Dawna I. Ballard

Expanding Organizational Temporality:

The Limits and Constraints of Temporal Commodification, Construction, and Compression

The scarcity of time is a taken-for-granted assumption in the contemporary workplace. For example, time is commodified both in practice (e.g., billable hours equate with revenue and employees “clock” in to receive wages) and through members’ language (e.g., time is spoken about as being spent, saved, wasted, lost, and the like). However, while this commodification of time is a significant theme in work time investigations and reflects a familiar modernist analysis, Hassard (2002) proposes that in order to apprehend its full complexity, organizational temporality must be understood vis-à-vis three predominant metaphors drawn from sociological theory that includes the construction of time by quasi-autonomous groups owed to symbolic and cultural processes, and the compression of time (and space) ushered in by postmodern communication technologies. The current paper explores interrelationships among these varied tropes and shows how all three perspectives are critical to informed social analyses of workplace temporality. 

Susan Banyas

everyday dancing, a dance lecture   

everyday dancing is inspired by the late composer, John Cage, whose seminal modern work, Lecture on Nothing, is a composition of everyday language (anecdotes and thoughts) written as a musical score.  everyday dancing uses the language of dance—action, breath, space, stillness, and timing—with words, to talk about dance and life.

Since the mind has no physical constraints (boundless imagination), the practice of putting thoughts, feelings, and images through the body (imagination in action) allows the limits of the body to set up the naturally poetic language of dance-mind.  The point is not to be a “good” dancer, but to feel the pleasure of one’s dance as a creative ally, as natural and easy as everyday speech.  What is the present composition, and how am I moving inside of it?  The lecture/composition will be partially improvised.  This dance essay is created in memory of our dear colleague, Karen Davies, a devotee of the everyday dance.  

In order to answer these questions, I have analyzed important historical and sociological qualitative and quantitative analysis procedures in order to assess which time-layers they address and if they are able to grasp interaction of time-layers.

Robert Belton

The Effects of Time Constraints on Interpretative Behaviors

Contemporary art writing seems less to be about an art object than the identification of the interpreter with some common interest group. Abstruse theoretical jargon is often used to enable identification with a group of like-minded interpreters, while diversity of opinion is attributed to differences in general mindsets, overall background knowledge, and critical prejudices and assumptions. Art writing, however, offers little explanation of the actual mechanisms driving interpretative difference. I propose that these are the combined effects of differences in observational behavior — for example, eye-movements — and the cognitive effects of semantic priming and expectancy. I propose that art writing could benefit from an understanding of how neural systems are linked to and support cognitive functions and how cognitive systems are related to an organism’s observable behavior. One way to isolate these links is to control for behavior in time.

Marc Botha

The Dynamic Simultaneity Of The Minimalist Object

Reconceptualizing aesthetic minimalism in terms of radical objecthood challenges several spatio-temporal conventions concerning the aesthetic object, and requires a repositioning of this discourse within the broader field of human interrelations and positions of subjecthood. A specific function of the modern subject is associable with a violent taking of the present, a conversion of pasts and futures into an active present tense. Is the object, then, always characterized by inert passivity – always just the scraps of the subject’s agency?

In addressing this question, I shall argue for an ontological mode, dynamic simultaneity, that finds its most cogent expression through minimalist objecthood. Its resistance to being systematized and tensed enables it to demonstrate a significant subversion of the powers of the subject through an appeal to a minimal sublimity – an equivocation of past, present and future – and a being that exposes a significant aesthetic, ethical and ontological crossroads.

Jeffrey Brown

Vital Chic: Bergson, James, and the Politics of American Temporalism

This exploration of the American vogue for the ideas of Henri Bergson in the 1910s will focus particularly on the Bergsonism of William James, the most influential of the philosopher’s American enthusiasts. James and his contemporaries were captivated by the “temporalism” at the center of Bergson’s thought. The potency of the theory of the immanent and irreducible reality of time lay in the notion that this most authentic order of experience pulsed just beyond the reach of discursive thought, and that it carried a spiritual and therapeutic potential unfathomable by conventional religion and science. A powerful compensatory postulate, duration, was thus joined to a formidable critical proposition: anti-intellectualism. For James, both aspects of Bergsonism held significant “cash value” as instruments aiding in the negotiation of a variety of metaphysical problems. I will argue that the pragmatic terms of James’s Bergsonism anticipated the manner of its assimilation by Americans in general.

Troy Camplin

In Defense of Hubris, the Virtuous Vice

I will explore the nature of hubris, and investigate it as a limit-challenging quality — a quality necessarily found in the tragic hero. The tragic hero challenges social, psychological, and moral constraints and, by doing so, creates the possibility for the emergence of new social, psychological, and moral orders. Without these challenges, there is nor growth and creativity in a culture. When the limits of an old level of psycho-social complexity cease being freeing and become oppressive, the hubristic person dares challenge that old level, presenting us with the possibility of a new, more complex psycho-social level that solves the contradictions of the lower level, and whose rules are more freeing both socially and psychologically. Thus, I will present a psycho-social model of emergence developed by the psychologist Claire Graves — one which maps very well onto J. T. Fraser’s umwelt theory of time emergence. It seems humans, too, emerge into new levels of complexity — which are also new levels of time-understanding and experience. We are able to see and enter into these new levels only because there have been those hubristic enough to challenge our limits.

Jamie Carr

A Struggle over Time: Civilization, Irrationality, and Theorizing Fascism

Historians and literary and art scholars have recently examined fascism’s conception of itself in temporal terms—as revolutionary, “primitive,” or irrational. Since the 1930s, however, time has informed theoretical understandings of fascist politics and subjectivity. Focusing on a text by British political intellectual Leonard Woolf, I examine this recourse to time. In Quack! Quack! (1935), Woolf argues that fascism is a regression to barbarism within modernity, using the anthropologist James Frazer to make his claim (a thinker who influenced modernists, not the least of which “fascist modernists”), while condemning Henri Bergson as a fascist thinker. Why does Woolf draw on Frazer when anthropology was moving away from Frazer’s developmental metaphor of human progression? Why is Bergson targeted as a harbinger of fascist thought? Woolf’s text enacts, that is, a struggle between rationality and civilization as oppositional to irrationality and primitivism.

