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in
Phenomenology

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Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations,

and Chance

Daniela Vallega-Neu
University of Oregon
dneu@uoregon.edu

Abstract

This essay addresses time’s dissemination both in the sense of an undoing or fracturing
of unifying conceptions of time, as well as in the sense of ‘scattering seeds’ by conceiv-
ing of manifold temporalizing configurations of living beings, things, and events with-
out an overarching sense of time. After a consideration of traditional conceptions of
time, this essay explores the notion of duration in Bergson in order to make it fruitful
for thinking duration without centering it in human consciousness. The author sug-
gests that we can begin to think the temporal happening of things and events in terms
of different temporal configurations of various degrees and qualities of complexity
that may be occasioned by chance, whereby chance is understood as the freeing of
time-spaces of indeterminacy in which temporal configurations take shape or mani-
fest themselves.1

Keywords

time – duration – chance – Bergson

“Nietzsche said that we had not got rid of God if we still believed in grammar.
The same could be said of time. For Time [with a capital ‘T’], too is dead—the
great river has dried up, the great dam has burst, and the turbines of grand
design have ceased turning. What remains are the little creeks, the tributaries,

1  This essay was originally a paper delivered as the André Schuwer lecture at SPEP in Atlanta,
2015. It appears here with only minor alterations.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341353

2 Vallega-Neu

the rhizomal springs, the seasonal flood and droughts. Time has become frac-
tured, dispersed, irregular . . . plural.”2
These are the opening lines of the first chapter of David Wood’s Time After
Time. Time is dead, he tells us. Certainly, the shadow of a unified or overarch-
ing concept of Time and with it of universal progress still persists. However,
the complexity of the worlds we inhabit demands that we throw off the rest
of the shackles that bind us to traditional conceptions of Time and that we
learn to think and see the worlds we inhabit otherwise. Perhaps we should
no longer speak of Time but of temporalizing, of temporalities, and of time
spans, at least until we get accustomed to hear time (now with a small ‘t’)
as plural.
This essay addresses not only time’s dissemination, in the sense of an undo-
ing or fracturing of unifying conceptions of time, which opens up what one
may call an-archic senses of time. It also addresses the dissemination of time
in the sense of ‘scattering seeds,’ which might open up ‘pluri-archic’ tempo-
ralities together with a sense of manifold temporalizing configurations of
things and events. My explorations are guided by the belief that we may have
a concept of time as such but that, strictly speaking, there is no ‘time as such’;
that time is always embodied, that it is of something, of a thing or event (in
their broadest senses), but such that things and events or—said otherwise—
different configurations of various degrees and qualities of complexity, are at
the same time constituted temporally. In this view, consciousness (subjectivity)
is only one of many temporal configurations, and thus, decentering time from
consciousness will be an important aspect of the dissemination of time. The
other main aspect will be a resituating of time in movement and change.
In what follows, I will first consider what has lead, in the Western tradi-
tion, to overarching senses of time, and how these overarching senses of time
are anchored. Second, I will turn to the notion of duration, in particular in
Bergson and, partly in departure from him, I will begin to think duration in
relation to non-human things and events. Third, I will show how we can begin
to think the temporal happening of things and events in terms of configura-
tions. Here a specific notion of rhythm will play a prominent role. Lastly, I will
bring in the notion of chance: chance in the sense of the freeing of time-spaces
of indeterminacy in which temporal configurations take shape or manifest
themselves.

2  David Wood, Time After Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 9.

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Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance 3

