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Plotinus was born in Egypt in 204 or 205 CE. He died in the 270 CE in Campania, Italy. Plotinus was a Greek philosopher.
Being an adherent of Plato, Plotinus’ primary aim was to provide a coherent interpretation and defence of Plato’s philosophy. For centuries most of Plato´s works were predominantly apprehended and understood through Plotinus’ reading and explication of the great philosopher. Yet while he is considered to be an essential commentator and interpreter of Plato, and consequently, the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus was also a truly original thinker who was influenced not only by Plato but also by the Stoics and Neo-Pythagoreans (and, of course, he was very familiar with Aristotle as well). The early life of Plotinus is not well known. However, in his mid-to-late twenties, Plotinus went to Alexandria to undertake studies in philosophy. After attending various lectures from the most influential philosophers of the day, he finally found his teacher and mentor in Ammonius Saccas, with whom he studied until 242. Plotinus pursued further studies in Persian and Indian philosophy and consequently accompanied Emperor Gordian III on a military expedition. After the latter’s assassination in 244, the excursion was thus canceled in Mesopotamia. Via Antioch, Plotinus then went to Rome to establish a school of philosophy, where he remained as a teacher for twenty years. Plotinus spawned many students-cum-followers; among them were the philosophers Amelius and Eustochius, the emperor Gallienus and his wife, Salonina, and the critical Porphyry. It was Porphyry who truly documented Plotinus and not only urged Plotinus to collect his lectures but also edited them into the Enneads (Gr. “ennea”: nine), which Porphyry published roughly thirty years after the philosopher’s death. It is due to Porphyry that we owe most of our knowledge about Plotinus’ life, and it is because of him, almost all of Plotinus’ work has survived, unlike the works of most other ancient philosophers. Porphyry divided Plotinus’ collected lectures into six books of nine treatises each. They do not follow the order in which they were actually written and also tend to vary greatly in length. After their initial publication, the Enneads were first published and translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino in 1492. They soon gained great importance for generations of thinkers, especially those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the first, Ennead Plotinus writes about ethics and virtue, beauty and happiness. The second and third are primarily concerned with cosmology, covering topics such as Matter, time, and love. The fourth concentrates on the soul, while the fifth focuses on the intellect and knowing or know-ability. The sixth and final text addresses being numbers and the “one.” Plotinus’ metaphysics is based on three critical concepts that form one reality. These are "The One", The soul and the Intellect. Existence is formed from the unit of these three concepts. Through dialectics, this hierarchy is maintained, and thus reality, as the eternal return to the origin, the One, is understood. Arguably the last great Greek philosopher, Plotinus, did not only have a great influence on Porphyry, Proclus, and Saint Augustine (as well as early medieval philosophy in general), but also on Erasmus of Rotterdam, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Henri-Louis Bergson, among others. He continued to teach in Rome until approximately 268. Plotinus then retired to an estate in Campania, where he died in 270. His famous last words are said to read as follows: “Try to bring back the God in yourself to the God in the All.”
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Giordano Bruno was an important Italian philosopher. Based on the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) and Nicolas of Kues (1401-1464), Bruno developed the theory of heliocentrism and shows, philosophically, the relevance of an infinite universe, which has no center, populated by countless suns and worlds identical to ours. Bruno is most known for his theory of the plurality of worlds. Strictly speaking Bruno was neither an astronomer nor a mathematician, but rather a philosopher and poet whose work had an impact on both sciences.
Born Filippo Bruno in 1548 in Nola (in Campania, then part of the Kingdom of Naples), he was the son of a solider, Giovanni Bruno and his wife Fraulissa Savolino. After studies in Naples and tutoring at the Augustinian monastery there, at the age of 17 Bruno entered the Dominican Order of the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples (where the infamous Italian philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) had taught). There Bruno was primarily instructed on Aristotelian philosophy and changed his first name to that of his metaphysics tutor Giordano Crispo, and became an ordained priest by the age of twenty-four. Bruno was a controversial figure of the Italian Renaissance. Burned at the stake for heresy and pantheism in 1600. Bruno’s views on infinite worlds, his mnemonic techniques, and his approach to mathematics all make him an important figure. Bruno was very outspoken and led a challenging life filled with travels. Bruno had as many supporters as he had enemies. Wherever Bruno went, his passionate opinions found opposition. Bruno’s impressive memory and memory techniques became widely recognized. So much so that Pope Pius V invited him to give a demonstration. It was also at this time that Bruno developed his penchant for free-thinking and was caught participating against religious doctrine by owning a banned Erasmus (1469-1536) book. This led Bruno to have to flee Naples in 1576. Bruno traveled for a time in Italy where he was still able to publish his lost work entitled On The Signs of the Times (1577). By 1579 Bruno had made his way to Geneva, a protestant city, but was soon arrested due to a publication in which he was critical of a university professor. For the next seven years he lived in France lecturing on various subjects and attracting the support of powerful patrons. While still in France Bruno published his book De Umbris Idearum (“The Shadows of Ideas”, 1582), and dedicated it to the French King, Henry III. The King took an interest in Bruno, and specifically in his lectures on the art of memory. Bruno benefitted much from his newfound French patronage and continued to publish: Ars Memoriae (The Art of Memory, 1582), and Cantus Circaeus (Circe’s Song, 1582). Both books addressed his discussions on mnemonic models. During this time Bruno also wrote Il Candelario (“The Torchbearer”, 1582), an outrageous dramatic comedy centering on the male midlife crisis and incorporating avant-garde mannerisms employing proto-Brechtian devices, vulgar language and jokes. From 1583 to 1585 Bruno lived in London at the house of the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau (1517-1592). Bruno met members of the Hermetic circle and established a relationship with the English poet Philip Sidney (1554-1586) and dedicated two of his books to him. Bruno then travelled to Oxford to lecture, though, he never was granted a teaching post. This is because Bruno’s views, particularly on Copernicus, were considered highly controversial. In 1584 Bruno published La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), in which he defended Copernicus’ heliocentric theory. Bruno was a follower and supporter of Copernicus’ theories believing that the Earth did in fact revolve around the sun and that the daily rotation of the heavens was a result of the Earth’s own rotation around its axis. In 1584 Bruno published De l’Infinito, Universo e Mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds). Here Bruno boldly argued that the universe is not only infinite but also contains an infinite number of worlds inhabited by intelligent beings. This was the first representation of the modern concept of an infinite universe. Bruno also alleged that the universe reflected God in his infinite nature. For Bruno God is an immanent being, existing everywhere and not as a singular remote heavenly deity. Bruno believed the universe is homogenous and, therefore, as on earth, the stars also contained the four elements (water, air, earth and fire). Because of this, the same physical laws would, and should, apply. In Bruno’s cosmology, space and time are infinite, and the universe is isotropic with planetary systems evenly distributed throughout. Furthermore, ahead of its time, Bruno believed that matter is intelligent and made up of discrete atoms. Bruno felt that every part of the universe, mineral, plant and animal, had a soul and that all souls are akin. In a sense, therefore, Bruno can be considered a pantheist. Leaving England in October 1585, Bruno returned to Paris, where the political climate was tense for him. Due to his writings against Aristotelian natural science, and, in particular, a publication against the mathematician Fabrizio Mordente (1532-1608), Bruno was becoming controversial and unaccepted wherever he went in Europe. Bruno persevered, however, and completed many works in Latin between 1589 and 1590: De Magia (“On Magic”),Theses De Magia (“Theses On Magic”) and De Vinculis In Genere (“A General Account of Bonding”). In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy and eventually became a tutor to Giovanni Mocenigo (1409-1485). Sadly, this tutorship became tragic and traumatic for Bruno as his apprentice denounced him and his teachings to the Venetian Inquisition. Bruno was imprisoned in Rome in 1592. The many charges against Bruno were based on his writings as well as on witness testimonies. Some of these charges included blasphemy, immoral conduct, engaging with magic, and the heresy found in the doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology. Bruno was of course rather controversial as he held many opinions contrary to the Catholic faith. Bruno was asked to recant his philosophy, which he did partially, so it seems he could retain the basis, and perhaps integrity, of his philosophy. Unfortunately, this was not enough for the Pope, who recommended that he be put to death. Bruno’s unitary concept of nature would find admiration by important philosophers and scholars, including Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). While Bruno’s overall contribution to the birth of modern science is still open for debate, many accept Bruno more as a philosopher than a scientist. The American professor of biochemist Issac Asimov (1920-1992) disregarded Bruno as a “philosopher and poet” rather than a scientist. Historian Frances Yates (1899-1981) defend Bruno’s ideas on an infinite universe without geocentric structure as a critical shift between old and new modes of thought. Bruno’s concept of multiple worlds is also viewed by some as a precursor to Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of place and absolute space and to some of quantum mechanics. Accused of heresy Giordano Bruno was condemned to be burnt alive after an eight-year trial in 1600 at the age of 51. In 1889 a statue of him was created on the place of his execution close to the Palace of the Chancellery, which ironically houses the Vatican’s administrative offices. My son was diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy at three years old. As I learn what it means to be a mother of a child with a disability, I find myself frustrated at the lack of access to care, confused by the various opinions and upset at a world that is not as I wish it was. It has been a complex journey for my son, as he understands what it means to have cerebral palsy and to live with a body that works differently. Emotionally I see he is challenged and frustrated when he isn’t as fast as other children, or has to miss school for therapies. We are only at the beginning of a lifelong journey, but I want to use all my energy and skills to make the world better for children like him. I want to research the rhetoric of disability to examine how virtual reality and affective technology are used to help children with disabilities improve their physical motor functions and emotional skills. I want to focus my dissertation project on looking at electracy and Khôra as a guide to creating technology for people with disabilities that empowers active learning and improved health. The research I will conduct will look into the experience and rhetoric of cerebral palsy to see how neurological conditions affect individuals' sense of identity and agency. I want to discover ways to help children with disabilities understand themselves and their bodies, improve motor functions through assistive technology, and understand identity, and celebrate the different perspectives and unique experiences they have. My son is only seven years old and is still making sense of what it means to have a disability; this is an ongoing process that evolves in its complexity as the experiences change. I want to help work with medical researchers to advance technology that makes physical therapy accessible through VR and other technological tools for children and families so that every child can have access to the best tools to further their physical and emotional health. Virtual tools can be used to create communities for families and children with disabilities.