Anthony Crabbe

The Limitations of the Minkowski Model of Space-time

This paper seeks to demonstrate that the non-Euclidean Minkowski geometry of ‘space-time’ is only one among a number of methods for mapping events in Relativity. Both Hans Montanus and the author have described mapping methods for the Special Theory that reveal Euclidean space-time manifolds, governed by the functions of the circle rather than the hyperbola. The author’s approach is to measure time t, by reference to the displacement of a light pulse dc, rather than to seconds of the arc rotated by the hands of a stopwatch. The displacement dc is the radius of a spherical wave front w, which provides a parameter for any observers A located at the origin of this pulse to compare their measurements of events with those made by observers in translating frames such as A’.

It is argued that Minkowski geometry may not be best suited to representing the physics obtaining at and beyond the limits of relativity theory. At the limit, where observed frames translate at the velocity of light, the Minkowski length of the proper time vector t (which can also be equated with relative mass m) extends to infinity. Whereas in the Euclidean analogue, the length of t ranges only from 1 = dc to 0. This suggests that the ‘infinite’ time dilation and mass-energy implied by Minkowski geometry is only notional. Beyond the limit of relativity, where hypothetical signals travel faster than light, the Minkowski ‘light cone’ reveals situations where such signals must travel backward relative to the observer’s time axis. However, a ‘light sphere’ precludes any notion of ‘travel’ with respect to time coordinates, since the parameter w expands continuously away from the observer’s position. Accordingly, light sphere modelling of superluminary signalling scenarios finds only positive and not negative time readings.

Robert Daniel

Dead Narrators: Illuminations from the "Other Side"

My presentation will focus on one particular kind of imaginative representation, the indirect evocation of death through voices of dead narrators who are portrayed as conscious, willful, feeling.  In the fifteenth century there appeared in Europe the danse macabre in which partially decayed, mummified cadavers, (generally understood to represent our bodily future), invite living partners to join the macabre procession and pass from life. To the reluctant and protesting invitees, the dead explain that no one, neither king nor pauper nor pope nor hermit, may avoid or postpone the dance.  After something of a lull during the Neoclassical and Enlightenment periods in Europe, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen a resurgence of didactic representations of deceased narrators. In most modern examples of this literary motif, as in the danse macabre, the speaking dead purport to impart special knowledge to their audience, the living.  While contemporary ethical reflections and injunctions are quite different from the ars moriendi and Church-dictated moral codes of the Middle Ages, modern literary encounters with the dead continue to present illuminating messages about the meaning of life, about the preciousness of moments, about the severe limitations of human perception and power, about ills that may reside in the desires of the living, about taking decisions, about facing death. I will limit my reflection to a few specific texts, for example, excerpts from Charles Baudelelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and, perhaps, scenes from recent films like American Beauty and Ghost.  I propose to catalog the salient traits of their lessons, to compare them to those of the traditional danse macabre, and to tease out some implications of modern and postmodern belief systems.

Koen DePryck

A General Theory of Time Based on Determinism and Indeterminacy

This paper presents a general theory of time based on the concept of a ratio between determinism and indeterminacy. I present the model starting with a general discussion of determinacy and indeterminacy in terms of a distribution of probabilities. Next I use the notions developed in that context to introduce a general notion of time as a ratio between indeterminacy and determinacy.  Two basic heuristic criteria underlie the model: coherence and non-triviality, the latter simply meaning that the theory must exclude some things from happening. As we proceed, we will need to investigate how the basic notions used to build the model relate to existing theories about and experiments involving time. Next, we need to make sure the model meets the non-triviality conditions: Everything should not be equally plausible within the model. Finally, we will need to show that the model is coherent. This paper is an onset to that program.

Joed Elich

Institutions, time and constraints

Even though we, as human beings, modern or post-modern, think we can be free, original and authentic, our actions, thoughts, and emotions are cast in patterns which we share with other individuals. These are patterns which we did not invent, but which we pass on (changed or unchanged) to the next generation. After we die, people will continue to act, think, and feel within the context of “institutions” like marriage, family, church, school, university, voluntary associations. Institutions are “humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction”. Institutions may be composed of both formal (laws) and informal (social norms) rules of the game within a society. 

Institutions supersede human lifetimes – they put constraints on our acting in order to secure continuity in norms and values. Interestingly enough, the timeliness of institutions differs enormously and some institutions are less vulnerable over time than others.

Carol Fischer

Dramatic Time

The stage is a unique space on which time plays. The linear time of a theatre event, from the audience’s entrance to the exit of the last spectator frames a performance: the start designated by dimming houselights, the show proceeding minute by minute to the final stage cue. But within this frame is the spacetime of the play, possibly representing historical time, future time, anytime, or time outside of time. On a stage, time is apt to go backwards or jump around undisciplined, suddenly stopping or racing ahead, becoming a character with its own energy. Actors and directors are concerned with rhythm of speech and action, beats of plot development imposing limitations on their embodied creativity, but all is manipulated by authors who bend the event with pressures of time. In this paper I explore the interplay of meaning and function regarding time within the dramatic art form.

J. T. Fraser (Founder's Lecture) 

Constraining Chaos 

With the help of the integrated study of time, this paper interprets the history of matter, life, and man in terms of the evolution of constraints upon the primeval chaos. The task is carried out in six steps, addressing the following themes:

1. The evolution of causation and time: from probabilistic causation to goal-directedness.
2. Creativeness in nature and man: a thermodynamic perspective
3. The constitutive conflicts of matter, life, and man:
4. Constraints as agents of change: from the laws of nature to human values.
5. Human time: a delicate balancing act
6. How to survive the constraints upon being human

James Gilbert-Walsh

A Brief History of the Concept of the Concept of Time

This presentation will focus not so much on the dominant conceptions of temporality which have been articulated throughout the history of Western thought, but rather on the underlying logic which structures and constrains, in advance, the way in which such conceptions are articulated and interpreted.