1 Time (with a Capital ‘T’): A Very Brief History of the Concept

One of the roots of a unified sense of Time in Western lineages can be tied
to an understanding of the cosmos or world as a whole. In The Wisdom of the
World, Rémi Brague points out how the concept of cosmos, as designating a
unified whole, arises only in classical Greece (some Pre-Socratics3 make use of
it, but it is only with Plato that it is firmly established). Prior to then, in Hesiod,
for instance, or in Egyptian cosmogonies, when speaking of what was later
addressed through the unifying notion of cosmos or world, the texts speak
of earth and sky, or would list additionally, mountains and sea, plants, and
animals.4 The concept of the cosmos as a unified whole, arises, then, in a par-
ticular Western lineage.
A similar case can be made regarding the concept of time. As a more abstract
notion (χρόνος, tempus) it, too, begins to appear only in classical Greece. Prior
to that time, there were many words addressing concrete time aspects, like
life-times, and the time of actions. (In Homer, αἰών designates one’s lifetime or
life, and χρόνος means a definite time, a while, period, or season).5 It also seems
that spatial and temporal occurrences often would have the same term.6
The first important Greek treatise on a more abstract notion of time is, of
course, that of Aristotle, who in Book IV of the Physics would first criticize the
more ancient identification of time with the celestial sphere (218b), but in the
end also give a justification for why time had been thus conceived, namely
because the motion of the sphere is the motion by which other motions are
measured (223b20), and time is, in Aristotle’s definition “a number of motion
fitting along the before-and-after.”7 Aristotle points out how, although time
cannot be separated from motion (it is of motion), it is not identical with
motion. He bases this differentiation on two factors: the one is that change
or motion is in the changing thing or in the place where the thing is mov-
ing, whereas time is present in the same way everywhere and to all things; the
other distinguishing factor is that change, but not time, can be faster or slower.

3  Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Diogenes of Apollonia.

4  Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 12. The adjectives ‘everything’ or ‘all,’ when speaking of the creation of
everything, are to be distinguished from the concept of a unified cosmos as well (ibid., 13).
5  Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935).
6  Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel:
Schwabe, 2007), article “Zeit.”
7  Aristotle, Physics, 219b. I am using Joe Sachs’ translation. See Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics: A
Guided Study (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).

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(218b) Resituating time in motion and change will challenge these distinctions
Aristotle makes.
A second unifying anchor of time is consciousness or subjectivity and it arises
together with a switching from a circular to a linear sense of time that can be
tied to Christian narratives of salvation and modern narratives of progress, as
Gadamer also points out in his essay “Die Zeitanschauung des Abendlandes”8
(“The Western View of Time”) from 1977. From Augustine’s notion of time as
distentio animi to Kant’s understanding of time as an a priori form of intu-
ition, to Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness, and to Bergson’s notion
of duration in Time and Free Will, time has been situated primarily within
subjectivity.9 Time involves synthesizing moments of time, the past, present,
and future, and what else could perform such synthesis but consciousness?
We have then, on the one hand, a unified sense of time bound to a unified
sense of the cosmos or universe, and, on the other hand, a unified sense of
time bound to synthesizing consciousness. The dissemination of time requires
that time be unanchored from both poles and also from binary and dialectical
modes of thinking. And the attention I wish to pay to configurations of time
in what we may call things and events in the broadest sense, also requires that
we don’t stop at diacritical approaches to time, where time is understood as
an original temporalizing that is a differencing out of which determinations of
things and event arise that have no, so to speak, ‘positive’ being to themselves.
A path one may take is that of a fractured subjectivity, i.e. making visible
how our experiences of time and history are not continuous but disrupted and
fragmented. This involves the acknowledgment that time reaches beyond the
conscious realm, involving lineages and histories we carry in our bodies mostly
without knowing it. This path appears to me necessary coming from a Western
lineage but it is not sufficient as long as it still operates with a sense of time
primarily defined by human experience. I say ‘primarily defined’ because I am
not suggesting that we abandon experience since experience remains for us
an unsurpassable access point if we do not want to regress into naïve realism.
The path I am taking today, one possible path for thinking the dissemination of
time, takes as a point of departure Bergson’s account of duration.

8  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Zeitanschauung des Abendlandes,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4

(Tübingen: Mohr 1987), 119–136. See especially 122.
9  This does not preclude our finding openings in Husserl’s notion of passive synthesis to think
time not simply as subjective; and I should note as well that with Matter and Memory Bergson
moves more clearly beyond a subjective notion of time.