I am interested in the way children come to understand their sense of agency with temporal and spatial narratives that redefine and blur self/other. Focusing on inter-subjective shared identities and experiences as starting points to create ethical frameworks that work with emerging technology can enhance emotional and physical health for children. When people find themselves limited within physical spaces, time is linked to the experiences they have. Attention to spatial and temporal dynamics of identity construction in disability is critical to further dialogues surrounding liberatory critical pedagogies. How can we harness emergent technologies to create new rhetorics and pedagogies which encourage ethical action while acknowledging the critical role of identity production as part of our knowledge-making processes? I want to explore the concept of Khôra related to intersubjectivity and the possibilities of digital rhetoric to open up new ways of knowing and doing ethically. I am interested in where popular media and identity intersects, particularly related to conceptions of risk, time, and space. Time and space in Marvel's Cinematic Universe are of interest in the popular deployment of technological and scientific ideologies. Looking at how popular media is influenced and influences the rhetoric of Covid and how children are affected by the logic of probability and risk as an ever invasive fear-based discourse in their daily lives. Superheroes and other forms of popular media create and are created within the context of normative discourses surrounding ableism. I want to find ways of using superheroes to focus on the power of difference and as a way of engaging young children in education and therapy programs. How can children and parents of children with disabilities work with risk, or understand risk from their own unique experience in a way that embraces agency and positive growth? Rhetoric can provide a uniquely valuable perspective to the medical, social, and emotional well-being of children with disabilities and their families Links to articles that I have found interesting and helpful in my own journey as a parent and a scholar. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/pages/index.html https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rrsq20/50/3?nav=tocList https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6693/5705 https://reflectionsjournal.net/category/archive/14-1/ https://disabilityintersections.wordpress.com/bibliography/ https://dsq-sds.org https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/456 “The Chora is indeed a strange “space”: the rapidity and violence of the facilitations are localized at a point that absorbs them, and they return like a boomerang to the invoking body, without however, signifying it as separate: they stop there, impart the jolt - laughter. Because it was bounded but not blocked, the rate of facilitation discards fight and bursts into a jolt of laughter.” (p. 284 Kristeva)
“For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect.Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe. So if I'm to tell the story of how it really came to be in this way, I'd also have to introduce the character of the Straying Cause-how it is its nature to set things adrift."-Plato Timeaus 48 The swaying cause we see here is a haunted space of indeterminacy fundamental to the foundations of Western Metaphysics. The swaying cause is the casual space of indeterminacy, a third space. Time for Plato is not linked to space by reason, to create order of intellect, but a necessity, space is that which reason could not create and time is part of the rational ordering of necessity, but it is part of an illogical, or third cause. Plato proposed this differentiated notion of time in Timaeus. “[the Demiurge] began to think of making a moving image of eternity: at the same time as he brought order to the universe, he would make an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity. This, of course, is what we call “time.”Plato later begins to articulate the receptacle, chora. Khora is between being and becoming for Plato, a matrix, womb, the mother of time as opposed to the father of time chronos. First elucidated in Plato’s Timaeus, chora is referred to as a receptacle. After analyzing vision and its gift to humanity, to see the perfection of the Kosmos, he described a third swaying cause, which I will argue can be linked to his discourse on Chora. The discourse on khora, as it is presented, does not proceed from the natural or legitimate logos, but rather from a hybrid, bastard, or even corrupted reasoning (logismo notho). It comes “as in a dream” (52b) which could just as well deprive it of lucidity as confer upon it a power of deviation. — Plato Does such a discourse derive, then from myth? Shall we gain access to the thought of the khora by continuing to place our trust in the alternative logos/mythos? And what if this thought called also for a third genus of discourse? And what if, perhaps as in the case of the khora, this appeal to the third genre was only the moment of a detour in order to signal toward a genre beyond genre? Beyond categories and above all beyond categorial oppositions, which in the first place allow it to be approached or said?” —Derrida (On The Name, 90) Khora is a space, any space that can be occupied or has been occupied. Khora can be a receptacle, a womb, a replicator, a creative holder, a holding of space. Khora is always outside the polis, but potentially inhabited by it. Remember also that defining Khora, as Plato uses, is not so simple, for it is indeed a bastard discourse that is unintelligible, un-sensible and undefinable. “Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos,’ said Neville, ‘this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust.” Virginia Woolf. “The Waves (Oxford World's Classics).” Apple Books. Chora is often thought of as either a place outside the polis, or a void. But Plato’s analysis on Chora is not so simple, it is truly an illegitimate discourse. The birth of matter itself, comes to be via a swaying cause, that has not Chora has been a point for post structuralist feminist working to articulate a language and history for women’s place as subject within linguistic and historical context of Western thought. Julia Kristen (2002) uses her semiotic linguistic and psychoanalytic theory to analyze chora to describe the maternal body. Luce Irigaray (1985) reads Timaeus to show the ways in which woman as a concept and subject is linked to Western philosophy and is intertwined in our understanding of self and others. Irigaray 1985. Butler (1993) reads the Timaeus to deconstruct and reconstruct a genealogy of the ways in which matter has been integral to the creation of Western Philosophy and her ideas on the performative nature of gender. Gender is a construction tied to a linguistic heritage from Plato which places matter and the feminine in a binary man/woman, with woman on the bottom. Elizabeth Grosz (1995) examines Irigaray’s connections between women and materiality, or space, articulating women as being in the role of the undefinable, or unthinkable spaces of being. Chora can also be described as something like space-time, a temporal differentiation, through combining hupodche and chora, Emanuela Bianchi describes a possibility of seeing the inter-subjective and causal relationship of space, boundary and movement, “Inviting in, receiving, holding, appropriating on the one hand, and opening out, providing space, giving, dispersing on the other.” (Bianci 2006). We are coming closer to the use of khora by chance, the possibility of creation through a creative space that is not form itself but a possibility of making matter matter. Heidegger hints at Chora as being where Plato starts to describe the third space between existent and being. In Being and Time Heidegger begins his analysis by looking at Aristotle’s physics. He goes to Aristotle's analysis of Book 4 in Physics, Heidegger links temporality and space as key to our understanding of being. Aristotle attempts to describe khora using topos with empirical understanding, explaining that only Plato has attempted to speak of the essence of place itself. Heidegger says in his 1951 lecture, “Might not cho ̀ ra mean: that which separates itself from every particular, that which withdraws, and in this way admits and ‘makes room’ precisely for something else?” He states in Being and Time that khora defined as space, differing from topos because of Greek notions of space as being always occupied, are different from our forms of spatialization. The notion of empty space, a quantitative number separate in totality from the qualitative aspects of its essence, are foreign to the thinking of Plato and the Greeks. We are not articulating an empty receptacle, but a creative matrix of possibility. “A chance happening that defies calculation? Like a storm cloud that condenses tattered wisps of material resistance. Shadow of bodies masking the limpid dryness of the air. Remains of incarnations that still remain under the sun and flit randomly out to block the purity of the light. And how is one to take a position against such an enemy? Or flee the impalpable dilution of revenge that fills the atmosphere and does not spare you according to the weather.” --Irigaray (Mariners p. 67) And what of khora? What is khora but a void, a receptacle, perhaps actually only a translation that has been over read - over analyzed, over thought? A memory, an emotional attachment to something quite useless and beyond or maybe before the moment of all that IS. To become, One falls, from something, they suppose. Or perhaps one cannot understand kairos or chronos absent a configuration. Exactly! So within a number of measurements exists a space. Amongst points in a line, we well have a line, we may flatten such a line, give names to it - but as Einstein pointed out, we really do have to account for such irregularities. There is something uncertain. Just as deterministic models of mathematics began to explain the universe - truly and whole and whole, hole, is key, as chance would have it, something uncertain appeared. and then we flew back into a quandary that has befuddled us. Simultaneity is a temporal break from the strain of Chronos. But we are not looking at only simultaneity but rather entangled states of becoming. Matrixial borderlands or birth, upon which the horizon is cavernous rather than extended. It is only to be unfolded. To see space as “floating time” as Elie During writes it, time as opposed to duration or becoming, we highlight the role of the framing device. One thinks of time as the great coordinator but duration is in the unfolding of things happening place to place. (Lecture 2013 EGS). If we redefine topos or time as floating space to mean a purely situational experience of time, one can see how astrology works. Or how it might unfold, time can be beyond temporal order, and its repressive function shifts