Specifically, I will discuss: 1) how efforts to acknowledge the phenomenon of time typically strive to articulate a conception of time (i.e., an answer to the question “what is it?”) that is somehow adequate to the phenomenon; 2) how these attempts strive to achieve this adequacy by way of a logic of division, distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic conceptions of time; and finally 3) how Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, while still caught in this logic in certain respects, nevertheless manage to engage it critically in a way that their predecessors did not.

Sabine Gross

Brevity as Enabling Constraint. On Wit and Humor.

Focusing on brevity and pictorial economy as a constituent of humor (in such genres as cartoons, jokes, and aphorisms) I address a) the related phenomena of timing and verbal/visual economy as temporal or quasi-temporal constraints b) economy of presentation and other forms of underdetermination in shaping audience response. The cognitive effort of “un-compressing” such oral or written-visual texts is a necessary element in creating the comic effect. Where Kant and Iser associate the comic with a collapse (of expectations, of positions), I will emphasize the cognitive construction that creates sense and unfold temporal sequence from cryptic or brilliantly condensed brevity.

The rich array of theories of humor/wit/the comic will be sampled with particular emphasis on underdetermination, radical reduction, and other forms of constraint and economy: the affect of humor is generated as we resolve incongruities, construct causality, and partially undo the economy of words and presentation in genres that exploit the comic potential of brevity as constraint.

Ronald Gruber

Limits Of The Distortion Of Time Estimation

(Poster)

Prior studies suggested that an unbeknownst rate alteration of a background clock distorts time estimation. If the clock speed was slow, the retrospective “flow of time” passed slowly and subsequent prospective duration judgments were short. What have not been evaluated are the limits to which time estimation can be distorted. What has also not been evaluated is how essential non-awareness is for the time distortion effect to occur.

The brain cannot rely on its highly variable physiological rhythms to provide the most accurate time estimate. Its final time estimation is therefore influenced by the internal clock and attention mechanisms which themselves are associated with moderate variability. However, the brain must also set a boundary to the final time estimation and does so within the range described.

P.A. Hancock

Evolutionary Constraints on Brain Mechanisms of Temporal Experience

 (poster)

The experience of time results from an interaction between tripartite brain mechanisms that deal with temporal processing. The lowest level function, shared by all living organisms, provides information concerning the persistence of self. Beyond self-persistence, the organism synchronizes activities within environmental constraints via perception-action systems which permit time critical responses independent of any necessity to reference any external time-keeping convention. The highest-level mechanism, centered in the frontal cortex, exceeds the constraints of ‘real time’ by generating ‘what-if’ scenarios which anticipate possible courses of events. This latter temporal solution demonstrates that memory is actually an artifact created by the requirement to anticipate the future and time itself has acted to fashion the way in which this tri-partite evolution of temporal capacities has been developed and integrated in the human brain. A number of aspects of temporal comprehension will be extracted from this newly proposed functional neural architecture.

Olga Hasty

Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading or the Artifice of Mortality

Invitation was one of Nabokov’s favorite novels, written “in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration.”  Although it reads like an attack on dictatorial rule, Nabokov denied it political relevance, aiming at totalitarianism of a higher order:  the constraints of mortality that he seeks, as the epigraph indicates, to refute:  “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.”     

The novel rebels against the certainty that life is movement toward death operating in conjunction with the uncertainty of when death will come.  Its hero is condemned to execution, but denied “compensation for a death sentence” – the “knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.”  His nearing end is manifested metaphorically, but it is in the construction of the world of Invitation that Nabokov –  whom one reviewer called “almost as much a theorizer of fiction as a practitioner” – develops narrative strategies that challenge mortality.  This paper examines his strategies.

Florian Klapproth

Waiting as a Temporal Constraint

Waiting is a temporal constraint, for several reasons. (1) Waiting inhibits goal-directed action. (2) During waiting time must be spent in a more or less passive way. (3) Moreover, as waiting time usually cannot be chosen, but is dependent on external variables, people who wait are also dependent on these external variables. (4) And finally, waiting time is uncertain.

Researchers have tried to find factors that affect both perceived waiting time and the emotions associated with waiting. The author conducted two experimental studies in which participants had to wait for a certain time period. In study 1 the participants received different causes which explained their wait. In study 2 different expectations about the duration of the wait were induced. Dependent variables were the time estimates of the participants and their evaluations of the waiting period. The paper will present the results and some explanations within the frame of psychological theories. 

Heike Klippel

Reproduction and Repetition: Can Time be Defeated?

Reproduction and repetition are movements towards a duration of past and present into the future, thereby trying to overcome time’s limits and constraints. For Marx (Capital) reproduction coincides with production; it means eternal renewal, of technical processes as well as of human beings. According to Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) the ubiquity and timelessness of reproduction media denies the consequences of history. Nowadays the conditions of historical media show that they age indeed, and often there exists no original matrix any more as a base from which to enter the reproductive circle again. But the modernist promise of eternity has meanwhile been renewed through the notion of “loss free” digital reproduction. My paper will discuss the implicit assumptions and desires of these ideas and contrast them with repetition as the–generally much less optimistically considered–subjective side of efforts to transform the past into the future.

Gus Koehler

The Radiance of Time: Bardo Limits and Constraints

For Vajrayana Buddhism, the now is an interval, a boundary, a point of tension and suspension with an atmosphere of uncertainty. It is a bifurcation point of variable length; its name is “bardo.” The bardo is immersed in the conventional. It emerges from “unstained” ultimate or primordial emptiness or “basal clear light.” The basal clear light is not the sphere of cognition. Cognition, including cognition of time, belongs to conventional reality. 

Cyclical existence moves through six bardos—all of which are the effulgent of the basal clear light—until Buddhahood.  The bardos are: this life; dream; meditation; dying; dharmata; and of existence.  In each the character of the now as embodiment and temporal knowing varies.  A complete and consistent cross-bardo yogic wisdom leads to total cessation of the now in the basal clear light.

