Duration

Tony Conrad (October 2004)

            There is a persistent and stable metaphor for time, as a line , as linear; it is so ingrained in us to model time as a line that the idea of time and duration as distinct entities, with different geometries, scarcely arises. I would like to discriminate between two temporal models by speaking of the socially referenced system of temporal measurement as time , and using duration for temporal intervals that are referenced to the subjective "present." This is to clarify the ordinary usage when one speaks of "what time it is," while on the other hand saying that a particular event will last for some duration . Time , in this regard, corresponds to the linear system of physics, clocks, and the calendar; duration addresses the subjective sense of extension over temporal intervals of greater or lesser size, referenced to the present moment.

            Of course, we use the units of time to measure duration. Then, in the ordinary cycle of daily events, there is little difference between time and duration. It's when we consider extremely short or extremely long durations that the maps of duration and time clearly diverge. For example, there is no such thing as a duration longer than about a hundred years, to say the least, since nobody lives longer than that. And if it were appropriate to speak of a duration shorter than a nanosecond, this too would correspond to no experience that could be differentiated from that of a picosecond or a microsecond. That is, duration has the geometry of a line segment , while time is measured as extending infinitely into the past and future, and as being infinitely divisible.

            What are the experiences of various durations like? Since experience is referenced to perception, the first problem is to find the link between time and perception, if we are to use time units to measure duration. Perception takes time; different sensory modalities have different latencies; and the interpretation or comprehension of a present event occupies a duration that is notoriously irregular. So let's simplify matters by assuming that we are alert, and that we are regarding an event that is to be perceived acoustically. Then the shortest durations perceivable, if a number of them are presented end-to-end, will begin to seem indistinguishable from one another; and events lasting for very much shorter times will not "exist" as durations at all. The character of perception is that it depends upon the response time of neurons, and it takes about a tenth of a second for anything at all to happen in the nervous system. Short events may be perceived, but the registering of these events itself takes time. This means that a sequence of short durations, of very short events, will not be registered as such, but as a single duration that is indeterminately longer than the duration of each individual event. In mathematical terms, then, durations are non-linear.

            Very long durations, too, are virtually indistinguishable from one another; this has much to do with the variability of subjective experience. We may have a pretty good idea of how long a minute is, or an hour, or even a day; but the experience of a five-year duration is hard to discriminate from the experience of a six-year duration.

            Phenomenologically, duration is the inverse of memory: duration bespeaks continuing presence. The "idea" of duration is an attempt to objectify the condition of being "always already." Duration also invokes an expectation of future experience; to endure is to last , and the root of 'duration' means the same in 'durable,' hard. There is something etymologically perverse in speaking of short durations. In the material world, if duration is measured by timekeeping, it must consequently be seen as linked inextricably to the emergence of Western industrial technology. The clock, from its artisanal and (subsequent) bourgeois origins in the renaissance onward, has functioned politically as the primary instrument of social discipline and control.

Both time and one's experience of it, in pre-industrial agrarian societies, had most to do with the quotidian cycle of sleeping, rising, eating, and working. With more complex social structures there came an extended imposition of temporality: reproductive cycles, ceremonial and religious cycles, annual events. The discovery of the calendar, of astronomy, and proper time keeping was always an aspect of state control. The subject's experience of duration was linked, in these societies, to the social machinery of time keeping, but not in the degree to which in more recent centuries industrialization and the invention of jobs has imposed state time-keeping on the subject. Until the nineteenth century, it sufficed for most people to have their hours regulated by a few bells here or there during the day. Duration related largely to one's experience of day-to-day happenings; times of day were allotted to the regulatory functions of religious observances. Then, with the introduction of a labor market, and pay-per-hour, it was necessary for capital to impose calendrical and horological regularity upon the work force.

As an instrument of social discipline and control, timekeeping was rapidly and effectively internalized by state subjects as an ethical principle linked to the self-discipline of the workplace. From its social point of origin, that is, time measurement became conflated with the subjective quality of duration . Internalized, time measurements found their place in the libidinal economy of the subject. In its relation to desire, duration mobilizes the wishes and memories of the individual subject. So, in the wake of industrialization, duration was transfigured into a bourgeois preoccupation with individual experience, introspection, and the desire for social mobility, where it was subsumed by romantic literature, fixations on personal and family memory (photography), and the idealization of leisure ("vacations," and escapism in music and theater).