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2 Durations

I mentioned above how in the Western lineage, prior to the arising of a more
abstract notion of time and with it of a concept of time, time aspects were
expressed in terms of time spans as in a lifetime, the time of actions, or the
orbiting of the sun. For Aristotle, still, time was inseparable from motion or
change. The endeavor to resituate time in the motion or change of things and
events brings me to the notion of duration and thus to Bergson.
For Bergson ‘duration’ becomes the main concept expressing ‘true time,’
which is for him the time we live, in contrast to a representational notion of
measurable time. Although in Time and Free Will, Bergson develops the notion
of duration in a dualistic framework and with a main emphasis on conscious-
ness, there are a number of interwoven aspects of his sense of duration (as he
develops it in this early work) that I find helpful.
Bergson attempts to think time not representationally but rather from within
the experience and unfolding of time. Tied to this is the attempt to think time
not quantitatively, i.e. not in terms of measurable time (which for him pre-
supposes its representation in space) but rather qualitatively, i.e. in how it is
experienced. This leads him to understand time not in a linear sense of succes-
sions of points of now but rather as a multiplicity that forms for him an organic
whole comparable to the phrase of a melody.
I will consider each of these aspects more closely, indicating both how I find
them fruitful and where I find limits in Bergson’s account from which I intend
to depart.
When Bergson criticizes representational accounts of time he has in mind
a Cartesian conception of space, i.e. mathematically conceived space, which
comes to dominate the conception of time after the scientific revolution in the
seventeenth century. Under the domination of spatial thinking, he writes, “we
project time into space, we express duration in terms of extensity, and succes-
sion thus takes the form of a continuous line or chain, the parts of which touch
without penetrating one another.”10 Thereby, time comes to be seen as one, as
a homogeneous medium, in which we make distinctions and count.11

10  Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Quadrige, 1927),
75; Time and Free Will: Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson
(Mineola: Dover, 2001), 101. Henceforth TFW, followed first by the English and then by the
French pagination.
11  Bergson criticizes a homogeneous notion of space especially with reference to Kant who
writes: “Time has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive”

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For Bergson, the challenge becomes to think time not in terms of spatial
extension but “from within,” which in his early work means, from within con-
sciousness. In Time and Free Will, he tries to explain the difference between
time-consciousness and its spatial representation with the metaphor of a point
moving on a straight line. If the point were conscious of itself, so he argues, it
would perceive change but not a linear succession. To get the sense of a linear
succession, the point would have to form the idea of space and begin to look at
itself spatially from outside.12
One is reminded here of the shift from a sense of being between earth and
sky to a representation of a cosmos as a whole. One is reminded as well of the
concurrent shift from a sense of temporal aspects bound to time-spans of lives,
seasons, and celestial bodies to a more abstract and unified sense of time. These
shifts occur through a more objectifying thinking that distances itself from
what it questions. In modernity, this more abstract representational thinking
finds a new anchoring in consciousness and the mathematical conception of
nature of which Descartes is one of the protagonists. Bergson’s sharp differen-
tiation between an outer space and inner time, especially in his early work, is
due to the domination of a mathematical-scientific sense of space. But here
already he intimates other possible senses of extensity, thinking of the sense of
space animals might have that cannot be that of a mathematically quantifiable
extension.13 There also are senses of space Bergson does not explicitly address
and that appear to me to be inseparable from time. I believe that ultimately the
notion of duration carries a spatial sense14 that must not be that of a quantifi-
able extension but perhaps more that of a spacing and expanding of motion
that we may experience explicitly, for instance, in dancing. At the same time, I
do think that moving away from a Cartesian representation of space and time
is essential for the dissemination of time.
The question, then, becomes how to think duration from within and with
this, the meaning of this ‘within.’ For Bergson (in Time and Free Will) dura-
tion relates to psychic states that are distinct from matter and leads to a sense
of a qualitative multiplicity that is distinct from the quantitative multiplicity

(Immanuel Kant, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental
Aesthetic,” section 4 [New York: St. Martins Press, 1965], 75).
12  TFW 103/77.
13  In Time and Free Will, Bergson indicates, with the notion of “extensity”, the possibility of
a perception of space that is not homogeneous but that is more proper to how animals
perceive spatially (TFW 96ff/71ff).
14  Bergson begins to elaborate how extensity belongs to duration in Chapter IV of Matter
and Memory.

