaggerated degree, the
correspondingproblemoftimeandtherepresentationofmovementhas
been strangely neglected’ (Gombrich 1964: 293). Might the pictorial
representationoftimeraisesimilarlyneglectedphilosophicalproblems?
Itwasanothertenyears,however,beforeItriedtoengagephilosophically
withGombrich’sresponsetoLessing’sdichotomy.
Not long after this visit, I became interested in the representation
of time in fiction, stimulated by the suggestion, first made in J. E.
McTaggart’sfamousarticle‘TheUnrealityofTime’(1908),that,while
wecanviewfictionaleventsasoccurringoneaftertheother,wecannot
make sense of any of them being past, present, or future. That did
make its way intothe dissertation, and was also the subject of my first
full-lengthpublishedarticle.
In 1996, another stimulus came along in the form of Christoph
Hoerl’sOxfordD.Phil.dissertation,‘KeepingTrackofTime’,forwhich
I was the external examiner. It explored issues of what is sometimes
called ‘cognitivedynamics’: the way in which we change our beliefs to
keeptrackofrealitythroughthepassageoftime.Itdrewmyattention
to issues of temporal representation to which I had not given much
thought before, and also alerted me to John Campbell’s exploration
of memory in his Past, Space and Self (1994). Campbell’s linking
of the epistemology of memory with realism about the past further
encouragedmetothinkofwaysinwhichissuesconcerningthemental
representation of time might interact with the kinds of issues in the
metaphysics of time that I had spent the last ten or so years thinking
about.
There followed in quick succession yet further stimuli to thought
about temporal representation: an essay by Roger Teichmann on the
impossibility of a tenseless language (1998), a typescript by David
Cockburn (later published as Other Times: Philosophical Perspectives on
Past,PresentandFuture),andaninvitationtocontributeanarticletothe
Preface ix
StanfordOnline EncyclopediaofPhilosophy ontheperceptionoftime.I
wasalsogiventheopportunitytorunacourseontimeandrepresentation
forMAstudentsandthird-yearundergraduatesatLeeds,basedonsome
of the ideas in this book. Eventually, what started as a collection of
somewhattenuouslyrelatedquestionsbegantoresolvethemselvesinto
acommontheme:howweintegratetemporalfeaturesoftheworldinto
ourunderstandingofthemechanismsbehindrepresentationindifferent
media—perception,memory,art,andfiction.Atthatpoint,itseemed
worthwhiletoembarkonafull-lengthtreatmentofthetopic.
It might perhaps be thought surprising that I have said very little
about emotion in this study, in view of the very extensive debate
over Arthur Prior’s (1959) ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’ argument
against the original form of the B-theory of time. This argument has
since been expanded and developed as a way of showing that states of
relief, anxiety, etc., are only rational if time is viewed as an A-series.
But precisely because there has been so much debate, to which I have
nothingtoadd,andalsobecauseinChapter2Icharacterizeemotional
statesthathaverepresentationalcontentintermsofotherpsychological
states, I have omitted any discussion of Prior’s argument here. The
interested reader is referred to Oaklander and Smith (1994), Part III,
andCockburn(1997),PartI.
In this study I have drawn quite extensively from the following
previously published articles: ‘Time and the Static Image’, Philosophy,
72 (1997), 175–88; ‘Egocentric and Objective Time’, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, 99 (1999), 19–36; ‘Can Beliefs be Caused
by their Truth-Makers?’, Analysis, 59 (1999), 148–56; ‘The Percep-
tion of Time’, Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2000),
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/>; ‘Fate, Fiction
and theFuture’, Philosophical Papers, 30(2001), 69–92; ‘Why Tenses
NeedRealTimes’,inAleksandarJokicandQuentinSmith,eds.,Time,
TenseandReference(Cambridge,Mass.:MITPress,2003),305–24;‘A
PuzzleConcerningTimePerception’,Synthese,142(2004),109–42.
I have benefited from conversationsand correspondencewith many
people during my pilgrim’s progress along this, at times, rather steep
and winding road, especially Craig Bourne, John Campbell, David
Cockburn, John Divers, Christoph Hoerl, Jonathan Lowe, Andrew
McGonigal, Joseph Melia, Adrian Moore, Nathan Oaklander, Sean
Power, Rebecca Roache (who also kindly corrected a complete draft),
Jon Robson, Katia Saporiti, Peter Simons, Quentin Smith, Jonathan
Tallant and Roger Teichmann. I would also particularly like to thank