steven shaviro, fluid futures: speculative time — review
shaviro demonstrates why time is thick through his deleuzian interpretations on sci-fi pieces but struggles to develop anything significant on continuity
shaviro tells us that whitehead’s central claim is that time must be treated as concretely real, not reduced to an abstract illusion, and he suggests that we do this by paying attention to concreteness itself so that we can avoid the abstractions that solidify it as this floaty concept. he says that general relativity treats time as loosely as it treats space, already having dealt with it by turning it into what is assumed to be a higlightable and modifiable surface. "it still seems to be the case today that a majority of physicists regard the passage of time as just a psychological illusion" says shaviro, quoting einstein and bergson's debate, where in the status quo it was supposedly confirmed that time became relativized in such a fashion that it enabled an intersubjective conception of it to prevail.
this conception is very similar to but nonetheless slightly different from say, st. augustine, who argued that time is an illusion in the sense that it depends on a type of "memory of attention" rather than a feeling of continuity or experience, as per christian tornau "augustine begins by observing that though of the three familiar “parts” of time, past, present and future, none really exists (the past having ceased to exist, the future not existing yet, and the present being without extension), time doubtless has reality for us. this is so because time is present to us in the form of our present memory of the past, our present attention to the present and our present expectation of the future"
shaviro never actually explains exactly what psychological views of science really mean by time being an illusion, instead arguing for a feeling of time implicitly connected to a sense of memory. however, this is forgiven by the fact that he consistently quote's carroll's epiphenomenalism as a way to explain how illusion in psychological views of time is seen, even if the concept of an illusion itself remains as a polemical placeholder. shaviro mentions assembly theory and argues that it supports time’s reality by showing that complex objects require historical pathways and memory and as well as preserved records. he quotes assembly theory because to assemble something means to hold the weight of time in its cultivation, that the fact of emergence requires instances that depend on sequences ("steps") that aren't pre-emptable or immediate, or in other words "assembly theory, in its own way, thus distinguishes between general potentiality and real potentiality.".
shaviro borrows anti-determinist resources from several incompatible frameworks without fully clarifying their compatibility. the narrative that shapiro lays out brackets rather than resolves the analytical backdrop behind this question of time's situated weight when it comes to epiphenomenalism, instead depending on theories that have to do precisely with epiphenomenalist modes of encountering it. he is naturally of course trying to shift the frame by saying that process, passage, inheritance, and novelty are ontological before they are psychological, but his borrowing of the literature opens up a bunch of unecessary analytical questions as he is doing this that remain situatated in an awkward spot between his main narrative and his intended sequencing.
he then uses maudlin to argue that time cannot emerge from non-time and that reversibility of events does not reverse time itself, as well as the idea that thermodynamic entropy doesn't actually explain why time flows forward, arguing only that it is asymmetrically imposing of temporality but that it's causal fact alone is not able to perceive time as both forwards and backwards at the same time. he then goes on to question the concept of a fixed system of the universe, arguing that a low entropy state is neither definitive nor self-emerging.
the problem with this narrative is that a deterministic view of time doesn't even necessarily implicate a deterministic view of events, neither does it explain away chance, or shaviro's more specific concern, that it decouples novelty from continuity. the idea that rare events (like freak assemblages of shards in fixed positions) are possible but have not emerged due to the short span of the universe also seems trivial in this case, given that probability for freak events doesn't even directly seem to conflict with real vs. general potentiality, which on its own is shaviro's strongest distinction. abstractions seem to not be able to be measured causally in this way, in fact, the problem of abstractions in physical laws seems to be slightly more intricate than the idea that if there is somehow a "measurable constant of duration", that time is as fixed as the imagined "spatiality" that fixes the duration (flow) of the universe into place) and carries with it all its processes.
it is easy to imagine a universe with a fixed causality with a continued chance for novelty, or a non-fixed causality that depends on a fixed novelty-amount with no extra novelty (virtuality) outside of these bounds, or a universe with a non-fixed causality that is truly random but with an unforseeable amount of pure (real) potentiality (true virtuality), or even a universe with no causality but an imposed (virtual, so that there's no deterministic cheating) limit for novelty. shaviro's narrative is simpler than these speculative distinctions, it seems that for him either the universe depends on its own continuity and time is a hyper-artifact (a higher order emergence that is the perfect way for the process of a process itself to unfold).
