Thoughts of the inside 23 - causes = time, or nothing less and nothing more than inhabiting being and the time according to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle

“We tell stories because… human lives need and deserve to be told… the whole story of suffering cries out for revenge and demands to be told…”

- Paul Ricoeur -

The dimension of time has always been a dimension linked to thoughts, dreams, pain, fantasy,  epiphany, to the words necessary to talk about it.

Literally, it has always been like this. 

Almost as if to say, since time exists. 

Time, like other aspects of life, represents something that belongs to everyone, without anyone ever being able to truly grasp it. 

Time. Different. Same. 

Elusive. Immanent. 

It exists and insists on being exactly what it is, time. 

Anarchically, it shuns any attempts to harness it in the counting and under a control that prefigure production, efficiency and consumption. 

As a proven Luddist, it undermines the case of hands and clocks with its false illusion of universality and controllability. 

Of a countability that would inscribe time in a sole economic dimension, given that, the mere counting of it already makes time sellable. And spendable, in its being time lost or time gained. 

Outside a dimension that inscribes time as economic capital, making it earned, accumulated, wasted, squandered or lost, there is a dimension in which time can simply be lived. And inhabited.

Going back to Anaximander would allow us to open a first pacifying glimmer of hope, which speaks to us of the necessity that there is always a beginning for every conclusion, and of the implication of every end in every new beginning.

Nothing but a continuous sequence of before and after, as Aristotle told us. A cyclical sequence of before and after in which one exists. A circular space of time in for the existance.

It is all already implied in these brief statements, in a gaze that ranges from melting ice to extinct volcanoes that chase each other as far as the eye can see. A gaze that unites and brings Heidegger closer to Einstein. 

Time is being. 

Time has been. 

Time is having been. 

Time is what will have been. 

Time is everywhere, and being everywhere, time is also space. 

A space to live in, which nourishes and is nourished by the purely individual way that each person has of inhabiting it.

Allowing oneself to leave the capitalist logic of time means authorizing oneself to let go of the imperative of accumulation, of the race to fill time with ... things.

Time, like being, feeds on its own immanent existence, articulating itself in the slowness that makes words scandable, intelligible.

Time is articulated in a pure grammar that allows being to become copula, marking the way to a possible orgasm, to the epiphany of the encounter with oneself and with the other that delimits the communicative exchange, the missed act par excellence.

As Lacan pointed out, "Every missed act is a successful discourse." Just as in the case of sexual intercourse, even in the communicative relationship it is never possible to make One with the Other.

Being that is articulated in time is a copula becoming in which the diversity of the parts remains unbridgeable, whether it concerns the partners in a sexual relationship, or whether it concerns the meanings and signifiers of a communicative relationship. Relationships that in fact never are.

In fact, this being in time is reflected in a continuous game of references that conceal, in a sort of perpetual failed act, in which the word cannot help but outline it, to draw limits and boundaries of time as of being, without ever being able to define them. Without ever being able to possess them. Without ever being able to indicate and fix them. Without ever being able to box them in a clock, in a chronicle, in a speech that makes something that flows into a finished and fixed speech.

In a particularly fascinating form, which has gone down in history as the famous “Copenhagen interpretation” based on the works of Bohr and Heisenberg, it is expressed how reality is the result of the interaction between observer and observed.

It means that the belief system of the observer determines the existence of reality in the form in which he believes it to be.

Not only quantum physics, but common experience itself tells us that the dimension of time, as well as that of being and reality, can never be completely inscribed in language: at the very moment in which the word expresses something of time, of being and/or reality, this has changed by the mere fact of having been narrated in some way.

If the act of speaking, of speaking and of constructing a narration starting from the act of speaking, can never define a reality that in the meantime is something else, just as it can never define a time without this having already passed, then it follows that the dimension of time, as of being, in its becoming copula, that is, a communicative act, is never taken for granted, a failed act. A missing act.

Missing in the sense that describing the here and now is possible only to the extent that in saying "here and now" we are already in a time and in a space that is no longer here and now, but is already elsewhere, is already something else.

We find confirmation of the Copenhagen interpretation and quantum physics in Alice's words:

"If I had a world as I like it, everything there would be absurd: nothing would be as it is, because everything would be as it is not, and vice versa; what is, would not be, and what is not, would be. Clear?"

It seems like a play on words, but it is not: it is precisely this being perpetually elsewhere of time and being, this being something else that marks the substantial and structural lack that defines the possibility of interaction.

Of an action, that is, in which one moves in the direction of inhabiting a time and a space that shifts to make room, to always allow that step that separates from what can never be reached.

Zeno's paradox tells us how time has a speed that flows inexorably, leaving us perpetually behind. As soon as we think or feel that we have grasped something, time has already taken a step forward, just like Achilles condemned to never reach the tortoise.

Zeno's paradox, recounted by Aristotle in Book V of Physics, tells us how "... when Achilles, the fastest competitor, starts after the tortoise, the slowest competitor in the race, the latter will never be reached by the fastest because the pursuer would first be forced to reach the place from which the one who is fleeing started, and in the meantime, of necessity, the slowest will always be a little ahead." 

