The roles of time and space are present in almost all media, and the chapter asks the question: are space and time master, or meta media? Are they real and tangible? Or are they abstractions of reality? Through this blog article, we will be taking you into a dense critical summary of the idea’s development through important theorists in history and its importance in media studies.
Oh, and feel free to consult the original chapter if you’re more interested!
The Greeks considered time based art as more important, as seen in the daughters of the goddess of memory, which promoted music, history, dance, song, and more, all of which don’t have physical canvases or muses to exist, they only have the moment they are presented to exist. Lessing admits that there are elements of space in ‘time art’ and time in ‘space art’, however, Lessing is adamant that things like painting are mostly space and things like poetry are mostly time. He sees them as two friendly neighbours who respect each other and their spaces. Lessing also states that the superior art is ‘time art’ as it appeals more to the imagination. Kant believes ‘time art’ represents self expression and ‘space art’ is outward appearance, and Hagel believes the history of art shows the progression of material art to virtual art. Aristotle and Johnson argued that time elements of theatre, such as plot and emotion, were more important than spectacles, such as costumes and sets.
Frederick James argued that modernism was dominated by time because it used history and revolutionary change, while post modernism was dominated by focuses on loss of space, "the end of history", which jumped off of the ideas of Hegel and Francis Fukuyama. Fredrick Kittler argued the three most important media inventions were cinema, phonography, and the typewriter. He argued it helped us to analyze human perception in a new way, like how trying to match sound to footage in film is analyzing space and time in a new way. Kittler’s prognosis for the decoupling of man and machine/media and computers was using the objective and qualitative natures of space and time. Before, it was too hard to objectify space and time, but it is now way easier with the use of computers and more sophisticated tools that can be used to measure those aspects.
Blake saw time as the man and space as the woman, and Benjamin thought that all art strays further away from its true original aura when it is removed from the exact time and place it was made. There are some examples of this mindset today, particularly when it comes to content warnings or advisories that are placed in front of older media, typically due to off-colour depictions of slavery or other now-taboo subjects. Even when not thought of in relation to controversial subjects though, there are some effects that older audiences would’ve experienced that simply aren’t able to be replicated, like watching a movie about WWII after having been deployed.
Erwin Panofsky speaks of film as if it erased the borders that were believed to exist between space and time, as stated by Lessing. This does not mean that the existence of categories disappear, since they are still there to complement certain values associated with different artworks. Clement Greenberg dived deeper into the topics of Lessing, as Greenberg thought there was a purity that needed to be upheld with the forms of art. For example, painting and sculptures were deemed confusing during the dominance of literature in the 1700s since it was damaged by the "realistic in the service of literature". He thought that the fix for this was to banish illusion and imitation all together. Greenberg wanted to keep space and time in their metaphysical limits, he wanted visual arts like painting and sculpting to affect the viewer physically, bringing the art to immediate reception of senses and intellect.
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel all perpetuated the idea that time was over space in many of their modern philosophical models. Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson viewed time as an experimental continuum and space as a discrete representation of an expanse of time. Bergson called the qualitative aspect of time as duration and the quantitative aspect of time two different distinct things, and suggested that between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of time there existed a "difference of kind" that is unviewable through the analysis of time as space. It can only be experienced and viewed by those with endowed consciousness which are human beings. It is like how despite the fact that we can measure how many seconds are passing during a pause in conversation, and we know how long a second is, we cannot measure when a silence becomes awkward. There are many moments in life when it comes to time that cannot be measured or ‘known’, but rather can only be experienced.
Husserl analyzed the givenness of the world to consciousness. His work focused on the goal of bringing things back to the conditions on which experiences are constituted. His work also focused on the reduction of the natural attitude to allow him to account for the constitution of the lived experience, and differentiated between the two modes of temporalization as retention and recollection.
The retention plus the immersion trail is what Gerard Granel considers the "large now". This is because the more moments that join the past, the more "nows” we are able to experience. To him, recollection is taking a now you experienced, going into the past, then bringing it back to the now to be experienced in a new light. This concept can be universally applied to everyone who has recollected something, as every time you remember something or tell someone a story, a detail gets left out or slightly altered, since the further away you get from the event the blurrier it becomes. The idea of re-experiencing a memory as a “new now” can also be compared to when individuals who have experienced a traumatic event are remembering it. To them, according to Granel, they are literally “re-living” through the experience.
Husserl didn’t speak much on space, except for the fact that for an object to exist in space, it needs to have an end date. Martin Heidegger continued the principle of time over space as he talked about the difference between the two modes of temporality for human beings, inauthentic and authentic time. Inauthentic is the time explained by clocks in specific units, and authentic time is the truth of the experience for a human being, similar to the concept of the “difference in kind” discussed by Bergsen.
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkhiemer worked on the critique of the culture industry and how it relates to the temporal dimension of media entertainment. They believed that the industry, such as cinema, needed a temporal factor inherently, which differs from the traditional workplace or other industries. This makes sense when you consider that movies have a set length, rely on editing to determine the pace of how a story is told, and so on. They also share the same priority of time over space.
Jacques Derrida’s work discussed the necessity of a non-origin for time and space and a purpose for our existence for us to find an inner sense of peace in a physical world. With that, we can have the power to stand against the power of space and time. Bernard Steigler brought this up in relation to media, suggesting that the giving of time and space is tied to the technologies that mediate the human experience. For example, Steigler suggests that the human experience and global views have become synchronized in a way, because of the cinema industry with things like broadcast real time television. There is a coalition between human time and media time, and with the rapid way that social media has taken over our lives and often dictates where we go, what we learn, and how we act, media time is often dominating control over human time.
This work is consulted on the chapter "Time & Space" from the book Critical Terms for Media Studies edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, published by The University of Chicago Press in 2010.
Blog post words by Oliver Cheung, Tyler Hannaford, Owen Menning, and Micah Sébastien Zhang. Cover image made by Micah Sébastien Zhang.