shaviro reads whitehead as not just arguing that continuity is a process of incompleteness but that it is in a sense a type of meta-time (my phrasing) due to the way that continual supersession constantly unfolds itself on top of existing emerging elements of concrete reality, and that pure potential sits here in between these moments. there is also an element of survivalism involved due to the way perpetual perishing is itself an endurance against entropy and therefore the denial of a neutral condition and that this itself is a valid metaphor for time's unfolding. the third element here is that the present is an extended duration itself, where the present moment is actually the extended duration of other temporal continuities - present and past, which flip abstractions themselves into being immediate extractions of an otherwise inemmediate reality where shaviro quote's bergson that "form is a snapshot of transition".
even though this reading of duration does properly solve augustine's dilemma about presentism and illusions by essentially turning the present into a non-standard time-scale and then inverting the past and future themselves into "diffracted" timescales by essentially implicitly viewing them as non-fixed versions of themselves (the future contains a part of the present, the present is itself a mixture of the future and past, the past contains traces of the present), it doesn't solve the broader problem of the feeling of continuity actually engineered by time-as-temporal-presence. this is because the present doesn't just serve as a phenomenological experience of bergsonian duration, but also as a phenomenological quality of the unfolding of temporality as a sense of continuity and not just a sense of process. it seems almost as if the present itself is a body-double, wileding continuity against processes. in this sense, it becomes thick “specious present,” compressing inherited pasts, which is a view shaviro draws from william james.
if augustine is the figure for temporal distension held in memory-attention-expectation and whitehead is the figure for an ontological transition, shaviro doesn't always manage to make clear where ontological transition becomes lived continuity rather than processual succession. he does perfectly manage this only on one ocassion, his critique of commodities, where he argues that "capitalist commodity production fetishizes novelty and the eternal now, but it also embeds within itselfthe very history that it overtly denies".
this is a good critique because it collapses temporality into the commodity to show how ontological connectivity actually encounters succession outside of memory and into an act of reshaping, however, it simultaneously collapses temporality into a binary of ascension and revival by treating "ubik" as the condition for switching the present forward and the past backwards into futurity through mutation-past-death, which disables the alterity of temporal modes and their connections to the supernaturality behind commodity-forms. there are three different forms of continuity that exist parallel to eachother, continuity as succession, continuity as experiential coherence and continuity as persistence/inheritance. by highlighting the commodity example, it is shown how shaviro seems to be polemically strongest on inheritance, fairly strong on succession, and weakest on experiential coherence. if temporal experience is related to commodity forms, succession must follow the path of choice rather than the path of destiny, but by tying it to death, shaviro returns us to the cosmic temporality of time.
the question of processes itself seems to actually be relegated by science into a spatial metaphor, where science barely touches continuity, but on the contrary, whitehead accidentally may be showing us how continuity itself is the required ingridient in any cosmological view of time as a "spatial/intersubjective/mechanically causal" construct. this view of continuity isn't tackled by shaviro because he's too busy having to solve the "procession" of continuity (by imbedding it with intra-psychological weight and arguing against the subjectivity of psychology) in presence, to actually even begin to tackle the continuity of procession, which is its own beast, one that is difficult to solve without inventing new temporal categorizations, ones that can defeat the view of the future as conceptually related to unfolding and the view of the past as conceptually related to memory. in fact, it seems that both epiphenomenalists and presentists are actually trying to scientifically arrive at this exact point, but by collapsing it into relativity they fall back into shaviro's critique.
the felt continuity of time can be seperate from procession through the cultivation of "mime" a new concept of alter time that can literalize continuity as an embedded experience of the flow of time without ever touching the depth of memory as related to time's encoding, or procession as successive emergence. things do not have to emerge to continue, sucession doesnt have to indicate progress, yet it can still feel like a succession. continuity can feel like flow without an embededness, and alterity can contain a vision of flow or motion without actually containing a vision of time within itself at all. mime can exist as something that is neither a felt experience of the world's forward motion as an abstraction, but still contain the felt experience of "forwardness" as a general facticity.
the laplace sections help us understand how determination and predictability themselves may not ever acutally even touch continuity or causality to begin with, due to the way in which unfolding itself may not have a strictly temporal dimension. mime is then a new mode of temporal continuity that reproduces the sensation of forward flow without relying on succession, emergence, or memory, being the psychological by-product of a new ontological temporal mode (which may already exist somewhere in space). this is important because it differs from alterity in that it images the future precisely as the opposite of a temporally desynchronized horizon, it is more like the horizon of a desynchrocity.