from linear folding toward simultaneity of relations. Floating time in Deleuze, deals with becoming animal (primordial), thereby non-measured time, plurality of times to be consisted in a range of time. Bersonian figure. They place floating music, machinic - opposed to Chronos' time of measure which creates a form and determines a subject. Deleuze and Guatteri are trying to disfigure the subject as a general subject, the individual is specific, rhizomatic, emerging from the particular, but relating in multiple ways to the universal which is also individual. We see here what one could call synchronization of heterogeneous durations within time itself. Plato introduces the Chora in Timaeus. Chora is described as a receptacle, a void, a place in which the matter is formed. The creation of matter within form is for Plato likened to a womb and the topic is taken up by Feminist Irigiray and Kristeva to call for a return to a maternal embodied understanding of subjectivity. Chora is used commonly in Greek texts to indicate place, often interchangeably with topos. At times it is clearly indicative of receptacle, or used for the placeholder in terms of a “cell” in the use of Arabic tables. Stoic philosophers distinguished between chora and void. For the Stoics, chora is a room within a room and the void is that which is outside the entire cosmos and surrounds it, it does not surround all objects, but only the edges of cosmic space and extends to infinity “The void subsists as a possible condition for place, where things abide: it constitutes the conditions and terms of place with none of the things that occupy or take up place. It is a pure extension to infinity. Void is thus considered independent of body, but also independent of mind or reason’s capacity to conceptualize it. It is an extracos-mic, independently subsisting infinity, an absolute particular incapable of generalization or universalization, extension in itself, orientation in itself, unbounded openness, the openness that enables bodies and their qualities to abide in place that is qualified by its bodies and that disposes bodies to be in certain relations with each other.” (Grosz 2017 p. 34) Essentially time is always an experience as such, a phenomenological experience, or a certain sense of time is this. Time thus is experienced as Bergson says, the duration of time or psychological time is the interior image of the experience of time. We understand its meaning from the familiar adage: a watched pot never boils. The measurement of time demands chronological precision, measurements and apparatus, but there is a connection between the measured exteriority of time and the interior experience of time. There is possibly a space. Physics points us to space-time, and philosophy takes us beyond space time. As Heidegger went beyond Bergson - to allude to an ancient notion of becoming in time. It is always in a time that the totality of history must be seen. Heidegger’s reading of Bergson acknowledges the contemporary vision and rapture or capture he had of the moment. Agamben writes that the contemporary is to always be out of fashion, in relation to the present, to thus be on the verge of benign out of time. You may quickly lose that moment, but that is to be of fashion! To be on time, or in relation to the time of now, willing to be again out of time. Classic and timeless, Heidegger wants to fall out of fashion with his contemporary, to go beyond him. Perhaps to imagine a future time, a retro-fashion. To dig up the hauntings which elude any discourse on time, there is quite simply a void. Althusser’s own aleatory materialism was only to give way to the later works which began to touch towards the void we are currently occupying. Khora. Leaving behind or reimagining the political philosophy of his work on Marx he begins to outline his next move, to articulate philosophy of science as having no truth upon which it reflects, but only to be touching on the void. The birth ‘space’ of form khora, is an encounter or to take hold (Althusser) a moment a HOLDING, “in order that this encounter 'take hold', that is to say, 'take form', at last give birth to Forms, and new Forms - just as water 'takes hold' when ice is there waiting for it, or milk does when it curdles, or mayonnaise when it emulsifies. Hence the primacy of 'nothing' over all 'form', and qf aleatory materialism over all journalism. In other words, not just anything can produce just anything, but only elements destined [voir] to encounter each other and, by virtue of their affinity, to 'take hold' one upon the other” (Althusser 1982 Encounter). Every conversation requires a space in which the conversation happens. “Conversation disrupts the possibility of a simple history because it dispenses with a personal or universal narrative in favor of what could happen to us between ourselves when we expose ourselves to this space, which belongs to neither one nor the other.” (Ronnel p. xv Dictations on Haunted Writing). Political philosophy describes the common space, rhetoric describes the kairotic moment, the ethics of the speech, the noise is an interlude that may disrupt the communication, but all communication is essentially in relation to another that can not be fully known and must take place in time. But if time is both particular and universal, it also must exist within something. And then without. The hole opens again.
Chronological time is measured and then laid out, in a line, an order in a fashion that is always with intention. It is a measure that claims objectivity. Its images would argue against such objectivity.
The first timelines were crude compared to the History of The World that one remembers in textbooks. The timelines were marked with dates, rows of kings, orders of family. They were to establish the genealogical ranking of an order of history which is also an order of power. A deeper examination of the timeline's history brings up a variety of issues of power and its relationship to the imaging of time itself. The conquering of the West produced new variations in timelines, using timelines to teach, standardize, and align a series of events into one narrative that pushed an agenda. Chronos in Plato's Timaeus (number = eternity in unity). Time is that which we imagine being ever marching forward. Time is linear, and you have only so much; it is quantity, and Cronus eats his children. He eats time. The future being forever crumbled in the mouth of Chronos, The Father of Time. In the 'Transcendental Aesthetic', Kant claims that temporal relations of succession and simultaneity order empirical representations of objects. This opposes the Aristotelian notion of space later confirmed by Galileo's vision of space as ordered by time, time as Chronos the constraining and ultimate organizer of all, time became a system, an order upon which all our notions of writing, living, working. Let us contrast, before comparing the definition of time in Aristotle's Book IV Chapter 12, Physics: "Not only do we measure the movement by the time, but also the time by the movement, because they define each other. The time marks the movement, since it is its number, and the movement the time. We describe the time as much or little, measuring it by the movement, just as we know the number by what is numbered, e.g. the number of the horses by one horse as the unit. For we know how many horses there are by the use of the number; and again by using the one horse as a unit, we know the number of the horses itself. So it is with the time and the movement; for we measure the movement by the time and vice versa. It is natural that this should happen; for the movement goes with the distance and the time with the movement, because they are quanta and continuous and divisible. The movement has these attributes because the distance is of this nature, and the time has them because of the movement. And we measure both the distance by the movement and the movement by the distance; for we say that the road is long, if the journey is long, and that this is long, if the road is long—the time, too, if the movement, and the movement, if the time. Time is a measure of motion and of being moved, and it measures the motion by determining a motion which will measure exactly the whole motion, as the cubit does the length by determining an amount which will measure out the whole. Further 'to be in time' means for movement, that both it and its essence are measured by time (for simultaneously it measures both the movement and its essence, and this is what being in time means for it, that its essence should be measured). " — Aristotle's Book IV Chapter 12, Physics 4 I find waves when I read Timeaus and I lose my bearings with Aristotle. But one must be diligent to pay attention to the different maps at work, Aristotle achieves the goal of creating a system, an order by which is the view on time as a force of motion. Time is essentially linked to movement, and measurement. Plato's notion, before Aristotle as written in the dialogue with Timaeus appears to reach to the stars, the cosmos. It also provides a unique designation of a third space within his cosmology, and possibilities of escape. Plato writes of the beginning of time "[The Demiurge] brought into being the Sun, the Moon, and five other stars, for the begetting of time. These are called "wanderers" [planêta], and they stand guard over the numbers of time. … And so people are all but ignorant of the fact that time really is the wanderings of these bodies." Plato. Although one can look forward to the use of Platonic theory and order the "kosmos" strictly by the perfection and order of lineage of the West, one may try to dig up a big of dirt in the text here to further examine time as the "the moving image of eternity" (Timaeus, 37d). It is precisely a moving image that describes the space of eternity itself. hence, and this is what being in time means for it, that its essence should be measured). Time does not exist because of the movement of the planets, but truly is the movement of the planets. What perspective does this ask us to look to? Cosmic time clocks, each on their own, simultaneously following their own orbit? Their own perspective on time? It is within time - that we learn more about the forms as well. "Aristotles idea that woman is merely matter, and 'the principle fo meovemtn which is male in all living beings better and ore divine' is an idea that expresses a will to power that goes beyond all of what is know." Well that doesn't sit well, neither does the Plato's woman as a secondary incarnation! But why is she the wet nurse of life itself? Consider Zeno's paradox - the tortoise versus Achilles in a race. Who shall win? Well one cannot win, each is moving within their own speed, so what is the measure of their success? Is it time? Is it time as seen by Achilles or the tortoise? Bergson introduced a subtle nuanced notion of memory and time throughout his work. His work, while largely popular (particularly by women- part of