Useful practices to test the tradition and author’s assertions will be suggested.

Michalis Kontopodis

Processing Time and Unlimiting Human Development

Is time a-priori irreversible or is irreversibility a modern discursive-material alignment? Is human development evolution or could it be perceived as ‘involution’? Does the model of irreversible time and development create limits, constrain difference and favour sameness? What is the role of mediations and translations with regard to time and development? How is human development ‘fabricated’ in schools, buildings, documents, files, CVs and other discursive-material objects?

My theory and research challenge the concept of irreversible time of thermodynamics, which underlies developmental psychology, and suggest a different understanding of time and human development based on process philosophy (especially G. Deleuze), performativity theory and the psychology of Lev Semënovič Vygotsky (1896-1934). In my presentation, I will briefly outline my argumentation and support it with ethnographical material gathered during a research conducted in a secondary school.

Rémy Lestienne

Time and Attention

Women and men are the only beings, I believe, who are able to think about what they will do the next day. This because such a thought implies three intellectual abilities that are proper to mankind: the capacity to take their own thoughts as objects of their thinking, the ability of mental time travels – to the past thanks to their episodic memory or to the future – and the possibility to project very far into the future, as a consequence of their enlarged and complexified forebrain.

On the other hand, when we pay attention to something, when we fix our attention, then our inner sense of  the flux of time freezes. I shall investigate the neural correlates that, in the brain, might illustrate and perhaps explain this complementarity (using Niels Bohr’s terminology) between the apperception of time and its flow, and attention given to an object or to an idea.

Erica Magnus

Timelessness in Ephemeral Praxis: The Non-narrative Impulse in Performance

In this paper, I will focus on that which belies or counteracts the formal limitations of theatrical narrative.  I will examine the notion that a timeless or extra-temporal impulse inheres in theatrical form, and that the response suggesting that time seems to stop in moments of performance is foregrounding a justifiable effect of the medium.

My method begins with a temporal reading of Aristotle’s Poetics. I will propose that the elusive term catharsis describes a rhythmic suspension through which a perspective becomes available against which the finite spatio-temporal propositions of the plot can be measured. The non-narrative impulse in performance has been cited variously but never examined concertedly and I will consider critical allusions to moments in performance that seem to pull from a nexus of time to one of space. Such statements are found in the work of Bernard Beckerman, Susanne Langer, Gavin Bolton, Stanton Gardner, Bert States, J.T. Fraser and Wylie Sypher, among others. I will propose the term “iconicity” to describe the anti-narrative pull of these dramatic moments and finally will suggest that their tendency toward spatial apprehension might be explained through an understanding of certain cognitive functions.

Juan Mah y Busch

When is the Time for Struggle?: The Time-Space of Ethics and Power in Chicana Narrative

During the 20th Century, Latina American theories of liberation moved metaphorically from Shakespeare’s Ariel to Caliban, replacing the hopefulness of freedom with tension and struggle, a resistance that has emerged through spatial representations.

In this context, The Hungry Woman, by Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga, frustrates easy notions of time. However, the play’s prison-like setting also undermines easy associations between space and struggle, opening up an opportunity to revisit Ariel, the figure of time and ethics, but from Caliban’s late-modern perspective.

This essay describes Caliban’s Ariel by focusing on Moraga’s conceptualization of hope. Since hope is usually understood temporally, as duration, a sensibility that reaches from now to then, I argue that Moraga’s use of time and space does not argue for an abandonment of hope. Rather, the playwright reconfigures hope via an understanding of the limits of time, and in so doing, reunites Chicana/o resistance with a discourse of ethics.

Robert L. Martone

The Mirror of Consciousness and Temporal Limits 

Consciousness is the breadth and limit of the know universe.  To each individual, the world is known to greater or lesser extent by their experience and comprehension.  Consciousness emerges, and might be the result of evolutionary processes.  The notion of the individual arises from consciousness of the self existing in a present, and having a history and anticipations for the future.   While individuation is an important feature of consciousness, there is evidence that we physiologically internalize the actions, intentions and emotions of others through the activity of mirror neurons.  This propensity to divine the intention of others may explain the human custom, common to all religious experience, of seeking a universal agency.  Thus, inherent in the limitations of consciousness is the drive for transcendence.

Benjamin W. McGee

The Special Theory of Relativity highlights a fundamental relationship between time and motion that supplants the view of an invariant, universal temporal experience.  Relativistic observations show that temporal sequence, rate, and interval are variable parameters that depend upon the idiosyncratic characteristics of an object’s coordinate system, which contradicts the modern scientific understanding of time as artificial or illusory.  By utilizing the relativistic time-motion relationship to redefine basic physical concepts and generate a new language of physical mechanics (Temporal Mechanics), it is possible to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between physical time and mechanical movement, unifying Special Relativity and Newtonian Mechanics as a fluid continuum.  In this way, relativistic temporal observations may be freed from the epistemologically inadequate framework through which they were originally interpreted, highlighting previously unidentified relationships between seemingly unrelated physical phenomena while calling into question the reality of a physical limit to time at speed c.

Zara Mirmalek

Solar discrepancies: Mars exploration and the curious problem of interplanetary time

It is common for organizational boundaries to operate across multiple time zones, promoting the notion that standard clock time is a universal tool for work coordination.  In contradiction to this notion, I present an
organization that extends across the solar system, for which solar time replaces standard clock time as the primary tool for work coordination. Using ethnographic data from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers mission, where
mission success required terrestrial and extra-terrestrial work to be conducted according to extra-terrestrial time, I explore some of the implications of employing the following assumption: that socio-technical
processes of work that are set to clock time are interchangeable with those set to solar time.  And, I consider how this assumption conflates two distinct past eras of work, agrarian and industrial, within the
context of a post-industrial work setting that endeavors to produce the future of humanity.

