Experiencing Time
Through time and space, bodies encounter constantly varying stimuli: sights and sounds bombard the senses from moment to moment.
Yet, somehow, individuals mentally organise these various sensations into something more structured that they call experience. This can be understood as a kind of story that people tell about themselves, an edited version of perceptions that explains who they are in the immediate present, how they got there via their past, and what their intentions are with respect to the future.
A major strand of IAS research examined the ways in which people construct a sense of self through time, whether this is psychologically, deep within the unconscious brain, or more publically, through literary and artistic narratives.
As an example of the difference between the sensory experience of time and its reality, perception of time is not bound to the regular tick of the clock. Humans sense time as being fluid and various, speeding up or slowing down; a particular memory from the past may be experienced as vividly as the ongoing present. Yet through this temporal ebb and flow, they nevertheless experience a coherent sense of the self, what Barry Dainton terms, in a paper written during his Fellowship, the ‘phenomenal continuum.’ His IAS Fellowship developed his research into the philosophy of time in two directions. Relating to the past, his encounters with IAS Fellow Mary Carruthers led him to explore the relevance of ideas about memory in the middle ages. Relating to the future, he considered the implications of artificial intelligence and neuroscience, ideas which he presented at a public lecture in Durham.
Whilst Dainton considered the experience of time and the future at the individual level, Barbara Adam considered its perception at the societal level. A pioneer in the field of ‘time studies,’ Adam’s recent work has looked at the role time and timekeeping plays in different institutions, such as businesses or transport engineering. However, her IAS work returned to more theoretical concepts about time and the perception of the future within the social sciences. Along with producing a variety of papers and seminars, she developed a book chapter on ‘The Future in Social Theory.’
As the ‘Future, Now’ topic later in this Report shows, when it comes to science and technology time can seem remarkably fast-paced, so that things that were once the stuff of science fiction suddenly appear in the present. This is where art may demonstrate its value. By framing the flux of the present in simpler and static ways, art enables its audiences to assess what the world is actually like before it seems to change once again. Andrew Pickering works at the interfaces between science and art, and while at the IAS he examined ‘ontological theatre’: performance art which tries to capture and explain more clearly to a general audience how advanced engineering and technology is changing us.
One form of art that inherently manipulates and controls its presentation of time is the literary novel. One of Andrew Crumey’s forthcoming novels was significantly reshaped after his encounters with other IAS Fellows working on the Futures theme. Crumey
Andrew Pickering’s lecture on the history of cybernetics in Britain since the Second World War can be heard at:
www.durham.ac.uk/ias/events/fellowslectures201011/pickering/
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