his exclusion and critique by contemporaries) - possible/ real for Bergson is rejected in favor of virtual/actual. Deleuze takes this up to say that the movement in becoming is a process of actual action instead of realization. This subtle difference is essential in understanding the push forward in thought here. It is not about making real via fiat- it is about process and the multiple movements of becoming that provide us a clue into the possibilities of temporality and the possibility of a subject in time. This all takes place within the duration of time. Time endures, and it is through this duration which is only possible in terms of a moving process which Deleuze elaborately imagines in his cinematic works that we see how an image of time might crystallize. "For it is by no means the case that all conscious states blend with one another as raindrops on a lake (p. 166 Bergson Matter and Memory) There is a point in our consciousness that is aware of the self Bergson articulates. This provides a counterpoint to our movements and actions in life. He speaks of the artist and their relationship to their work, an act that throws itself to the future. So matter is formed under the feet of time. The self or matter actually meets perception in the moment, through the body one understands temporarily. Memory is an image created that one can look back to, but it is not thethe experience itself. Bachelard writes that what happens is one thinks of ourselves as one thinking. We being to see the ways in which our images of ourselves become a formal structure that imagines oneself in time. Our becoming then becomes part of our mind, our image. An understanding of the possibilities of time, for a creative opening, or an agential realist perspective that we are drawing from in the work of Karen Barad that includes an ethical realization of agency demands that one takes the possibility of the chance seriously. The overlay of passing onto the future is part of the human experience, this happens when our bodies meet perception in movement. We fall to the ground, We run to the plane, we birth the child. The ground is laid beneath the feet, time marches forward with a resonating sound of the past. There Is not a melting of one's understanding of past into present, but there are breaks within awareness always present for Bergson in a n internal thread of awareness, that is thought of as an internal dialogue of hesitation. To take any movement is to consider not taking it. To move forward in time e-spaces the thought of point in time. Time has been measured as an image in chronologies. The timeline creates a visual system of order, to make sense of a historical collective past. But the timeline speaks little to an individual's perception of time. The wide variety in representations of time through the history of timelines gives us a larger overview of the multiple ways one can make sense of the past. But what if the future, such a multiplicity of restructuring temporal divides into the future - the spaces one divides to make a prediction of the future, to attempt calculation into the future require a use of some type of temporal divide. An apparatus, a tempo ro a rhythm, of which will be going back to some other imagining of the past as such. Should we divide by minute, year, lunar phases or solar arcs. Perhaps by 42. A significance is then made towards an unknowable future by means of ordering the past. Heidegger articulates ecstatic horizontal schema', the original drama of time. Standard temporalization of time is connected with the idea that time moves by itself, we say time is passing, we don't know why but we imagine it does. Need a primitive action for time to move this action is temporalization. Original action brings time into movement supported by the subject. Contemporary version is formalized by Heidegger, true and original time is time as produced by the gesture of throwing themselves at time Dasein. Mathematical time is derived with respect to original temporalization. But the emergent notions of the present require another notion of time emergent properties. A topographical layering allows for the qualitative notions of order which allow us to make music in the moment of now. Or to pass through the void of the unknown and choose a third door. For the gambler, life is a series of making chances subordinate to the power of one's agency, or perhaps to time itself…" the dice is worn"... For the artist, chance is the emergent space of a type of creative hope or haunting. This nature of the hazard of engaging in a project with a n unknown future, a slot is the hope of the lover, at first chance of meeting - to open to the embrace of the other. Spacetime in mathematics is considered a relational essence between points and objects, if you divide it endlessly, it falls apart. Remember Zeno's paradox. One cannot divide time without it falling apart - so can one separate space from time. Hegel : Time as form: 1-phases of becoming 2-apply mathematical concepts to phenomena change or duration. 3-be under rule of number 4- conclusion time is not medium of succession, medium of co-existence ensures commensurability of durations or motions. Time is the envelope of becoming(s). Non-operational definition - dimension of experience organizing theme of thought. (During 2019). Collapse of time onto motion. Aristotle time is thought of as unfolding or becoming in a way parallels motion. Strong concern for co-existence duration and less so for the accounting of time. Bergson’s writings on time are key to Deleuze and Ponty as argued by Olinksewy 2021 book, Deleuze Bergson and Moerleau-Ponty. She points out that for Ponty, to look at temporarily as the junction of objects and consciousness, so temporality is not chronological ordering of nows as psychologists would say, or a series of neurological events as physiology would ay - for Ponty, "temporal horizons of objects come to our attention through an idea or concept intuited by a unifying subject, but first, through the presubjective hold our body has upon the world." (Olinksewy p. 95) Ponty points us to the spatial perceptions of our temporality. Through visiting a foreign city, one can feel this, we search for some familiarity, "a body is in space only to the degree that is an expression of the network of temporal relations to the subject." (P. 97 Olinksewy). Collapsed time for Ponty is when lose any sense of time and lose the ability to act at all. Timeaus Plato - Khora, khora is the space of becoming. Time is a form, as Einstein is right, there is no philosophical time, but the task of a philosopher is to speak of the forms of time. How could this be achieved? We peer down our historical viewpoint, our immediate experience, the stars and the shadows for images, Michell Serre wrote of time as a process of percolation versus flowing, accumulates energy then it makes an emergent flow. Heating up of time. In Indian astrology and cosmology, heat gives order and truth and the foundations of a harmonious life. (Campion p. 131). Relativity physics is that when you think of it, the invariant concept of time is a local concept of time, measuring time along world lines in space-time but no common time for the ongoing becoming of the universe (During 2019). Time as a form is constantly emergent (khora). Bergson took the theory of Einstein struggling with time as reduced to local time, the issue of coexistence, is left out of the theory. There can be no universal present and co-existence matter perspective. Deleuze topological investigations to lines of flight through nomadic perspective -provides a kind of semiotic spatial topography of the event and the irreducibility and ultimate consistent divergence of processes. Birth is a process in which time is suspended and thus only through haunting the writing with traces of experience and lines of flight towards a possible vertex point which itself is an opening and unfolding into itself so we approach a method that can speak of time as such. Not a biological metaphor, but an experiential emergence of the place of becoming. It is through quickening of the energetic experience and text through analysis of image that we approach a vision of the ring of fire. Aion (eternal time) "But being an empty and folded form of time, the Aion subdivides ad infinitum that which haunts it without ever inhabiting it -the Event for all events. This is why the unity of events or effects among themselves is very different from the unity of corporeal causes among themselves." - Deleuze "Is there not in the Aion a labyrinth very different from that of Chronos-a labyrinth more terrible still, which commands another eternal return and another ethic (an ethic of Effects)? Let us think again of Borge's words: "I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line .... The next time I kill you ... I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting." - Deleuze "But being an empty and unfolded form of time, the Aion subdivides ad infinitum that which haunts it without ever inhabiting it -the Event for all events. This is why the unity of events or effects among themselves is very different from the unity of corporeal causes among themselves." - Deleuze "I pictured this chance not in mathematical form but as a key that could bring being into harmony with whatever surrounded it, since being is itself harmony, a harmony with what chance is in the first place. A light iso destroyed in the depths of the possibility of being. Being is destroyed and breath is suspended; it's reduced to a feeling of Silence, so that there's a harmony there which is completely improbable. Strokes of luck wager being, successively enrich (human) being with the potentiality to harmonize with luck, with the power of revealing or creating luck (since luck is the art of being, or beings is the art of welcoming and loving luck). There's no great distance from anguish to a feeling of bad luck to harmony. Anguish is necessary to harmony, bad luck to luck, a mother's insomnia to a child's laughter." - Bastille Leibniz writes against the possibility of chance, "I therefore admit indifference only in the one sense, implying the same as contingency, or non-necessity. But, as I have declared more than once, I do not admit an indifference of equipoise, and I do not think that one ever chooses when one is absolutely indifferent. Such a choice would be, as it were, mere chance, without determining reason, whether apparent or hidden. But such a chance, such an absolute and actual fortuity, is a chimera which never occurs in nature. All wise men are agreed that chance is only an apparent thing, like fortune: only ignorance of causes gives rise to it. But if there were such a vague indifference, or rather if we were to choose without having anything to prompt us to the choice, chance would then be something actual, resembling what, according to Epicurus, took place in that little deviation of the atoms, occurring without cause or reason. Epicurus had introduced it in order to evade necessity, and Cicero with good reason ridiculed it." - p. 314 1710 "43. Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too "(Marcus Aurelius On his thoughts) Kairos (ethic act of time, in the moment right choice, forecasting) The time of the moment introduced and expanded upon the time of choice, the agent within the chronological timeline. Kairos is the moment upon which one acts. It is perhaps the opposite of chronological time, it is perhaps the particular moment within a defined chronological timeline. It is also the localization of the universal against a backdrop of time: the subject's chance — reach — for freedom. Kairos more simply, or perhaps more complex — is unmeasured time. And it is bound to rhetorical and ethical practices. Kairos is also a term used for weather, which interestingly calls to mind forecasting and the possibilities of its uses. "Kairos is where the Arrow of Time point to the Mobius strip coniuncito of inner (vertical) and outer (horizontal)." (Stratfield p 89). Avital Ronnel reference to Goethe's haunted relation to weather forecasting. Kairos was the youngest son of Zeus or grandson of Kronos- God of the favorable moment. Kairos is split from Chronos in its relationship to ethics. It is not linear time as Stretifield writes, "Kairos opens a new dimension of awareness leading to permanent change. It separates from Chronos, which is sequential or chronological (linear) time ruling cause and effect, and enters the quantum leap of the acausal that is both spontaneous and qualitative. The time of the moment introduced and expanded upon the time of choice, the agent within the chronological timeline. Kairo is the moment upon which one acts. It is perhaps the opposite of chronological time, it is perhaps the particular moment within a defined chronological timeline. It is also perhaps the localization of the universal against a backdrop of time. The subject's chance for freedom. Kairos more simply, or perhaps more complex - is unmeasured time. And it is bound to rhetorical ethical practices. Kairos is also a term used for weather, which interestingly calls to mind forecasting and the possibilities of its uses. "Is there not in the Aion a labyrinth very different from that of Chronos-a labyrinth more terrible still, which commands another eternal return and another ethic (an ethic of Effects)? Let us think again of Borge's words: "I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line .... The next time I kill you ...I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting." -- Deleuze SUN DIAL The sundial measures time through finding the meridian, and the shadow cast from a vertical line aligned with the meridian indicates the hour of the day. The shadow should be parallel to the earth's axis so that the dial is accurate for all times of the year. The hemicycle was a favorite type of sundial to the Greeks; it was a semicircular form, hollow out of a block cut to mirror the polar altitude. Herodotus (5th century B.C.) wrote that the sundial originated in Babylonia from 2000 B.C.  WATER CLOCK The clepsydra was a Greek water clock. It is thought to have been invented by Ctesibius at Alexandria in the 2nd century B.C. (p. 48)**find invented elsewhere textual citation). The clepsydra comes from two Greek words kleptein (to steal) and hudor (water). The water clock was a vessel filled with water with a small hole in the bottom. It would be filled with water to a specific marking, and the water would then trickle out of the hole; it would empty itself in the same intervals of time. It was often used as an ancient timer, measuring speeches for example.  SAND Later sand was substituted for water in dryer countries, and it proved to be more accurate for the lack of evaporation and freezing. Also used to measure time were notched candles and graduated lamps; a candle made of the same material would burn close to the same number of inches every hour.  ASTROLABE Astrologers used the Astrolabe to calculate local time, the degree of the ascendant, and other functions. THE SAHALE STICK This rod made of wood marked with slashes representing important events in Christian history was used to teach the history of Christian imperialism. In accordance with the linear Christian liturgy, the intent was creating a forward line with a closed system of calculations consuming the viewer (as CHRONOS consumed his children). THÉ CHRONICLE The chronological time tables were developed by Eusebius of Caesarea, a 4th-century theologian who composed The Chronicle (Rosenberg & Grafton p. 26). He developed the Hexapla, a six-column Bible, using rows and columns, a new form of type that was much harder to put into ancient manuscripts. By coordinating the history of Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, he made his argument for a singular vision of history in which Rome unified the world to bring Jesus's words to the people. The Chronicles was reproduced through the middle ages. Scholars began to create astronomical charts and images to predict and chronicle eclipses and conjunction of plants. ASTRONOMY TABLES Peter Apianus' Atronomicum Caesareum explained the movements of planets and the sun and aligned their passages with history. The use of astronomical data in timelines in the 15th century catalyzed a revolution in chronologies. Prior to Apianus, astronomers based tables on fixed points originating in King Nabonassar' ascent to the throne of Babylon (feb 26 747 BCE) Gerardus Mercator created the first world atlas in1569. The famous 'Mercator projection,' was a world map on 18 separate sheets with parallel lines running from top to bottom and from side to side representing the longitudes and the latitudes. Giovanni Maria Tolosani, introduced astronomical evidence to prove that the Mercator Projection chronicled world history year by year with a list of dated eclipses. CONQUEST VIA CHRONUS TIMELINE Chronos is not always so clear in its linear direction, but the chronology is seen as a stream, a tree, a lion - an analysis of cartographies of time through timelines shows some of how time was used to further a specific narrative, through a variety of metaphors. It is one thing to say that Chronos is linear. He is but is not the line of many parts. In the U.S. frontier days in the 18th and 19th centuries, the colonization of the Native American's and the march west helped fuel a proliferation of timelines and their representation as a means of conquest. To conquer the natives was to assimilate them into the timeline. Cronus ate his children. The famous Father of Time was portrayed as sick and distended. He can only go forward and not back. The once-great king of the Golden Age is now sick with the weight of his children and cannot enjoy his overthrow of Ouranus - the aching stomach. The desire to consume anything which might in fact annihilate him. History is a process of eating the future to ensure the continuation of the timeline. MECHANICAL CLOCKS A mechanical clock consists of 4 parts, a driving mechanism; the transmitting mechanism; the controlling mechanism and the indicating mechanism. (Willis I. Milham 1942). The mechanical clock in Latin was usually termed Horologium, which could mean sundial, clock or clepsydra. The word can be translated as timekeeper. The exact date of the first mechanical clock is hard to pinpoint, but it has been said in 606...But to be more accurate historically and chronologically, one may say that the 19th century was the time of an ushering in of mechanized standardized time. As new forms of travel and communication proliferated, the need for time to be standard, to be the same became a matter of security and sanity. Achieving precision, that is the process of Chronos, to perfect and procure, or is Mars severing the sections of time out of its orbit. Indeed it was under the pressure of time that the chronometer took over. PHOTOGRAPH—CAPTURED TIME The refraction of light theorized on became reality in the spectacular innovation of the camera. FILM — CAPTURING THE MOVEMENT OF TIME STANDARDIZING TIME 1825 was the start of the U.S. Naval Observatory. President John Quincy Adams began the first official optical time keeping formal division of the federal government. It's primary function was the restoration, repair, and rating of navigational instruments. In 1842, it was officially put into law as the national observatory to track chornomorets, navigation devices. In 1845 the observatory held the first time ball, 12th in the world. The time ball was dropped every day except Sunday, precisely at the astronomically defined moment of Mean Solar Noon; this enabled all ships and civilians within sight to know the exact time. By the end of the American Civil War, the Observatory's clocks were linked via telegraph to ring the alarm bells in all of the Washington, D.C. firehouses three times a day. Soon after the time would be sent out via telegraph to railway and town stations. ...nearly all railway stations and towns used time as sent from Greenwich. In October 1884, the International Telegraph Union held the first International Meridian Conference in D.C. They agreed to divide the world into 24 time zones based on the Greenwich meridian. "The functions of the Bureau of Standards include the testing and com- parison with standards of various kinds of measuring apparatus, and the accuracy of such instruments. The Principal Object Of this standardization is to bring about better agreement with the standards of the United States of all measuring apparatus used in the comparison of physical quantities, and to increase the accuracy of measurement of the physical and chemical properties matter. This Service Is Performed For the public, as well as for the various departments of the National and State Governments Included in such measuring apparatus are timepieces of various kinds, and this is the first circular announcement of the beginning of the testing and certification watches by the Bureau. This Circular gives the regulations under which such tests will be conducted, the procedure of the tests, the criteria that will be applied to the results of the tests, and the tolerances that will be allowed in the performance of a watch for which a certificate is granted. Later, the Bureau will take up the testing for other timepieces, such as chronometers, clocks, chronometer watches, chronographs, and stop watches, and devices for the measurement of short intervals of time. Announcement of the beginning of such tests and of the methods to be employed will be made in a subsequent edition of this Circular."   