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Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance 7

of moments of now on a represented time line. It is different also from the

later conceptions of time in Husserl as well as from Heidegger’s notion of the
ecstatic temporality of Dasein in Being and Time.15
According to Bergson, if we attempt to stay true to or close to how we feel
and sense, refraining from representational thought, letting our consciousness
accompany our inner states without objectifying, i.e. without forming a rep-
resentational image of them, all we find is a succession of qualitative changes
that “melt into and permeate one another.”16 These changes form a qualita-
tive multiplicity of sensations, feelings, and emotions, which is more like the
phrase of a melody.17 The phrase of a melody is perhaps the most felicitous
metaphor he works with in order to express this qualitative multiplicity. He
writes that we perceive the notes of a melody in one another, and that their
totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, per-
meate one another. This is why changing a note or dwelling longer on a note
introduces a qualitative change to the whole melody.
For Bergson, the qualitative multiplicity of duration is held together through
a synthesizing performed by consciousness or memory. Although he has the
notion of a synthesizing consciousness, he does not lay it out, as Husserl does,
in terms of the retention and protention of moments of time that still retain a
certain sense of linearity along the line of past, present, future. Furthermore,
Bergson appears to have a stronger sense of the complexity of lived time, of the
interweaving of perceptions, sensations, and rhythms that, once we let go of
the primacy of a unifying consciousness, opens a sense of multiple durations
in what we see, hear, or sense otherwise.
While in Time and Free Will Bergson does not perform this step toward
thinking multiple durations but rather speaks of duration in the singular and

15  Although in Time and Free Will Bergson accesses duration through consciousness in ways
that keep him closer to Husserl, Bergson clearly challenges a Husserlian notion of time in
Matter and Memory since here duration is understood as memory that mostly occurs in
the unconscious. Lawlor even defines Bergsonism as “a philosophy of the unconscious”
(Len Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism [London: Continuum Publishing, 2003], 27). For
an interesting discussion of the relation between Bergson’s and Heidegger’s conceptions
of time, see Heath Massey, The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson (New York: SUNY
Press, 2005).
16   T FW 104/77.
17  Bergson continuously reflects on the difficulty of thinking pure duration. He is aware that
in his own account of pure duration, he uses spatial images, that in fact the very notion
of multiplicity and interpenetration makes one think of different sensations that are then
put together, and that this thinking of discrete intermingling unities is representational
(TFW 122/91, 129f/96f, 132/98).

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in reference to consciousness and its synthetic accomplishments, in Matter

and Memory we find a more explicit opening toward thinking duration beyond
its confinement to the mind.
In Matter and Memory, where Bergson proposes a new solution to the
mind-body connection, he thinks so-called “external space” differently. This
difference rests in part on an account of perception that clearly influenced
Merleau-Ponty. For Bergson, just like our bodies and all the things we perceive,
pure perception belongs to matter. Although conscious perception implies
as well the synthesizing activity of memory, Bergson has the sense that per-
ception, which he conceives as a non-mediated and instantaneous vision of
matter,18 is born in the midst of matter. Thinking our own body and percep-
tion as belonging to what is perceived, i.e. to matter, opens the possibility of
rethinking the extension of matter not simply as a represented homogenous
space along the model of mathematically conceived nature.
When we think movement representationally in terms of mathematically
conceived nature, we understand movement quantitatively as the measurable
space that something traverses.19 From this merely quantitatively understood
movement Bergson distinguishes the “real movement” of matter, which has
a distinct quality. He thinks it, partly with reference to scientific findings, in
terms of “numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continu-
ity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers
through an immense body” (MM 208/123). Bergson’s image of these vibrations
leads away from a simple linear representation of discrete moments and indi-
cates, again, a qualitative rather than a quantitative multiplicity. He points out
that the vibrations of matter form rhythms that are different from the rhythm
of the duration of consciousness and that are contracted in conscious percep-
tion into the rhythm of our own duration (MM 202/120).

18  Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1939), 20, 24, 39; Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul
and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 34, 42, 69. Henceforth cited as MM, fol-
lowed first by the English and then by the French pagination.
19  In Time and Free Will, Bergson draws the difference between movement and mobility
through the example of the motion of a shooting star. We need to differentiate, he writes,
between the space traversed, which is part of the external world, and the sensation of
motion he calls “mobility” (111/83). The successive positions of the star belong to a homo-
geneous quantity, but the synthesis of the positions “has no reality except in a conscious-
ness” (112/83). It is because of the phenomenon of endosmosis that we project a sense of
duration on the shooting star. But strictly speaking, there are only successive positions
in space.