            Further, industrialization led to a need for coordinated transportation schedules, particularly railroad schedules, to organize the traffic flow. Still, throughout most of the nineteenth century the regulation of time down to the hour or minute commonly varied substantially from city to city; until 1883, noon in Washington DC was 12:02 in Baltimore, 12:12 in New York, 12:24 in Boston, etc. Transportation by sea exacted even more stringent requirements than the railroads for accurate calendrical timekeeping--not to avoid collisions but because longitudinal distances, and consequently the accuracy of maritime charts, could be calculated in only one way--by measuring exact clock times at two different points on the earth. Inevitably, this meant that precise astronomical observations presided over the regulatory system of clock time.

The social footprints of duration and of science trace a meaningful historical intersection. From earliest times, even preceding the ancient Pythagorean invention of the phrase "harmony of the spheres"--the concept that empowered harmonia to colonize the cosmos -- astronomy was the science most avidly inclined to occupy and dominate the subject; the regulation of our lives by astronomical signs lent vast authority to sages who studied the stars. The invention of clocks during the renaissance expanded the capacity for time measurements from the calendrical realm of astronomy progressively toward shorter time measurements, and finally (with Maelzel's metronome) into the musical territory of the heartbeat. So began a reverse colonization of harmony by the cosmos.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been a focused colonization of subjectivity by science; new composite sciences such as physiological psychology and biophysics have attempted to "explain" or rationalize subjective experience. The role of astronomy during this later period has been the imposition of state-regulated time measurement on duration. Supported by the political machinery of the railroads and telegraph systems, astronomers were able to introduce the global system of minute-ly accurate time zones and "standard times" that we accept without question today. Simultaneously, other scientists, led by Hermann von Helmholtz, categorized the minutiae of subjective duration: reaction times, the "persistence of vision," the physiology of reflexes, and hundreds of other parameters of short-term perceptual psychology were measured, categorized, and "explained" within the esoteric preserve of scientific discourse.    

            This colonization of subjectivity by scientific rationalism infected thinking within the arts, first through the pointillist painters and then more broadly in the 20 th century, as technology provided increasingly accurate control over the temporal and perceptual parameters of both music and images. During the 1960s extended durations were introduced in the time-based arts (music, theater, film) as efforts to overthrow conventional forms. These exploitations of longer durations flew directly in the face of scientific rationalism; they attacked exactly the same technological topoi , music and film, that had been most thoroughly occupied by rationalistic temporality, but they abandoned any rationalist pretense; long duration work was precisely, in this regard, radically subjectivist, anti-Enlightenment; the works staked out a tentative beachhead on the territory that was to become "postmodern."

It is notable that the key musical work challenging the authoritarian posture of the composer was John Cage's 4'33" , a piece explicitly comprised of duration only. The anti-authoritarian and anti-bourgeois ("counter-cultural") underpinnings of extended duration works, in meditation, psychedelia, the hippie movement, Fluxus, and Orientalism, serve to reinforce the fact that duration was a marker of industrial-era bourgeois authoritarianism.   

            Long durations were brought into the art context of Fluxus by La Monte Young, in particular with his composition Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. (1960). This was followed, during my participation in the collaborative Dream Music group (1962-65), by our composerless extended-duration music. Musical "minimalism" inaugurated the use of long durations to break formal boundaries in other forms--dance, performance art, theater, and film. Andy Warhol's silent 8-hour film Empire (1964) became, like Cage's 4'33" , a work that everyone felt s/he knew, even though almost no one had really attended an actual presentation. It was, in effect, an iconic representation of pure duration in film.

