Reading Around My Work

Hello Library, warm, secluded, and quite. Today I am doing some reading around the concerns of my work; the relationship between time and memory, and the nature of presence.

'Present Pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory' by Andreas Huyssen

"Even now, when i try to remember . . . , the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as i think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on." W.G.Seabald, 'Austerlitz', p.24

"The boundary between past and present used to be stronger and more stable then it appears to be today. Untold recent and not so recent pasts impinge upon the present through modern media of reproduction like photography, film, recorded music, and the internet . . . The past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries. As a result, temporal boudnaries have weakened just as the experiential dimension of space has shrunk as a result of modern means of transportation and communication."

The section titled 'The hypertrophy of memory' proposes that this compression of our history and how we identify with history, as if we are, socially, culturally, and individually, transcending a paradigm of association with the past and more an understanding of the past as ever informing the present, through the present. In this sense there is an instanuity in our recognition of the present, something which is maybe more accurate to the nature of human perception. relate my statement that "memories we have to remember aren't memories at all. It is the memories tat live through us in the present which are real."

Rate of flow

The concept of "time passing" can be considered to be internally inconsistent, by asking "how much time goes by in an hour?" The question, "how fast does time pass" seems to have no satisfactory answer, in which answers such as "a second per second" would be, as some would argue, trivial and thus false. In addition, even if we do accept the above answer, then the statement "a second per second" can be expressed as a fraction which is always equal to 'one'. But this 'one' has no meaning beyond being a number and is thus also the wrong kind of answer. Therefore, the argument goes, the passage of time is nonsensical.
There is a major problem though in that the question of time is no different from space. We can similarly ask, "how much space is contained in a meter?" — and face a similar objection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)

In The Unreality of Time, J. M. E. McTaggart divided time into an A-series and a B-series, with the A-series describing events in absolute tensed terms (past, present, and future) and the B-series describing events in terms of untensed temporal relations (before and after). He also added the notion of a "C-series", a series that has an order but with no notion of time, like a series of letters.
      (series of letters like an un-regimented series of events is similar to how i believe we draw our sense of self and experience time through the self. We tend to only remember the important events, irrelevant of how far they were apart. How does this then relate to my suggestion that our memories live through our present actions; the unconscious self defined by past events, or the conscious self who is aware of this pre-determination. This then brings into question free will, and potentially how only through being conscious of the present moment and our actions in the present, can we be free to alter our actions and ultimately the future due to the inherent relationship between our learned behaviors  (preconceptions) and our perception. Though my previous statement exists within the 'A-series' framework, could it not be reconsidered in relation to the B series; in so much as, the past and the future can be plotted on some form of trajectory in the established understanding of sociology and the predictably of humans within given environments and under specific stimulus. Considering that B-theorists believe that the past, present, and future are equally real, I have to bring up the 'Many worlds' interpretation that every possible scenario of an event is as real as the other; this has reference to the nature of quantum mechanics; however it is both relevant to this discussion objectively but irrelevant to our human experience of life as I am concerned. The point I am trying to make is that we as humans exists within the fourth dimensional of space-time. Interestingly, it seems that our profound ability to remember and plot events in time is both the what sets us free from the unconscious cyclic nature of existence and yet our self absorption with the temporarily of life has lead to us creating a system where we try to calculate the speed of time in years, divided into months, to minuets, and seconds. How can we transcend this prison of time. Huyssen Suggests the 'Hypertrophy of memory' and in this maybe there is a portal. As we move ever closer to the instantaneous; the ability to share and communicate with increasing congruence with the present. We are becoming ever more interconnected; and through this process i believe that the self is becoming dissolved, just as our identification with the past is becoming more difficult, the separations between now and then. I equally see potential that separations between the self and the other will be transmuted. There is countless evidence to propagate this eventuality within our history and in such our nature. Anytime in history when one person has intended to rule assume power over another it has failed, and yet we all seek an affinity with the other, an essential connection that can be seen but is not limited to the sexual bond between male and female. Our tribal heritage is not of coincidence and does not still exist within the world today by coincidence  As the pressure of globalization increases the consistency of egoistic collisions, ideals are forced to dissolve into one another. As the collective gravity of matter formed the stars and planets, we are so heading for a dissolution, whether this will crush us under its weight or transmute us into a core is unclear. These considerations of time translate in scale, if we can release the binds of the past and so the future, we can see the present as a palimpsest of what has and may come to pass, though this image is shrouded in entropy, it is our unique potential to decipher these seemingly ambiguous observations and be imbued and informed through present consciousness. Magic.

Schrodinger's cat

Speaking on the relevance of the quantum mechanics and the 'Many worlds theory' I believe that Schrodinger's though experiment has much to offer.
Schrodinger wrote:

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

—Erwin Schrödinger, Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The present situation in quantum mechanics), Naturwissenschaften
(translated by John D. Trimmer in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society)

I have highlighted in orange specific phrases which hold presence in my current experiments with condensation of time and the abstracted ambiguous images that are produced. here's an example from my previous post:

Many Worlds theory

In 1957, Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which does not single out observation as a special process. In the many-worlds interpretation, both alive and dead states of the cat persist after the box is opened, but are incoherent from each other. In other words, when the box is opened, the observer and the already-dead cat split into an observer looking at a box with a dead cat, and an observer looking at a box with a live cat. But since the dead and alive states are incoherent, there is no effective communication or interaction between them.

More to read:

Art & Time (704.949529)

Phenomonology of Perception by M.Merleau-Ponty

The Anthropology of Time by Alfred Gell

Becomings by Elizabeth Grosz