shaviro quotes leinster’s novel “the eternal now” where a type of infra-time literalizes temporal thickness by placing whole lives inside a fraction of ordinary time. shaviro claims that leinster's extension of time in pockets of time that move whole sequences of events in a fraction of a second in "real world time" is inverse of time dilation at near light speed according to special relativity. but instead of investigating whether continuity actually depends on perceptions of time as depth or whether pockets of time can destabilize or extend time's continuity, or whether even our perception of time actually shifts depending on these pockets remains unquestioned.
shaviro simply burrows it under the idea that "every moment contracts, or folds, other moments into itself; these other moments may conversely be unfolded from it", where the conclusion here is that "this is another sense in which there is always more to the real than merely what is evident and actual." shaviro is too busy attacking scientific determinisms around the dilation and expansion of time as quantitative events to explore whether there are qualitative differences in unfolding. not only that, but dick and leinster's examples do not actually show how unfolding relates to time in shaviro's reading, where they just look like sequences where duration is perversely extended so as to mess with temporal order and continuity rather than temporal depth or temporal quality. shaviro often treats sf examples as if they straightforwardly exemplify temporal ontology, when they may instead dramatize distortions of sequence, scale, or mediation.
in between the continuity problematization and the laplace section, there is a stronger argument about continuity, where shaviro quotes meillasoux to argue against crosshill's thesis that ai has led to the end of "magic" by arguing that predictability itself is subsumed by a type of renormalization of the law as a grander narrative that allows for unpredictabilities to always factor in as if they were always assumed, showing how meillasoux tells us that essentially this meta-predictability itself may collapse once we get to the other side of this thought process and confirm the idea that the laws of nature may come to pass altogether due to the way that "eventualities are thinkable" due to their logical possibility and as such their continually stored potential as realities.
earlier it was stated that shaviro sees time as a hyper-artifact, and this was mentioned because he ends the meillasoux-crosshill chain by confirming crosshill's view that favors continuity's ability to generate emergence together with potential novelty as the base state of the universe "crosshill threads the needle between these two opposing dogmatisms. his story gives us a scenario in which there is already effectively more than can be circumscribed by the laws of nature". the problem that isnt explicitly stated here is that in the same way that shapiro thinks that that time emerges as a constellation of various intertwined continuities-turned-processes, the concept of normalization itself presupposes this same type of meta-narrative about normalization, where what is normalized is a constellation of previously held potentialities that were technically inverted against expectation, but that still have a devilish underside, one where their potential as "reality definers" narrows as our conceptualizations of the world become more quantitatively predictable, even if qualitatively speaking there are numerous novel possibilities awaiting.
it is not necessary to close the empirical sense of eventual discontinuity away as meillasoux suggests, for continuity itself to nonetheless serve as a breaking point for multiple possible realities by weaponizing destiny against time. crosshill's supposed middle solution only gives time the benefit of the doubt by placing it in shaviro's favored position of "continuity as the primary generator", but this doesn't actually solve neither the problem of socially expected novelty and its epistemic influences, nor of our actual encounter with wider sets of more "microstructural" real potentialities.
in "the pastness of the past" shaviro uses deleuze to argue that even the past sometimes jumps over the present when its influence is considered up and against a current of determined-to-be-forgotten presentism, and that time sequences themselves don't move evenly even in their own sequential ordering. the idea thatpast events lose active efficacy but remain incorporated into the world as material for future developments is a strong one, but when shaviro begins an argument in the next subchapter with "what can it mean to recover the past, to find it again? bergson tells us that it is never true that “the past has ceased to exist.” rather, it seems to us that the past “has simply ceased to be useful” — at least in terms of our habitual modes of understanding"
it reminds us that the vision of the past that continental philosophy has developed and that bergson is drawing on doesn't actually manage to ever imagine the past as a truly active force no matter how much it tries, by either segmenting it into a hauntological recovery process or harkening it as something influential but disposable by modernity. the past, on the contrary, has precisely been most revived only a fisherian hauntology that views it as an active force in an unimaginative present, but doesn't manage to have any actual "preservable" effect not just because it isn't an active force in our current understanding of the world, but it may just be that the natural laws that surround the past as an artifact themselves are "weakly attachable" constructs. the fordist imperative for turning the present into the "most influential/only impactful past" may just be an imperative that attempts to preserve the past in the only way it can - precisely by mobilizing any amount of it that it can into what it sees as the only functionable temporality - the supposed present - one that modernity doesn't even apparently need to believe in or see value in in order to mobilize far more authentically (realer than real) than anything the past has ever had to offer.
