Times
Past
On order, duration, and the recycling of history.
01
Definite
It begins
The analysis of the use of time in a narrative centres around three aspects: order, duration and frequency. One analyses the relation of story-time to discourse-time from these three angles. A narrative can be divided into elements of story, relating to questions of WHAT happens, and elements of discourse, relating to questions of HOW it is told.
Story-time is the sequence of events and the length of time that passes in the story. Discourse-time covers the length of time that is taken up by the telling (or reading) of the story and the sequence of events as they are presented in discourse.
There are five possible relations between story-time and discourse-time: scene, summary, stretch, ellipsis and pause. All of these influence the reader's perception of the speed of a narrative.
02
Variable
It bends
Baudrillard's theory of the recycling of time and history sits against a Modernist-Enlightenment conception of time and history, where history is moved by a universal, transcendental and metaphysical force and is a teleological process.
Aristotle and Machiavelli epitomise the cyclical theory of history — no social or political system is stable, and humans cycle between regimes. It was in the Enlightenment, particularly with Kant and Hegel, that the idea of a universal and teleological history was fully developed.
The cyclical theory of time, by contrast, is based on classical cosmology — all aspects of the world are temporally organised in a cyclical pattern of birth and death, rise and fall, growth and decay, structured in relation to the movement of the planets.
03
Recycled
It dilates
Time dilation refers to the seemingly odd fact that time passes at different rates for different observers, depending on their relative motion or positions in a gravitational field.
Time is relative. As counterintuitive as that sounds, it's a consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity. In everyday life, speed is relative — a car travelling at 60 mph relative to a stationary observer would be seen as moving at 120 mph by a driver going in the opposite direction at the same speed.
Depending on an observer's relative motion or their position within a gravitational field, that observer would experience time passing at a different rate than another observer. At a low level, we're subject to it all the time.
04
Forever
It blocks
In the philosophy of space and time, eternalism takes the view that all existence in time is equally real, as opposed to presentism or the growing block universe theory, in which at least the future is not the same as any other time.
Some forms of eternalism give time a similar ontology to that of space, as a dimension, with different times being as real as different places — future events are "already there" in the same sense other places are already there, and there is no objective flow of time.
It is sometimes referred to as the "block time" or "block universe" theory due to its description of space-time as an unchanging four-dimensional block, as opposed to the view of the world as a three-dimensional space modulated by the passage of time.