Carlos Montemayor

Time: Biological, Intentional and Cultural

The topic of limits and constraints in the context of theoretical approaches to time becomes particularly interesting when experimental results from different areas of research are contrasted. In my paper, I explain how the research on biological clocks describes a set of constraints on psychological and cultural time that determine our awareness of duration. The main thesis of the paper is that psychological time is a cognitive capacity that bridges high-level or conceptual-intentional processes that are subject to cultural variation with low-level, or psychophysical and biological processes that are the product of our evolution. After assessing different arguments, I conclude that in order to fully understand the psychology of time we need to conceptualize it as a series of processes that mutually determine and constrain each other.

Tom Munnecke

The Good Ancestor Principle

Jonas Salk said, "Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."  We will examine some models for following through on this responsibility, looking at formal models for expressing the role of how information from the future real or anticipated might impact our decisions in the present.  

The fine print of the second law of thermodynamics, as well as Shannon’s theory of information, constrains their applicability to closed systems.  The explosive growth of the World Wide Web demonstrates how open information spaces may become autocatalytic spaces.  These are spaces that have the property that adding more stuff to them increases their capacity to hold more stuff. 

We will examine ways of using these concepts with the intention of making the world a better place, which we call uplift.  We will examine ways that concrete or exotic retroinformation may shape our present-day decision making, which we will call the Good Ancestor Principle.

Deirdre Murphy

Racializing the Limit and Extent of National Time: The Coincidence of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Construction of National Standard Time, 1883

For the most part, scholarship on nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants asserts that these figures were subject to consistent derision in the visual culture of the era. Modes of representation, so prevailing thought goes, were few and they were incendiary. Chinese are generally thought to have appeared as fantastical teeming and slithering beasts. Or, in human form, portrayed as uniformly untrustworthy, opium-addicted, and threatening to white womanhood. However, my reading of Gilded Age illustrations from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly*the two most popular illustrated periodicals of the era*suggests that there is another and more subtle story to tell.

Just how these seemingly contradictory impressions coexisted, why they did, and what purposes they served, is a topic I examine by focusing on two events that I argue were in fact linked. The first is the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first legislation to prohibit the admittance of an entire immigrant group solely on the basis of race and country of origin. The second is the establishment of national standard time in 1883. In different though overlapping ways, both of these events were concerned with fostering a homogeneous nation* the unity of which was to be constructed in terms that were both racially and temporally limiting. In relation to both of these events, I examine images of Chinese immigrants in which such figures are constructed as*unfortunately, innately, and interestingly*out of time. One outcome of this judgment for the Chinese in the United States is that they were subject to a dangerous form of cultural appreciation.  Such imagery had the effect of distancing Chinese figures from the ideals of citizenship in the modern nation. At the same time, it also disclosed mainstream concerns over the shift to homogeneous national time.

Tyler T. Ochoa

Limits on the Duration of Copyright

How long should a copyright last?  There are two principal views.  Some people believe an author has a natural right to profit from the exploitation of his or her works.  Under this view, copyright should be perpetual and is limited in duration only because of practical considerations.  Under the utilitarian view, however, copyright exists primarily to encourage the creation and distribution of new literary and artistic works.  It functions by granting a temporary monopoly that allows the publisher to charge a higher-than-efficient price.  Because the higher price is by definition inefficient, the utilitarian view holds that copyright terms should only last as long as is necessary to accomplish their incentive function.  Historically, copyright terms have increased over time, as countries that initially adopted the utilitarian view have moved closer to the natural rights model in the interests of international harmonization.

Steve Ostovich

Pauline Eschatology: Thinking and Acting in the Time That Remains

Recent interest indicates the letters of Paul are becoming newly legible two thousand years after he wrote them. This paper will examine Paul’s understanding of time, that is, his eschatology. Paul was convinced that the resurrection of Jesus marked the rupture of time in promising the temporal presence of the Messiah at the parousia. This messianic time is limited time wherein “thinking” is a historical rationality of promise, hope and remembrance rather than an escape into the timeless, and “acting” is a form of political theology. Eschatology has been a difficult topic for Western thinking especially in modernity. It has either been secularized as philosophy of history or dismissed as politically dangerous. This paper will use Paul to claim now is the time for this time. Paul’s eschatology might also provide a way to think about J. T. Fraser’s “sociotemporality.”

Jo Alyson Parker

Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas of Narrative Constraints and Environmental Limits

David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas pushes the limits of narrative construction through its use of a narrative constraint. The novel comprises six separate but thematically linked stories, the first of which is embedded in the second, the second of which is embedded in the third, etc., with each story breaking off at a crucial point as we move to the next. The sixth or chronologically last story serves as a fulcrum, the novel then boomeranging back through the preceding stories, each of which finally comes to closure. The self-imposed narrative constraint that Mitchell employs him to drive home a message about exceeding environmental limits; the temporally innovative narrative structure shows us the dire future that present action (or inaction) may trigger, yet the boomerang back from a post-apocalyptic “future” to a past seemingly still in flux enables us to appreciate the far-reaching ramifications of our present actions.

Jack Petranker

Hearing Time: An Exploration in Multiple Temporalities
 

This presentation calls into question the usual interpretation of ‘subjective’ temporality as centered on the self’s experience in time. Such a focus on subjective temporality encourages a distanced approach to time, resulting in an inability to accept experientially time’s transience. This paper suggests that instead of putting the self at the center, we experiment with putting the senses at the center. It does so by focusing on the sense of hearing, in part because hearing tends to be undervalued in comparison to seeing, but more importantly because hearing and meaning are so closely linked. After establishing an appropriate framework for inquiry, the presentation will invite participants to explore the relation between time and hearing through a few simple exercises. The aim is to access an experiential temporality focused less on the linear succession of moments and more on a “time of the whole.”

Michael Pigott

Time and Film Editing

The function of editing in mainstream cinema is to create temporal continuity between the individual shots that make up a scene, and to naturalise the temporal and spatial dislocation of the scene-change. My paper will attempt to analyse the intrinsic manipulation of time in this process, and to discover how the temporality of continuity editing might be defined.