shaviro's concept of a pastness of the past, influenced by whitehead and deleuze is quoted as "for whitehead, the past “is what it is, and is with its definite status in the universe” (whitehead 1978). the past constrains, but does not altogether determine, what succeeds it. for nothing is entirely determined until it has passed". this highly imaginative form of causation is great at answering the question of historical constraints as perceived rather than determinable limits, but when it comes to the question of determination itself, it doesn't manage to just yet conceptually prove how a "passing moment" is supposed to be different from "the constraintment of the past". furthermore, shaviro aestheticizes the past’s persistence more effectively than he explains its mechanisms of force. he seems to be good at describing how the past remains, but less good at distinguishing its modalities such as material inertia vs. mnemonic survival vs. virtual reserve.
a moment that has passed could just as well be read as a closure rather than an opening. all of these problems become fully clear in the next subchapter which is by far the strongest, where shaviro examines in great detail the full extent of the bergson-whitehead-deleuze chain, positioning whitehead's ontology as a future-oriented bid for pure potentiality. the answer to the question of how a passing moment isn't equivalent to the passing of potenital through determinate constrainment arrives directly through a "a sort of reservoir of potentialities" where the passivity of indetermination that contains virtually all possible novelty becomes shaped into an actuality that can hold it as foreign-yet-arrived.
the remaining chapters that follow after this one simply situate more visions of culturally alternative modes of time as related to the idea of an inseperability between potentiality and the necessary weight of lived actuality, but shaviro never develops a critique of virtuality beyond envisioning it through the existing literature. the problem that he helps us reveal becomes more apparent as we take a look at what is behind this "speculation" in time. the biggest problem with virtuality is that it simply pushes determination vertically without showing whether it was actually pushed vertically. one aspect of ontological closure focuses around the narrowing of "passages" of time, which are entirely irrevocable because they determine a sequence of movement. the way that skill trees work is that by unlocking something you lock something else, but these aren't "determinate choices" precisely because the ability to be able to bypass these later through re-virutalization actually requires that you move into the path that denies their original existence, and thereby denies the actual temporal consequences of this choice. it is true that virutality allows horizontal re-allocation of past locked realms, but it doesn't allow a re-imagination of the travelled path, which would require to walk the steps back into the original positon so as to unlock all the "micro-determinations" that sit in between virtual re-allocation and originary movement (the movement itself contains novelty).
if you were to call upon the virtual to "reveal" the hauntological remnants of past non-taken paths, you would simply be calling upon your own refusal to travel those destinations, and if you were to virtually spawn the products of those subsequent choices, you would either have to walk back your original progress, or fail to entirely cover the ability to take that path. determination can have a lousy side-act that allows itself to re-determine pathways, but if determination coincidentally happens to be a property of time, virtuality isn't enough to produce new forms of causality without consequence. this is actually visible in the very character of virtuality, which requires the very aesthetic-religious image of whitehead's alterity as a "coming down of foreigness".
deleuze, bergson and proust obviously sidestep this problem, but their re-animation of remnants never even begins to tackle lost futures. the closest we do get to a solution is non-western views, such as "sun ra’s “radical temporalities” that “refuse a western chronology of civilization,” suggests that “the term alterity is a much more useful term than futurity,” because the latter remains overly tied to “what can be seen, or imagined, in our current epistemology", showing how the “other side of time” is neither timeless eternity nor homogeneous progress, but a discontinuous alter-time. the alter-time technically side-steps the virtual dilemma by essentially claiming to have walked the other causal chain of history towards a progression of emerging properties that don't coincide with a broader narrowing of temporality, however, it only manages to solve the micro-problem of social fragmentation rather than the macro-problem of "cosmic diffraction" which is about how the entirety of any single movement is unable to spread itself fast enough to avoid an entropic closure of potentialities.
shaviro helps moderately engaged readers to cover the entire temporal literature in simply one subchapter and frames it through cultural examples, but doesn't help to expand the discussion on temporality whatsoever in this chapter, and leaves us with way more questions than answers