            However, these long duration works were not simply iconoclastic. Their implicit connection with the counterculture of drugs, meditation, and Orientalism (shortly made explicit in Warhol's case with his sponsorship of the Velvet Underground and a slew of Jack Smith-influenced films) smuggled a phenomenological paradox aboard institutionalized "high" culture. This paradox arose through the countervailing of subjective linearity that occurred when audiences slipped into "altered states:" sleep, trance, reverie, meditation, and absent-mindedness. When this took place, viewers and listeners found that their experience of durations was subjectively transformed; memory and the "present" assumed values and experiential velocities that were not compatible with rational clock-time. In short, long durations became demonstrations of the non-linearity of experienced duration.   

            The use of long durations evidently did have a place within the ethos of artistic modernism: as a reframing of the temporal scale of the work, as a manipulation of size or scale. Formal relationships were the stock in trade of minimalist artists; Wittgenstein was "a philosopher much in favor with Minimalists." [Perreault 262][Perreault, John. "Minimal Abstracts." In Battcock (1968), pp. 256-62.] That is, it was easy for critics, beginning from a formalist analytical perspective, to link long durations to other abstract or formalist approaches. More than this, in her classic modernist essay "A B C ART," [Rose, Barbara. "A B C ART." Art in America, October-November 1965. Anthologized in Battcock (1968), pp. 274-97.] [Battcock, Gregory, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology . New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. (1968)] Barbara Rose, while describing minimalism as in part "a reaction against the self-indulgence of an unbridled subjectivity" [Rose (1968), 274], summarizes by calling minimal work

a negative art of denial and renunciation...seeking to evoke, it would seem, that semihypnotic state of blank consciousness, of meaningless tranquility and anonymity that both Eastern monks and yogis and Western mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Miguel de Molinos, sought.

She specifically suggests, in this context, that "[t]he 'continuum' of La Monte Young's [ sic ] Dream Music is analogous in its endlessness to the Maya of Hindu cosmology," [296] while also tracing the use of "durations of time much longer than those we are accustomed to" [290] back to Satie, and in its religious or metaphysical overtones, to Mondrian and Malevich--those archetypes of formal abstraction who had prepared modernism for an irruption of spiritual values into the art experience.

Paintings, needless to say, were implicitly long-duration events, even if a viewer commonly skipped past a canvas after only a few moments. But the explicit incorporation of long durations in "temporal" forms like film introduced this paradoxical suspension of presence into the center of discourses that had been structured to serve other ends. Unlike painting and sculpture, music and theater had arisen within bourgeois culture as diversions, as distractions from quotidian problems--in effect, as escape mechanisms. Western music was founded on the principle of suspended resolution, within the calculus of dominant harmony. Western theater and the novel too were founded on the dynamics of conflict resolution, on the spellbinding capacity of empathic tension. The "trance" of theatrical films was similarly built on the rolling investment of the viewer in anxiety reduction; but this "trance" was not an implementation of complacent quietude, of meditative repose; it was a "trance" built upon concatenated invocations of brief episodes, of short duration events.

            When long durations appeared in this cultural framework, their dialogical shock was immediately felt; it went directly to the core presuppositions of bourgeois cultural construction. The social reasons for the distraction of the viewer came immediately to the surface: the bourgeois cultural framework had been constructed upon the premise that there was a desperate longing amid the middle class for release from the anxiety-production that mobilized their lives, and that they could be tempted to believe in this resolution only by the suggested assuagement that a dispersal of anxieties into a welter of fantasy identifications with imaginary conflicts and repeated, successive, overlapping and interlocking releases might provide. This dense tapestry of defenses was stripped away by the minimalist temporal logic of long durations. Instead of the distraction offered by the undulations of conflict and resolution that had inhabited the temporal spaces of Western theater and music, audiences were baldly confronted with denied expectations.

Conflict and resolution had in effect shrunk the field of durations within Western art by centering upon the use of distraction: of repetitive conflict resolution and the momentary use of novelty or variation. With long durations, the audience found itself immersed in another and quite opposite system of anticipation, one captured in the tidy psychological aperçu that a watched pot never boils. This "never" fully captures the sense in which long durations were not only "long," but that they implemented a sense of duration that was even longer than "long." Duration , that is, was exposed as non-linear, as paradoxical; as capable of overturning the psychic state of bourgeois expectation.