A Trajectory of Birth in Philosophy "Women are afraid of birth because they do not have an image of birth." (The Business of Being Born - documentary) Women expect pain, trauma and fear. There is nothing written of the process of birthing or the possibilities of the matrixial space that has reached us all. Birth is not just the physical process, but it is the place of women in the hands of experts. Her material body at the whim of a world which has only recently realized the womb did not wander throughout her body. A world that considers her womb the marker of hysteria, something to be owned, to make use of to produce an image of him from the father. A woman turned to mimesis. Moreover, in a world of production and capitalism gone wild, we have found the focus on production - absent even a realistic examination of the probability or numbers in terms of the interventions at birth and its relationship to birth. Maternity care is currently in crisis; less than 8 percent of women consider home birth a viable option. The US is currently At 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births; the United States ranks No. 33 out of 36 OECD countries. Birth has become increasingly clocked, technologized, increasingly monitored, measured but has the increase in medical frontiers increased the power of women? "When this conception of social performance is applied to gender, it is clear that although there are individual bodies that enact these significations by becoming stylized into gendered modes, this "action" is immediately public as well. There are temporal and collective dimensions to these actions, and their public nature is not inconsequential; indeed, the performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. Understood in pedagogical terms, the performance renders social laws explicitly." (Judith butler 1988) What happened to the midwife - the rise of obstetrics created a business of hospitals, the movement away from the midwife and the birth at home was also a repetition of the move away from astrology. The sterilization of birth happened through a logic that drove out the Woman, drove out the individual. Standardizing time was part of the process of the standardization of birth, of the subject. Birth must be on time! Timing became linked clearly to fetal health. Based on measuring exact dates of birth using sonar - what is it allied? There becomes a timeline for a birth that leaves little room for natural birth. IF not on time, a series of medical interventions follow a typical US birth. Pitocin, to speed up and intensify the contractions, which can stress the fetus, which then creates intense pain due to the augmentation - and the epidural no longer works, and they up the epidural the cycle comes in, and the baby is being shocked of oxygen and Blood, and then quickly you need a c-section. This is not a unique horror tale. It is apparent in the scientific literature that each intervention creates an increased likelihood of a cesarean section. Positions for birth, lying on the back, were invented as part of the move to the obstetrician in favor of the doctor. It helps the doctor, but not the child or mother. Movement is necessary for the more effortless movement of the child through the birth canal, standing, sitting on a birthing stool, walking; these are the movements that facilitate an entrance to time that does not re-traumatize the Mother/womb. It was commonplace to give birth at home until the early 1900s. In this illustration, midwives and astrologers practice their art side by side, from the 1580 edition of Jakob Ruff's popular Renaissance midwifery book, De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis. The Birth Horizon: Space of Becoming The falling from eternal to a mortal is the space of becoming. Can this space be mapped as internal/external, above /below? This eternally deceiving receptacle of such a becoming is the womb of the mother. The Mayans mapped this inner space as outer space in their images of the World Tree at the Galactic Center. Simon de Beauvoir writes, "Woman? Very simple, say those who like simple answers: She is a womb, an ovary, she is female: this word is enough to define her." (Second Sex p. 21) A Trajectory of Birth in Philosophy Men conceived western philosophy. It is not surprising that the most fundamental human activity of birth has no space here. The birth trauma of being expelled from the mother is reflected in the absence of the birthing language in philosophy. Heidegger's being is never presented as a phenomenology of birth. How then does Being arrive? Birth is rarely seen, rarely spoke of as a phenomenological experience of the mother. This study — astrology as the haunted optical lens of western philosophy, prepared by Plato with his Timeline Project of merging the two bands, the celestial equator and galactic center by way of the Vertex — set out to change this condition by creating an ontology of the birth itself, as a thing in itself. This thing in itself is the astrological birth chart, otherwise known as the horoscope. "The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping." Virginia Woolf. "The Waves (Oxford World's Classics).". Deleuze & Guattari: Becoming Animal Deleuze & Guattari's analysis of becoming-animal provides a privileged place to the becoming of Woman, they argue the factual statement that there is a point at which the becoming-woman and becoming-child do not resemble the Woman or child as separate entities, so here they term a "molar entity" defined by her Form and used for her organs. Quickly they jump to the claim to back away from further investigating this process and say they account for imitating forms in homosexuality, attempting to subvert the Freudian impetus to focus on the virginal, they return to the girl, as a body without organs to embody the third space of movement, between definitions. We find a lack here, emerges - a lack in the elaboration of the womb space, of woman/child as one or two distinct becomings, in one. Is there not a series of infinite lines within this process that can speak to what becoming in actuality entails? In its material sense, and then in its virtual sense. For what is irreducible - what is virtual is this - the becoming as such. In the mysteries of which silence by the great thinkers persists lies a depth worthy of shining light. Badiou: Birth as Event Birth is not only an event - in the Badiou terminology, but it also exceeds this definition. For it is truly entirely subjective and objective - it is beyond understanding and is a process. It can not be merely the instant of the birth that one considers, but we have *of course* conception (Phallocentric history never forgot that). However, between these points, we have many encounters and lines of flight, territorialization of the processes of becoming, which are not just natural processes separated from the subject of the womb, separate from the mother, to speak so materially is out of fashion. Nevertheless, to speak of a matter that matters, to make sense of the space of secret knowledge, or perhaps hidden mystery demands a deeper look into the depths of such a topology. Luce Irigaray – Repressed Debt of Birth For Irigaray, an inability to repay the gift of one's birth is a repressed obligation that is not represented in a phallocentric system of images (Grosz time travels p. 70). The fact that the gift cannot be repaid continues the violence against women as haunting of the repressed debt, to try and erase it. Cixous writes of writing women into the text, a violent act that determines the existence of women as such. However, to write of birth, the messy, the rhizomatic openings, we can exceed the debt and lay open the experience, to be felt and read through new writing of the secret void. The unknown territories of its reality that create this give violent tremors. No longer pained by the burden of the unknown, we proclaim the cry's of mother/child and the spaces of being temporarily hidden within the sanitized discourse of philosophy. She writes, "the lapse of time between the moment of conception and consciousness can never be caught up with. And it cannot be evaded either, as it returns to the memory, even it's visions: dazzling intuitions of seeing, I reflected my, without target or measurement." (Speculum of the other woman p. 306) There is a focus on conception and the moment of birth the naming of the child, but a lack of a rhizomatic analysis that examines birth as a process that can be further spoken of. New Frontiers: Irigaray's To Be Born Irigaray provides the lead, but as her work To Be Born returns in depth to the subject of birth- we start at the newborn. The divide is clear; even the style of writing has left it previously an intoxicating feminine style. We are left with a story of a child who chooses his being, chooses his breath…parents do not worry of breathing, she writes. That is debatable. The inability to sleep due to the fear that if you are not touching breathing with your child is part of the becoming of mother and child and father who becomes with them- if he so chooses- a choice not relegated to the primary caretaker. The hand on the chest - the holding of the becoming. It is becoming so much more fragile than this. The return to a discourse on human development as somehow singular, a child in need of objective food- instigated in itself separate at the start denied the process of becoming in itself. The temporal unfolding is not confined to the pregnancy, birth, or developmental stages, but it's also not singularly without the mother. Reclaiming the Mother for Philosophy Why must the mother again be left behind? The superhuman of birth emerges in Irigaray's analysis…" By coming into the world, the newborn runs an absolute risk; but it is its life that takes this risk and not some plan that is more or less artificial and abstract concerning life. The little being ventures into a completely changed environment with regard to its relation to oxygen, food, light, gravitation, and so on to get over a decisive stage of its becoming. In general, it succeeds in achieving this exploit, which transforms our newborn into a sort of hero before whom everyone bows without understanding what they are saluting." ( to be born) The Return to Psychoanalysis The return to psychoanalysis, in the Form of critique whose perversions lead us to a forever questioning instead of a radical new subjectivity, comes full circle. Through the guise of Heidegger's ontology and a final return to love of male and female as the site of our own possible genesis of a world that can encompass breathe we have again see the maternal material processes of the unfolding of a birth list in a discourse that does not sense the holding of a mother and child. This is perhaps a return to a materialism that is certainly out of style but a necessary return. It is not the love shaped within the desire, but the love within confines of necessities of Darwin's processes, of a Bergsonian duration and Deleuze rhizomes that I will try to articulate. Ettinger's M/Other Matrix Ettinger argues that pregnancy is always linked to the material body. I write in agreement with Stone who says, "So, dividing pre-and post-natal existence into being-towards-being-there versus (fully) being- there makes too sharp a cut. What remains true is that being born in the broad sense that includes conception and gestation is the