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Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance 9

It is not my intent to follow Bergson in his intricate account of the dura-

tion of matter, which borrows in part from scientific accounts and tries on the
one hand to keep intact the dualism between matter and memory and on the
other hand shows their interpenetration such that ultimately, the difference
between matter and memory will be understood as temporal rather than spa-
tial (MM 220/130).
In what follows, I will take a more phenomenological approach to duration,
one that takes in different directions Bergson’s appeal to think duration quali-
tatively. Like Bergson, I will attempt to think duration from the midst of dura-
tion in act and not with a representational distance that objectifies duration as
a chain of linear spatial and temporal successions attached to something. I will
take some of the examples of time-experience Bergson gives in the earlier work,
Time and Free Will, and rethink them phenomenologically from within experi-
ences of duration, when consciousness literally takes place as ‘con-scientia,’
i.e. as a knowing or awareness that moves along with the experience without
simply objectifying it.
In the first part of Time and Free Will, Bergson gives some examples of aes-
thetic feelings to illustrate deep-seated psychic states that do not seem to have
a close relation to their external cause. He writes how “in music, the rhythm
and measure suspend the normal flow of our sensations and ideas by causing
our attention to swing to and fro between fixed points,” how rhythm and mea-
sure “take hold of us with such force that even the faintest imitation of a groan
will suffice to fill us with the ultimate sadness” (TFW 14/11). Later he speaks of
the regular rhythm in poetry “by which our soul is lulled into self-forgetfulness”
(TFW 15/11). Then he indicates that in architecture one finds effects analogous
to those of rhythm (TFW 15/12). He ends up suggesting: “every feeling expe-
rienced by us will assume an aesthetic character, provided that it has been
suggested and not caused” (TFW 16/12). So, according to Bergson, deep seated
aesthetic states of our psyche arise precisely when the normal flow of our sen-
sations and ideas is suspended, when we are “lulled into self-forgetfulness” and
taken over by the rhythm of music, poetry, architecture or some other thing or
event we perceive. But is this not precisely an illustration of how our sense of
time can be intensely determined by the duration of the music we hear or the
rhythm of different kinds of works of art? Is it not the case that when we are
absorbed in listening or seeing, we find that it is the tune and the image that
endures and not ourselves?
Certainly, we find not only a specific tune or image to endure, and this espe-
cially when we are less taken by them. A multiplicity of other sounds, sensa-
tions, images, thoughts, and memories permeate and sometimes interrupt our
attentive hearing of a piece of music. And still, part of that multiplicity we

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are aware of is the rhythm of the sound, of the lines and colors on a canvas, of
the words. These rhythms are also durations, and they are not reducible to the
synthetic activity of the mind.
With these observations, I am beginning to depart from the strict distinc-
tion between, on the one hand, the duration of mind and on the other, the
rhythms of matter—a dualism Bergson wishes to maintain.20 I am transform-
ing his sense of multiplicity constitutive of the duration of consciousness into
the multiplicity of various durations belonging not only to what we may come
to conceive as our own bodies and thoughts.
Once the door is opened for acknowledging that duration is not simply
that of a psyche or rather that the psyche is not self-enclosed to begin with,
one will have to speak of durations in the plural and acknowledge that things
have their durations, their time. This sense of a temporality of things could be
also explored coming from a Husserlian approach. The synthesis of time-
consciousness that Husserl thinks through the notions of retention and pro-
tention is dependent, one can say, on the phenomenon that endures. Indeed,
we are never simply conscious of time in itself but of something occurring
in time. One may venture, then, towards thinking the constitution of time in
things themselves.
In Force of Imagination, for instance, John Sallis21 pushes Husserl’s analysis
of time-synthesis beyond the confines of consciousness, translating, as it were,
protention and retention into protractive and retractive imagination such that
temporalizing is at the same time a spatializing. For Sallis, it is “by force of
imagination that time is constituted, specifically, in the sense of coming to be
borne concretely there in the self-showing of things themselves.”22 In radical-
izing Kant’s account of Einbildungskraft and with it Kant’s account of the sche-
matism by unhinging it from the transcendental ego, Sallis understands force

20  Bergson insists on the duality of mind and matter especially because he wishes to argue
against the assumption that memory-images spring from the brain. I wish to acknowl-
edge, though, the turn Bergson perform in Chapter IV of Matter and Memory that leads
him to access matter intuitively (prior to its taking on the form of extended things in
homogeneous space) such that there is no longer a strict duality between rhythms of mat-
ter and the duration of sensations, since perception is ‘of’ matter and the rhythms of mat-
ter are merely ‘contracted’ into our own durations. But Bergson himself writes toward the
end of Chapter IV: “Yes, no doubt, the distinction [between matter and memory] subsists,
but union becomes possible, since it would be given, under the radical form of a partial
coincidence, in pure perception” (MM 222/131).
21  John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2000).
22  Sallis, Force of Imagination, 191.