Zeno's is a paradox, and as such it should be taken as part of a more general discourse, which allows us to relativize the positions and equations that connect us to others.

In care work, whether with groups or with individuals, or even in a parental position, I like to repeat that a position defines and defines itself as a role or a job, but that the work is always and in any case done by groups, or individuals, or children and grandchildren. That the focus is on the dimension of the other.

As quantum physics reminds us, the mere presence of the observer defines what will be real, that is, the existence of reality in the form in which it is believed to be from the point in which and from which it is looked at.

It seems important to introduce these thoughts into the discourse of care. 

Their effect is equally important since it tends to limit the aura of ego-centeredness of the professional, or the parent, and to leave the responsibility of the field to what the subject can authorize himself to observe, to see, to make his own.

In an expression that often raises doubts, I like to repeat that as parents, teachers or trainers, as care professionals, our only usefulness is in being absolutely useless.

Our supposed usefulness unfolds in being absolutely useless, and in this lies the essentiality.

At the risk of recalling Zeno of Elea, our usefulness is given by the finiteness of our position, which does not have as its movement to send back something of some truth to the other, but to allow the other to develop his own discourse, to authorize himself to encounter his own truth.

As I said before, the usefulness of the position lies in its uselessness, in an ephemeral dimension that is real, imaginary and symbolic at the same time, which allows the other to take his own steps, whatever they may be, in what is and will always be the unrepeatable and individual way of inhabiting one's own being and one's own time. 

In a way, and in a world, that while always being the same, will also be clearly new.

It is not a simple thing to take the step, and the passage, towards a new world of being starting from the habit of living time backwards, or by projecting onto the present or the future what is well known of the past.

Some time ago, a young woman who had lived the scars, both metaphorical and real, of a painful childhood, described in a truly crystalline way the circuit, and the short circuit in which she had been confined by the violence suffered over the years.

She said “… I was possessed, but not in the religious sense, I was in the sense that I no longer belonged to me, I was in their possession … it is damned difficult to break the vicious circle … I know all too well the historical mode made of fear, anguish and violence, but I do not yet know the new one, and this scares me, and fear reactivates the historical mode …”.

When self-mastery is taken away, when one is not master of anything, it is difficult not to find oneself in a position of servitude, not to stumble into Hegel, not to slip into being possessed by someone else. But what is past can be experienced as such, that is, as past. It can be, slowly and painfully, let go.

When I speak of the importance of letting go of the past, I am referring to a way of inhabiting time and being in a time that is truly ours.

Unlike shrimp, which are animals that proceed backwards, we can allow ourselves to turn our gaze, and with it our discourse, from what has been and that we know well as bad, to what we do not yet know, to what will be.

This step and this passage has nothing to do with a movement of denial or removal, which are by their nature movements that nail the past in a historical present that endlessly repeats the litany of what we should be on the basis of what someone else has established, not even if it were a debt.

A young mother read this mechanism with simple clarity: “… when something of someone else is passed off as mine, there is always something of mine that is missing … at this point, there is a leap to make, a leap that I can make … I can rethink things calmly, I can correct them not in the sense of going back, but of changing the time, the grammar, and with these the meaning of their narration so as not to be perpetually chained in the past, but to try to be where I want to be, at least as much as possible …”.

There is always a dimension of time that can be recovered in new meanings, that can be written, and inscribed, in new narratives that hold the past as such, as historical time that signals, and makes a sign, of moments of history.

We can recognize in being and time their own peculiar becoming, allowing the person a recovery of subjectivity within the grammar of a narration that constitutes, at each step, the next step in the path of identity.

Of being. Of being who you are, where tomorrow is the measure in time of what will have been in a here and now that we all continually inhabit.

As Ricoeur wrote, “… time becomes human to the extent that it is expressed according to a narrative module … the story reaches its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence…”.

Time and being return to chase each other, to define each other, to open up possibilities of subjectivation, to reveal that unrepeatable and individual story of which we are subjects, encountering a responsibility full of dynamics, humanity and movement in life.

As Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle teaches, not only can no one be detached from the system they observe and inhabit, not only is everyone part of it, but they substantially condition it just by interacting with it, by inhabiting it.

Making this principle of quantum physics a space and opportunity for life means opening up the possibility for each person to inhabit their own being, their own time, their own unique and unrepeatable narration of existence.

...

notes and references:

Broken Social Scene, ‘Cause = time’, from ‘You forgot it in people’, 2002

Paul Ricoeur, Time and narrative, 1983

Aristotle, Physics, 4th century BC

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927

Albert Einstein, On the Special and General Theory of Relativity, 1916

Jacques Lacan, Function and Field of the Word and Language in Psychoanalysis, 1953

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, 1972-1973

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865

Werner Heisenberg, Physikalische Prinzipien der Quantentheorie, 1930

For researches of Italian etymologies I always refer to the “Etymological Dictionary of the Italian Language” by Ottorino Pianigiani in its online version.