precondition of experience; obvious as this may sound, it is still worth remarking." Allison stone 2019 (P. 13). Ettinger's project requires a more subtle unfolding of birth as a process in which becoming is unfolded as material and linguistic, the existentialist tradition allows for a phenological explanation but one which focuses on mortality over what stone defines as Natality. Even the feminists who write of birth do not write of the inside of birth. It is kept hidden. Irigaray refers to the excesses, the milk, the leaks but what of the earth, the matter of the mother? A radical new vision The astrology chart captures a specific image of the time of birth, that from which produced lines of flight, which reproduced other images of potentialities of possibilities. But before such a birth, was not simply an immaculate conception, Jesus, as Badiou would proclaim in his defense and resurrection of Augustine, but rather is a much more subtle, interioriality of the spaces of matter and the quickening, the contracting, the bodily function, the mothers nesting, the shared sounds, the intensity of the moment, the due date, the measuring, then the incalculable moments, the kicks, the intensification of forces that our language consistently can never describe. Amid my second birth, the energy was flowing down, intensifying, not pain, this is not pain, I will not hear another writer contemplate or continue to masculinity this - it is specifically energetic intensification for which we have lost a vocabulary to expand upon. Furthermore, it comes in - from above, within, beyond, and it is there, it is the train off the track, it is the ultimate force of life itself - given and shared between two beings. There is no objectivity allowed, perhaps except in foresight. Of course, in relation and contingency with time, we can imagine a sanitized version. Birth Scopes Or with the technological apparatus of birth, there are many variations to this experience I speak of. A disclaimer here, I do not wish to elevate a specific instance of birth, say a natural home birth, or a "natural" birth, one without drugs, without the hospital to the position of better or worse. Birth defies this. Birth explodes the possibility of this ordering of births. It is only the continued linguistic and societal division between Form and matter as such that has created the battling within mothers, to worry, to fear, to assign hierarchy within the births of self and other. This is too much to speak of now see here to read more on this.XXX Birth vs. Timelessness The opposite of Chronos is chaos - kairos demands another opposite - chance, and chance is that which happens regardless of the use. The measure. Without intention, kairos is a hyper invention. And what encapsulates the possibility of this explosion. Revisioning Khora. Khora can be made finite by focusing on its opposite: the horizon, the end. Time. Measurements itself. Matter exists as the underdog of Form. Khora is void, that demands an answer, that births the creative nexus event, the events awakening, the falling, the becoming, the crystallization of the soul- a space. Khora explodes between topos and logos. And life and death, matter and Form, soul and mind. The emergent force that can never be encapsulated. Not to merely produce but to be the space of production- not by another not to reproduce, but to hold space for the becoming, to hold. To hold the child is to feel the quickening. The rapid speed of contractions. That shifts from one to the other. Time does not exist here. Mother and Child are one in a space of eternal return. Khora defying the teleological Deleuze and Guattari are just one amongst many who pretend to see birth through means of teleological explanation, he recognizes the experience of birth to inquire but gathers that, like Deleuze thinks, he can see the experience in the experience of drugs, Husserls will see it in the phenomenology of other experiences. Simone de Beauvoirʼs The Second Sex was in conversation with Husserl and his followers (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Heidegger) who assumed sexual difference and thus the experience of birth as a part of Woman could be explained by objective analysis, Woman must write herself Cixous claims! Beauvoir highlights the issue with a phallocentric discourse that denies women's lives experiences; philosophy limits the human experience by neglecting attention to the structure of this experience. Birth as Lived Experience The political and bodily implications extend into the biopolitical sphere of birthing technology and the rise of c-sections, the sanitization of birth and the exclusion of female voices in the academy and the death of children, and the focus on the doctor's experience of birth. To lie on your back, to schedule your birth to meet the meat on the chronological deadline before the golf tournament of doctor discourse. Chronos eats the child, and the wife, the drugging of women, the trauma of birth imagined only in the eyes of one who thinks they can speak of birth they cannot experience. To listen, to hear without vision, that is the domain of the womb. Women as sacred protectors of the womb space must return to the roar of an ancient rite of passage. That of the holding of the becoming, the midwife who participates in the birth, not to cut or to Birth as Supertime The eternal return, the moment of birth, is not even a quasi-subject; that should be clear by now. However, the birth is in fact, a return to the residual memory of a haunted subjectivity. Khora haunts the texts of Timaeus, a swaying cause, an encounter of love, or hate made into materiality, a baby sent from the demiurge - and here we try to make sense of this suspended time This time is closer to Supertime (During) - a time that exists allowing a third attention, as shifting gaze or perspective. In fact shifting materiality. I realize there is no turning back in the birth of my third child. My mind runs back to my births, forwards to my future, but I am not in time. I do not care about the time. I am now her and me, and I am not part of her, she is not part of me, but we cannot see each other without being with each other. It is a feeling of pure intensity. The chain of events linking me to the birth of myself, the birth of the ancients, the birth of the world, the birth of the stars all overlapped in a moment. And the moments are like a dream, with moments of lucidity, and a non linear narrative. It is not clear to predict exactly how each step will go - I am going with the intensity and I want to move through, she wants to move through, is their agency in this space. I predetermined as much as I could the space of my space. How could one escape the black hole - already we know information leaks. The black hole is not void. Void is merely an abstraction of fullness to be full. To be. To hold. The holding is the emergence of the bond of life of time. To love is to hold and to hold is to e. A dance a temporal awakening not if your own, but if the other from whom I or You emerge. Time is a picture or a memento of a birth. Once one looked at the heavens and determined distance, myth, God, self-based on a spatial and temporal understanding of the phenomenological experience of the eye to the stars. This vision opened and defined the world. Today we stand filtered through screens, enhanced by mirrors, and marked by certificates. Can we dare to imagine a space of time when we cannot tell the distance from here to the nearest restaurant without a multitude of apparatus that lead us to follow an iPhones Google map timing our destination? To walk, to even walk, and not to map. Phenomenological Experience I wanted no one there. I wanted only a trusted midwife and a father. I wanted to be at home. I could not be in the sterile environment of the hospital walls. I could not risk the apparatus of birth, the drug of birth, the masculinization of birth. The midwife on the phone, lie down, lie down screaming. I remember this. The moment I hated this, she was through a machine not in me, no one was with me. I was alone, in the void but operating on a certain plane of reality. This is the space of the void. You hear things, muffled through the womb space. An entire album was released from the womb. Women were left for days alone in the early 1900s strapped to tables while drugged and unable to control themselves. Phermendamine is a drug that causes birth defects. Cydatec and 100s of ruptured uterus - finally 1999 research showed they should not. There is not a history of caution in the history of obstetrics. Midwives reborn during the age of midwives. The queen of midwife history Ina May Gaskin - began the work in the natural childbirth. As society left the technocratic, they left the communes. Recording the womb space To record the womb space is to make music of the womb space Khora. The album, Sounds of the Unb was released April 2021 by Luca Yupanqui. It is from her womb space; her mother and father are releasing it. They used the sounds of the womb to transpose a synthesis of the noises, taking the womb noise as information for their electronic synthesis, an eerie uncanny effect is produced. (https://youtu.be/90g9Vqvx3yg) Birthspace Exceeding Maps The womb cannot be mapped; it exceeds its maps. Of course it is mapped. We map that which we can conquer. The mapping of the womb was part of the dark side of the history of obstetrics. The fetus kicks to map its physical orientation within the womb space. The placenta is the excess map of the birth, to be birthed after the child. Still connected after birth. Not more! I'm not ready, can there be more? Then the bleeding, the Blood… The technological mapping of the womb and fetus is part of obstetricians. Obstetrician etymology: mid 18th century: via modern Latin obstetric us from Latin obstetrician (based on obstetrix 'midwife'), from obstare 'be present. Birth Recorded in Matter/Mother The milk, the fluid after the fire. The placenta maps it's pathways to origin - a tree of life emerges from the immediately repudiated art of stamping the placenta. What else to do with a placenta, well one could eat it. Is this Cronus eating his child? Is this something more, is to eat the placenta, the excess of birth, the seed of an origin beyond life that nourishes the mother, to return her to the memory of the physical processes of growing the child. De Beauvoir does not go far enough; she likens children to parasites. Virginia Woolf, also seems to repudiate the idea of a woman as such. These feminist leaders outlined a horizon upon which the feminist pathway could be leading, but they did not go far enough. They wanted to eat it and become-man as a woman. There is a bi-sexuality to this process. Or so they say. Or is it all a process of femininity that is concerning our desires here. The placenta feeds the child. The umbilical cord connects the mother to child via placenta. Absorbing nutrients energy, broken down into the food of the child. Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of feminist thought author of A Vindication on Women's Right, mother of Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein, herself died in the after birth. On 30 August 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter Mary and died after her placenta broke and became infected. There are many risks. Birth is something to be experienced, not to be denied. Do you want to sleep through sex? Through life? Through love? Is it the animal nature of such a process that makes us disgust and wish to wash it away? It is a specifically female experience that holds the residual memory of a primordial time - that might, if we dare enter the time, return us to the spaces of our eternal return. I don't know what to say of the totalizing force of such a birth. I can hear the critics ringing in my ears. I know that not all women are women, and gender is a performance, and that the nature of identity is placed precariously between politics, subjectivity, becoming, time, history, and science. I have to go there. If we continue a discourse that completely evades the realities of experience, we will stand in the shadows of our UberMensch. Bracha Ettinger goes there; she articulates the matrixial borderspace, a psychic region between mother and child that flies in the face of feminist and psychoanalytic theory. The introduction to the work by Judith Butler and Griselda Pollock both highlighting the absolute intense risk of such a discourse. She truly provides a new space, a space that is so radical it dares barely be spoken. What will you think of me? But the human eye is always eating the horizon. Or was it the mouth? Cronus ate his children. Constructing an Ontology of the Khora One can't say what drives Khora. She is the fleeting image of the thing that unites one and collective, and escapes them eagerly. Without somewhere to meet. How can I meet you? We can write a letter. Sent through time and space or collapsed into instants via text. But the space that defines us is escaping us. I see you where I draw you. In a mind, in a room and you see me where I may be. But one cannot know where another is. But you could map them? Sure. But where is the space in which the communication happens. Well, the text must surely travel through some type of electronic current and be sent via wireless intent towards a connection of energy that turns your apparatus into my apparatus, and we share a language ,- screen, an image, we certainly share a time. And from Chronos to kairos we introduce the next concept... Khora. One can only make sense of time if one is to describe the spaces of time. The thing that time itself exists in? So in fact if time can be imaged, horizontal, vertical, circular, geometrically, a "hex" then time must be imaged itself. Streitfeld illuminates the limits of this space in regards to Schopenhauer's writings on Suicide: 20 "The presentation, created out of nothingness, is now placed into time and space: "the concept, the material of philosophy" and "finally the word, the sign of the concept" which "also belong to the representation". Having created the presentation in time and space, what is left but to abolish it? Yet, he points out that to abolish the will also mean to abolish the world as its mirror, bringing up, once again, the dilemma of suicide. Not only that, but without a mirror, the where (space) and when (time) no longer exist. Where do we turn? All that is left is nothingness. The philosopher arrives at the paradox that western language cannot penetrate: "as we are the will to live and nothing can only be expressed negatively, because like can only be known by like, the mirror relation, and that would mean a deprivation of all knowledge". Yet conversely, this would mean the potential of all knowledge, absolute knowingness, which relates to the world as representation, or the objectivity of the world, as the world is the reflection of the self knowledge of the will." The arrival of this positive knowledge is in the key passage (fifth paragraph), the all-knowingness, to come about through the negativity, the denial of the will. This is where he reaches the apex of not only his but all western thought, the reflection coming from the east, the mirror of the saints who have achieved the "completed denial of the will" which he names "ecstasy, rapture, illumination union with God and so on". What follows this unity is the very crux of the limitation in language revealing Schopenhauer's own will, precluding both suicide and the negation of his ambition as philosopher/king: "But such a state cannot really be called knowledge, since it no longer has the form of subject and object; moreover, it is accessible to one's own experience that cannot be further communicated."
And why do we have no language for energy? Why do we not let the woman experience birth as energy rises? Why must it all turn to pain? I think it is a lack of imagination. A limit to the potential of women. If she were to truly know the power of such potential, what might she do? Spontaneous creative birthing, what monstrous forms may emerge in such an environment. Monsters capable of determining their own direction, their own hex. Their own time waves. It is not painful. It is the loss of self. Of control. It is space and timeless. I have been injured, I know the pain - I know. You don't know; and I truly don't know the master knows. But the particular emergent seems relevant still. In the moment I saw no one and I saw it all. I dropped the grip. I was to hold. To hold onto nothing. That is it. I had nothing. I was nothing. I was a conduit - a portal - a primordial and yet transcendent being. There is nothing one should know to hold the space. It is precisely the unimaginable. Did you worry you would die? Did you know what to do? Did you want drugs? I was already dead. Who I was. I am no more. Just as you aren't who you're weren't. But that's not the point. I am no longer worried about me. I was at a point of emergence. For once! The Woman screamed and gave back- to not receive to not be void but to be chaotic to be unpredictable to be wild to be outside of time! Let the Woman emerge a space Now you are losing me, I hope you are not telling me that a wild woman emerges. This sounds like the old rhetoric of the white feminist. No I do not; but my passion exudes. My words go beyond, you look for critique and I demand to be - I was once emerging and now I merged and we all are emerging to only hold so briefly to the chance - to the hope - to hold onto something we can never grasp. And I placed my child on my breast and I was back. I fell back. I fell into myself . It was coming and I was tired. I lost time, I gave time and I held onto the future as I let go of mine. This truly is - a moment that time cannot speak of. Why has the birth itself been so terribly excluded from the work! Know that NOW I ask you? But I have been questioned? Do you feel this is appropriate for the diagnosis? I simply wanted to understand the nature of your hysteria? Of your thesis? Of us? I didn't mean to offend your experience? Are you ok? Breaking. Broken. Timelines What if all is topsy-turvy in our world of lines. The baby is breech, the ship shall sink? The breach baby presents problems for the delivery as statistical increase in converging bad outcomes. But many breech children can be delivered without use of C-Section, but it is a momentary ethical decision that should belong only to the mother who can in some sense have a sense of that moment. Emerge. And diverge - Variants. Of what of the birth that goes awry. The variants to the perfect birth. 11 toes and 4 fingers. These variations in the presentation of the human body are part of the mystery of the process of birth. We know little of spontaneous variations that happen in the womb. Despite increasing measures and tests, there still exists an ultimate undecidability and improbability that leaves many parts of the human birth to something beyond the laws of natural science, besides an indeterminate theory. It seems to me that the entire history of philosophy is searching for something that they are afraid I would write. If I were to write this, if I could say these words. What if a follow up? What is next? If we truly connect to this new techno-savvy-bis-sexual-coming-vibrating-woman-witch-home-birth-philosopher then what of us? What of the secrets we pretended to know? They hid and they ran into corners, into language that entranced and enthralled, that led a path to this wall. The wall of the courageous, the unafraid. A broken train of end trails. If we could see that pain and joy are tied together and that actually every mother has in some manner dealt with this? Then what of us? What of those of you who turned away from her, who denied her. Who then could not handle the power of HER luminance - the wife who birthed - the lover you held, was not the mother you had. This isn't about endless tales of running our heads into our anus - A Lacanian nightmare that nearly swallows the project of unfolding on its own. Instead this is simply the obvious, most logical, thing to actually speak of. BEING and TIME. birth AND being. THE birth OF THE WORLD. I was held by the hands of the women who were left in the shadows, generations of exiles, immigrants, mothers, dreamers, writers, their genealogy does not fit into a timeline. It is woven into the text. This is the matrixial borderspace of khorazimatic birthing. It is now time to no longer hide in polite nods to the masters. Freud was sick. Lacan - nasty. Zizek - I want to throw up. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Ok so I don't like sphycoahlnsyis its endless entrails, circulating through the text. I come close to embracing Ettinger, she brings us to the space of the matrixial, Irigaray, she is too much of this, Kristeva - again! But we can massage out of this something. It can't be C-Sectioned out, We can not simply cut out the child, but we must love. I love Irigaray like I could love a child. Like a mother. Oxytocin - The natural morphine high of birth. You cannot feel this by apparatus. Perhaps it was not penis envy - but rather the impossibility of watching the incredible love of a mother to her child. This love is best seen in the dark. If the hormones are not released can we survive without love? Materialist discourse is actually necessary to save the eros of the future of becoming. Will we survive a generation - a multitude of generations of mothers who give birth without the becoming-animal reward of such a hit of jouissance? The Vertex – Cone Shaped Head Birth position matters. As does all that takes place on the material plane. The vertex is the best position for a birth. The vertex is when the baby is head down face towards the abdomen of the mother. This presents the simplest delivery as the head the largest part comes through first, the most able to be shaped, the cone-shaped head of birth. What of this?  |
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