Taking the ‘cut’ as the limiting factor for the temporal extension of a shot, we see that the form of mainstream cinema is determined by breakages – the cuts across time which structure the scene and consequently the viewer’s sensation of time.

I will compare the structuring, and necessarily constrictive, force of continuity editing with the ostensibly greater temporal freedom of a film-style which favours long takes. The difference lies not just in quantity but in quality, and I will appeal to Andrei Tarkovsky’s theory of ‘time-pressure’ in an attempt to produce an aesthetics of film-time.

Robbie Pos

Two temporal constraints in self-organization, imposed by evolution

There are two mutually exclusive types of autobiographic memory, which match two personal time perspectives and represent two temporal constraints in experiencing personal time. So-called alphas are preferentially oriented to the present, have a situational time perspective, and are good at realizing short-term goals. So-called betas are preferentially oriented to their future and past which are arranged in an enduring timescape. They are good at pursuing long-term goals.

Basic psychological changes in ontogenetic development must originate in evolution. For example, recall from general knowledge memory and developing language must appear before the internalization of the environment into general knowledge memory, and the internalization of personal vignettes into an autobiographic knowledge memory (the latter representing our emerging life story). Subsequently the duality in time perspective must appear; then the shift from pre-logical to concrete logical thinking; and finally abstract thinking.

Hans Rämö

Time Constraints in New Mobile Communication Practices among Senior Managers

Based on studies on the working conditions for senior managers in a leading telecommunication company, and new forms of mobile management practice by the use of mobile handheld communicators, this paper focuses on unexpected time-saving limitations and constraints that are resulting from the implementation of the mobile devices.

Unoriginal management practices have become discernible, e.g. when deciding how to deal with everyday situations and problems at work can be solved by asking others on the communicator’s contact list. Empowerment might thus be replaced by disempowerment and increased reliance and dependence in managers’ ability to be in charge and to deal with all kinds of inappropriately timed problems.

The above, and other unexpected aspects of new mobile management practices are analyzed, and implications to the wider discourse of communication, management and social aspects of time are addressed.

Lanei M. Rodemeyer

Inner Time Consciousness and the Constraints of Freedom

This paper begins with a brief overview of the phenomenological understanding of inner time-consciousness, with an emphasis on how the present carries within it both the past and the future. Then, in order to consider the possibility that there is freedom within the limits of such temporality, I turn to creativity and creative interpretation as one avenue toward freedom. I conclude that creativity is a form of freedom that requires temporal constraint. More importantly, creativity places an emphasis on the futural aspect of temporality, and thus I introduce an analysis of the relation between creativity and futural consciousness. Finally, I consider how ethical freedom must also fall within temporal constraints, and further, how ethics must take into account not only its temporal limits but also the importance of the future as essential to its structure.

Erich Runge and Claudia Fenske

The Physics of the Steady State and the Physics of Glasses: Artefacts of limitations to the observation time ?

To describe a system as "being in the steady state" is a central and very useful concept of Statistical Physics and Thermodynamics. The apparent steadiness of steady states results from our limited experimental ability to resolve the on-going rapid fluctuations. In contrast, the concept of a "glass" reflects our inability to observe long enough to see the slow non-local dynamics in the glass. This makes the Physics of Glasses an extremely challenging field for theoretical physics. Nevertheless, every look out of the window confirms that pragmatically the concept of a glass is well defined. We will comment on this apparent contradiction and pose the question - but not answer it - whether social changes show glass-like behavior. In particular, we ask whether revolutionary events corresponds to glass breaking into pieces.

Ida Sabelis

Time regimes: temporal constraints in organizations under acceleration

Under ‘new public management’ (Parker & Jary 1995), or driven by ‘neoliberalism’ (Davies et. al. 2005), the tasks of professionals implicitly are designed on the basis of industrial time budget views that come to dominate the working time in all organizations. When time is money, the “in-between-times” with their variation and unpredictability can at most be “estimated” (Peters 2003). Time compression implies tasks based on “estimations” to be cut out, which ironically adds to the workload. Inspired by workload studies in universities, I started to label differences in work time experience between departments. A conclusion was that implicit differences in time perception were related to the temporal orders in the daily tasks, to which diverse values were attached, and from which specific patterns of organizational politics (changing power relations) were emerging. These patterns could best be pinpointed by the concept of time regimes, which will be the core concept of my presentation, based on recent observation from service organizations.

Mary Schmelzer

The Tempest, Propero’s Books and the Limits of Linear Temporality

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, thought by most scholars to be his last play addresses the power of the ruler and the artist in this linear narrative about Prospero, the overthrown “right Duke Of Milan” who finds a way to wield remarkable power on a deserted island. The dark comedy twists it way through the expected plot conventions: star-crossed young lovers, feuding brothers, amiable fools as well as a fillip of the exotic with monsters, spirits, and magic. After less than two hours on the stage and less than two days in the world of the play, all’s well and ends well enough. The gifts of language, the poignancy of the human condition, the complexity of its ideas, the art of construction, the wit transcend the moment s they linger in post-performance excitation, meditation or chat over drinks.

The event itself—the performed or read play—is limited by measurable time, the experience of which frees us up to dally with its graces at our leisure or its insistence. But other things can happen when the work tropes into a starting point for a more internal investigation. Prospero is a particularly complex person even as he acts and dreams onstage, but if one could find a way to look inside and parse the complexity of his unconscious, another Prospero might emerge. Film can do that and Peter Greenaway’s 1991 Prospero’s Books connects his audience to the irruption of the unconstrained imaginary order that challenges the limits of measurable chronology as well as the desire for order and consistency that such a construct privileges.

The film is in every way excessive. Prospero, the libidinous magus, artist, and power broker immerses himself in the pleasure and chaos of creation. Lacanian jouissance—a desire for pleasure without regard to consequences—prevails in this piece that has received little critical attention and even less understanding.

