One of the issues that tends to give me headaches within the object-oriented ontologies of Harman, Latour, and Whitehead are the questions of time and space. It seems to me that all of the object-oriented ontologists are more or less agreed in rejecting the notion of time and space as containers. If objects are, to use Bogost’s gorgeous term, the primitive “units” of being (which isn’t to say they are simple or indivisible), then it follows that time and space cannot be more primitive than objects, that they cannot be containers within which objects reside, but rather time and space must be generated by or arise from objects somehow. But how, precisely, to conceive these processes or the genesis of spatio-temporal fields and relations among relations? Of the object-oriented ontologists, Whitehead strikes me as having the most well developed account of spatio-temporality, though sadly I have a bear of a time understanding just what he is claiming (perhaps Shaviro can flesh this out for us some day). Whitehead was led to a similar conclusion precisely because he treats being as composed of actual occasions and nothing else.
I’m on the run so my comments will have to be brief, but it seems to me that one way spatio-temporal relations might be conceived is in terms of a sort of network topology pertaining to paths or vectors of relations among objects. Speaking in the context of spatiality, consider the difference between the three-dimensional geometrical plane in the diagram to the left above and the network diagram to the right. The geometrical plane above represents the standard notion of space as a sort of container for objects. Proximity and distance is a function of where objects are located with respect to one another in a coordinate system. Two objects are near or far when their coordinates share a close proximity to one another. Here the space precedes the objects.
read on!
A network topology, by contrast, is entirely different. Take the decentralized network (B) in the network diagram to the right. If we look at the lower two branches of the network cluster at the bottom of the dencentralized network we notice that they are, in Euclidean terms, very close to one another spatially. However, if we begin from the premise of topological network space, despite this close proximity, there are tremendously distant from one another. Why? For the node that is closest in Euclidean space to reach the closest node in the next branch it must pass through three other nodes. By contrast, the lowest node in this network only needs to pass through two other nodes to reach the central node in diagram (B). Space would thus be generated by objects through these sorts of network relations defining paths of accessibility or relatability. Rather than a Euclidean space where distance is defined by proximity, instead proximity would be an issue of paths.
To make this point more concretely, Graham and I are far closer in network space than I am with my neighbor. Despite the fact that my neighbor lives only a few feet from me, he is topologically very distant as there are few paths for us to relate to one another. By contrast, I tend to talk to Graham a few times a week despite the fact that he’s all the way in Egypt. We can think of time in a similar fashion. Times can be vastly distant for, say the Amish, in that the Amish occupy a different temporal horizon than someone living in the midst of post-industrial media culture. The paths between these two times can be very difficult to connect because of these different temporal plateaus or horizons.
One might object that this conception of time only pertains to the human, but this is not necessarily the case. No doubt there are specific ways in which human social systems are structured that organize time and space in this sort of networked fashion, but we find similar network structures of spatio-temporality in the biological world as well. There is, for example, a frozen lake in Siberia (I forget the name) that has not been exposed to the outside environment for thousands of years. Currently biologists are trying to figure a way to drill through the ice so as not to contaminate the environment underneath. Here we quite literally have a different temporality where the paths between life outside this lake and inside this lake require a number of mediating steps to meet up. They appear to be “contemporaneous” or simultaneous, but where the temporal distance between this ecosystem of life and others is quite divergent. In addition, we could ask how such a network structure of time might be thought in terms of nonorganic physico-material entities that do not have a dimension of memory (organic or cognitive). Time to scoot.
Larval Subjects . 
October 16, 2009 at 5:35 pm
October 17, 2009 at 12:32 am
Tik tak tik tak dr. Sinthome!
To support my display of the Madonna clip is I feel that the diagram of time and space as you presented it should be liquid time, as represented by the fractal fragmentation of the frame here. I love these kinds of Alice in Wonderland spaces, dr. Sinthome, just as much as you do.
October 17, 2009 at 1:03 am
To your final paragraph, since I was tempted to say “this conception of time (might) only pertain to the human”: does “time” name a number of different relations between objects, things themselves that recede into unknowability? If so, then when we say “time,” even in the context of realism, are we always committing that unspoken correlation?
October 17, 2009 at 5:23 pm
something that has intrigued is the idea of fourth dimensional object interaction. after reading harman on merleau-ponty, i thought that fourth dimensional relations could take up the flesh, or medium for interaction; and this would likely remove any notion of non-absolute spatial movement for third dimensional objects, as long as existence is granted within the fourth dimension, for any object – making ‘things’ a lot more interesting! but also, would it not make time, as a measured thing, a creation of object interactions within specific dimensional levels?
October 17, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Does this conception of time diverge from Meillassoux’s view that a realist ought to be able to say, with no correlationism seeping in, things like: “Our universe is 13.5 billion years old. Our earth accreted 4.56 billion years ago. Life originated on earth 3.5 billion years ago. Humanity (homo habilis) originated 2 million years ago.”?
October 17, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Hi Mark,
It might. I think one of the things to keep in mind is that the name “speculative realism” doesn’t refer to a shared metaphysical or epistemological position, but rather to a conference that took place involving philosophers that have very different philosophical commitments. The only thing that unites these philosophers is a commitment to some form of realism and a rejection of the centrality of the human or questions of access. Meillassoux, it seems to me, belongs to a tradition of realism that I would call “representational realism” and that primarily revolves around epistemological questions. For Meillassoux, in other words, the real is what is independent of humans (physical nature) and something to be reached by surpassing the human. The object-oriented speculative realists, by contrast, do not restrict the real to physical nature, but see physical nature as a subset of the real with many other real things besides. For OOO theorists, the real is composed of objects and some of those objects happen to be physical beings, while others happen to be things like type writers, burritos, novels, and signifiers.
All of this aside, time was one of the central questions at the Goldsmith’s event a few years ago. The issue was that of how we are to think the time of the real. Here, in particular, Meillassoux got a lot of flack. What does it mean to say that the earth is 4.56 billion years old, given the manner in which time is organized at the quantum level and at the relativistic level? Can we make straightforward claims like this about physical times? OOO encounters a different set of problems. Insofar as OOO treats objects as what are ontologically primitive or as what makes up being, the question for the OOO theorist becomes that of how time and space are generated out of objects. This leaves room for a variety of different types of time and space as a function of how objects come to relate to one another. What you thus get is a sort of spatio-temporal pluralism.
October 18, 2009 at 12:19 am
Ah, yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that disagreeing with Meillassoux on that question would result in speculative-realism heresy. Just was curious whether you viewed it as diverging on that point, since it seems that at the very least it makes Meillassoux’s ancestrality argument against correlationism trickier, if time doesn’t isn’t an objective, real, universal timeline. Rhetorically that would be somewhat unfortunate, since I’ve anecdotally found it to be a compelling argument against correlationism, for at least some people. But that’s admittedly not a decisive consideration.
October 19, 2009 at 2:09 am
Probably the most important living philosopher for thinking “the network structure of time” would be Michel Serres. This is brought to mind by noticing a book stuck in my stack, Maria Assad’s READING WITH MICHEL SERRES: AN ENCOUNTER WITH TIME, where each chapter explores a different sense of time in relation to Serres’ philosophy:
1) Time Promised: reading GENESE (1982)
2) Time Immortal: reading DETACHMENT (1983)
3) Time Empirical: reading LES CINQ SENS (1985)
4) Time Dynamical: reading STATUES (1987)
5) Time Inventive: reading LE TIERS-INSTRUIT (1991)
6) Time Geographical: reading LE CONTRAT NATUREL (1990)