Walter Schweidler

Kurzfassung von „Ontological Aspects of Absolute Past“

The question of the beginning and end of time raises philosophical problems which can show the relevance of metaphysical ideas like the concept of an ontological plurality of times and especially the idea of an absolute past. This idea has been developed in systematic form by the German idealistic thinker Schelling. He speaks of a reality which is in itself neither temporal nor eternal but has limitations which only in relation to the time of our universe are turned into a temporal structure. In this view which is also important for the understanding of current phenomenological positions (Lévinas, Marion), there is a second time, a “temps perdu”, which is in equal distance from any new event in our universe including its possible beginning and end.

Nina Serebrianik

Death and Aging Across the Disciplines: Temporal Constraints of the Human and Post-Human

Concerns about the temporal limits of the human life – death and aging – provide a connection between humanities, social and cultural studies, and sciences. From The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and contemporary science fiction, literature explores the possibilities to defy these limits. Popular culture reflects the same attitude, while science offers possibilities to prolong life and cure terminal diseases using genetic engineering and cloning. However, both humanities and sciences express concerns about defying these limitations, raising the question of whether without these constraints we lose our humanity. In literature, eternal youth and immortality become a burden and lead to atrocities; in science, such concerns caused over 40 countries to ban human cloning experiments, and heated debates about banning genetic engineering continue worldwide, involving activist groups and general public. Different disciplines share these problems; together, they can solve them.

Katherine A. S. Sibley

Shrouds and Crowds: Mourning Time and the Harding Funeral Train

This paper will examine a U.S. president’s (untimely) death to investigate an overlooked phenomenon, “mourning time.” More than eighty years have passed, but Warren G. Harding’s funeral rites still demonstrate how mourners attempt to stop time in order to connect with something not of time. After Harding’s sudden demise in San Francisco, a train rushed his remains eastward for burial (it still took four days). Yet upon arrival in Washington, his body was carried slowly through town on a horse-drawn caisson. While the horses’ gait signals the deliberate pace which mourning rituals require, it was hardly the only time-slowing that occurred. Businesses, transportation, and communication systems stopped as well. His remains lay in state afterward, too, to permit the measured passage of witnesses in the Rotunda. In death, slow motion creates the illusion of constricting time’s arrow, with its relentless past/future dynamic, allowing mourners to connect instead with some eternal or divine dimension.

Helen Sills

Time: Limits and Constraint

This presentation comments on the temporal limits and constraints operating in both the brain and the mind, particularly in the case of a composer working with varied patterns of temporality. I will follow these temporal constraints through the journey of a human life-span: from the formation of the temporal lobes to a final, mature creation of a concise temporal structure in music.

We shall look briefly at the ‘Requiem Canticles’ of Igor Stravinsky, composed when he was 84 years old. As he came to the end of his life, he felt the need to consolidate his explorations of time in music. In a work consisting of 9 cameo movements, lasting just 15 minutes, which he called his ‘Pocket Requiem’, he revisited many of the musical techniques for creating varied time experience on which he had previously worked, but in new, highly condensed forms. By the utmost economy of formal means, he left us a temporal construction which not only marks out directions in which the human brain might develop in future, but also allows us to participate in a sense of duration so extended as to seem ‘outside’ time.

Marc Singer

Menelaus, More or Less:  Recursion, Supplementarity, and the Limits of Subjectivity

Christian Steineck

Interpreting Time: Methodological Constraints

The paper's aim is to elucidate methodological constraints that apply to a natural philosophy of time as envisioned by J. T. Fraser. Such a natural philosophy is a possible and productive endeavor, but needs regular critical revision especially in respect to remnants of uncritically accepted world-views or over-interpretation of elements integrated from the various fields of science and humanities. Neo-Kantian theory of knowledge is used as a tool in undertaking such revisions. A brief description of Fraser's own fundamental methodological, epistemological and ontological assumptions will highlight its merits as well as points of contention. The main section of the paper will explore the Neo-Kantian concept of methodological pluralism and its implications for the study of time, and spell out some revisions of and guiding principles for the further development of the natural philosophy of time.

John Streamas

Closure and “Colored People’s Time”

A multicultural turn demanded recognition of “colored people’s time,” or CPT—an in-joke among people of color, explaining late arrivals or slow and languid performance. I will examine the relationship between CPT and narrative closure, to determine whether the former, often simplified as a circular sense of time, frustrates or even thwarts the latter. Crucial to this study are Lefebvre’s analysis of rhythms of everyday life and Morson’s conception of “sideshadowing,” which allows “a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not.” Morson was not writing about racial politics, but sideshadowing recalls an unspoken assumption of CPT: that lateness or slowness resists expectations of what should happen. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the emergence of a “double consciousness” among African Americans, and sideshadowing, if it is indeed a function of CPT, may indicate a “double consciousness of time” among peoples of color.

John J. Stuhr

Time, Death and Eternity: Limits to Meaning and Meanings of Limits

This paper (with soundtrack and video images) connects three undertakings: i)an analysis of time as limit/constraint and, reciprocally, time as determination/enabling condition of human actions and their meanings--meanings that are never wholly fixed, final, or past; ii)a critical rejection of three key notions--the future, death, and eternity--as they are employed or deployed to transcend time as limit/constraint by ethical theories and theologies of the eternal as distinguished from ethics of the temporal; and, iii)an account of the differences between meanings and values that supports a reformulation and defense of the desire to live forever in the face of death and the belief that we gods are gods for only a brief time (and thus that the temporality of divinity does not make it any less divine).

Jonathan Tallant

Memory, Anticipation And The (Un)Reality Of Past And Future

There has been some disagreement as to whether or not the structure of scientific enquiry reveals anything substantive regarding the metaphysical structure of time. Some philosophers have argued that the very possibility (and actions) of science indicates that our world must be A-theoretic: the view that there is something fundamental expressed by the terms ‘was, ‘is’ and ‘will’. Others have argued that the very same possibility of science indicates that our world is B-theoretic: that the world is composed from tenseless relations. On this view the terms ‘later than’ and ‘earlier than’ reflect the metaphysical structure of reality. I argue that, simply by observing the structure of scientific enquiry we have no evidence to favour either view.

 Nicholas Tresilian

The Dark Side of the Meme: Temporal limits and constraints to the Irrational?

The memes which drive the global economy from day to day are semantic hybrids in which rational and relational meaning are fuzzily commingled. We need this fuzzy commingling to negotiate the conflicting real-time priorities of our differently-speeded biological and ecological evolutions – political biases towards one set of values or the other are often traded off across relatively long periods of time.

This presentation looks at what may be going on in the meme when the equable trade-off of rational and relational meaning is thrown down by the more coercive forms of ir-rational meaning: meaning gone bad, as in the Nazis’ so-called `final solution’ and in the menacing fundamentalisms of the 21^st century. In the context of our increasingly volatile and time-compact world, it asks if we can head the irrational meme off at the pass by a better understanding of its semantic mechanisms and of its evolutionary causation. Or is the meme itself mortal?

Temenuga Trifonova

Bergson and Film Theory

This paper will explore the curious incongruity between Bergson’s critique of cinema as incapable of representing the spontaneity and indeterminacy of reality and, on the other hand, his enormous influence on theories of film realism. I will demonstrate that Bergson’s understanding of reality and time in terms of ‘continuity’, ‘indivisibility’, ‘flow’, ‘spontaneity and ‘unself-reflexiveness’ underlines the dominant understanding of realism in cinema.

Bergson defines duration as the automatic preservation of the past in the present, the interpenetration of the past and the present. I will argue, however, that insofar as the idea of interpenetration implies a relationship of discontinuity rather than continuity (between the past and the present, or between the real and the unreal), the most ‘Bergsonian’ films are those governed by the (supposedly) un-Bergsonian principles of fragmentation and spatialization. I will consider the spatialization and fragmentation of time and narrative in art films as an example of the postmodern transformation of the Bergsonian notion of time as freedom/indeterminacy into the notion (and experience) of time as distraction.

Frederick Turner

The Final Frontier: How Death was Invented and What it is For.

Who needs a clock if one has all the time in the world? Death is a comparatively recent arrival in the universe. One doesn’t require the term “death” to describe the metamorphoses of matter and energy. Only with living organisms does death begin, at first as the destruction of organism, but later as a design feature of cells and multicelled animals and plants. Why?

The need for oscillators, counters, and alarm-clocks (counters with thresholds).

The chemistry of cyclic catalytic reactions.

The need to balance reproductive genetic stability against real world experience.

Death as life’s way of distinguishing target information from “jottings” acquired during the computation of an algorithm—and limiting the thermodynamic cost of discarding the latter.

Death as a tool in constructing adaptive futures.
The conclusion will ask why the word “end” means both cessation and purpose.

Friedrich von Petersdorff

Temporal Limits And Constraints Within Historiography

In his book „Analytical Philosophy of History“ (1965) Arthur C. Danto points out that the historians’ narrative sentences „refer to at least two time-separated events though they only describe (are only about) the earliest event to which they refer“. It, therefore, has to be concluded that any account of a specific historical event is bound to be replaced, sooner or later, by new interpretations - because, as time moves on, historians will view the earlier of the „two time-separated events“ in connection with more recent events. Historical research, therefore, is based upon a specific but changing time-frame. It is the purpose of this paper to give a precise description of these temporal limits and constraints within historiography, to examine the epistemological aspects involved and, thereby, exposing the limits and possibilities of historiography in the quest for truthful accounts of past events.

Friedel Weinert

Temporal Asymmetry and Relativity

The purpose of this paper is to explore the compatibility of the Special theory of relativity with a dynamic view of physical time. It is commonly held that the notion of relative simultaneity commits the Special theory to a static view of time (block universe). But this argument only takes kinematic relations between inertial reference frames into account. The paper argues that a consideration of the frame-independent entropic aspects of these relations leads to an asymmetric direction of events for all time-like connected observers in space-time. Such a notion of physical time is supported by Leibniz’s relational view of time, which must however be adapted to the geometry of Minkowski space-time. This adaptation leads to space-time relationism, which is essentially a dynamic view of time but still confines all creatures to the small slice of time, within which they happen to be born.

Thomas Weissert

Constraints and the Scale of Time: Paradigm Shifts in the History of Geology

The history of geology is significantly marked by two major paradigmatic shifts. In the 18th century, physical evidence began to outweigh religious doctrine about the age of the Earth. Explanations shifted away from cataclysmic change and toward long slow processes. By the 1920’s, new generations of geologists refused to entertain any serious cataclysmic explanations. But the so-called “Channeled Scablands” in Washington state defied uniformitarian explanation. J Harlan Bretz’s radical explanation—that the 100-mile track must have been created by a enormous catastrophic flood—came under vehement attack from the geological establishment because it violated the tenets of uniformitarianism. Bretz’s theory won the day, and geology finally began to have room for both long and short term explanations. Why then, do the current economic policies of the United States seem to be predicated on the uniformitarian ideas that climatic change can only take place on long time scales?

Andrew Wistrich

Time Limits, Procrastination, And Statutes Of Limitation

A statute of limitation sets a deadline within which a legal claim must be filed. If the claim is not filed by the deadline, then the claim is extinguished.

The current structure of statutes of limitation undermines the policies they are intended to promote by encouraging plaintiffs and prosecutors to wait until the eleventh hour before filing a claim. As devices to manage the human tendency to procrastinate, statutes of limitation are unsatisfactory.
One solution might be to penalize tardy plaintiffs or prosecutors incrementally rather than avulsively. Instead of extinguishing a civil claim that is not filed within the limitation period, we might gradually diminish the value of the claim over the course of the limitation period.

A more graduated approach to statutes of limitation would promote their purposes without forcing courts to impose draconian penalties, something which experience suggests they are reluctant to do. It also would bring statutes of limitation and the gradual deterioration of evidence over time into a more harmonious alignment.