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Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance 11

of imagination to be, not a human faculty, i.e. not subjective, but rather a nam-
ing “the self-deployment of imagination itself at some site.”23 In his discourse,
force of imagination is placed, or is shown to occur at what we may call, with
Merleau-Ponty, a point zero that is neither an in itself nor a for itself, nor is it a
negativity, but rather an opening at which multiple entries of the world cross.24
Following the self-deployment of imagination, Sallis traces carefully how a
sensible thing “comes to show itself as temporal, as having its time, which is
also the very time of the self-showing.”25 He indicates how the lateral horizons
of the self-showing thing (i.e. the lateral images that, although they are not
there, i.e. not present like the frontal image, are co-constitutive of the presenc-
ing of the thing) implicate past and future, since they “are precisely the faces
that the thing can, in the proximal past, have turned to one’s vision or that it
can, in the proximal future, set before one’s eyes.”26
Tracing attentively how a thing comes to present to us its time, its endur-
ing, requires a certain focus and concentration that singles out the duration
or temporality of a thing while maintaining a sense of the withdrawing lat-
eral horizons. It also reveals a thing to be a configuration that depends on and
extends to what does not come to presence and what is not present.
Thinking in terms of multiple durations requires something like a slacken-
ing of the focus on a single thing, a letting consciousness glide along the tem-
poral multiplicity constitutive of each moment. What we find, then, is that our
sense of the time of things and events is always already disseminated into a
multiplicity of durations not simply of different lengths but also of different
character and intensities. We may focus on some durations of things and expe-
rience them as beginning, lasting, or ending relative to other durations (street
noises, breathing, the dull vibrations of an air conditioner, birds flying, mus-
cular tensions, the cursor on the computer screen, various things lying around
and multiple other visual impressions). When we concentrate on specific
movements, we can also objectify durations and measure their length relative
to other durations. However, once we single out a duration of something, we
tend to lose sight of the multiplicity to which it initially belongs.
I will consider the concept of configurations of various durations in the
next section. But first, let me point out what the notion of duration so far
developed implies. I am attempting to think durations not simply in a linear

23  Sallis, Force of Imagination, 144.

24  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968), 260. French edition: Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 314.
25  Sallis, Force of Imagination, 190.
26  Sallis, Force of Imagination, 190ff.

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representation but from within their occurrences. Durations are not to be

situated simply within a consciousness but occur in any thing or event in so
far as these always are either in movement or changing or at rest and exhibit
some form of continuity or intrinsic temporal coherence. Things and events
are, however, not discrete entities but are relatively open-ended or porous,
and are intertwined with or involve durations from other things or events. This
opens up the question of configurations of durations in various forms of things
and events.

3 Configurations

When thinking of temporal configurations from a Bergsonian perspective, we

would be bound to his account of how duration, and the multiplicity it implies,
is not simply a chaotic conglomeration of sensations but forms an “organic
whole” (TFW 128/95). I mentioned above how Bergson describes the hearing
of a tune as the organization of an organic whole such that we do not hear
discreet notes following one another but a totality. This totality, he writes, “may
be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one
another” (TFW 100/75). One is reminded here of how the biologist Uexküll con-
ceives of an animal life in its inseparability from its environment as a “melody
that sings itself.”27 As Merleau-Ponty writes in his second lecture course on
nature: “In a melody, a reciprocal influence between the first and the last note
takes place, and we have to say that the first note is possible only because of
the last and vice versa. It is in this way that things happen in the construction
of a living being.”28
All life-forms (humans, other animals, and plants) are temporal configu-
rations of durations that we might attempt to think in terms of qualitative
multiplicities, i.e. not simply or only as having a life span from birth to death,
passing from moment to moment, but as occurring or enduring in multiple
configurations of temporal occurrences. As in each living being and between
different kinds of living beings there are different modalities of life in relation
to the environment, so there are various degrees and modalities of participa-
tion in durations belonging to other temporal configurations. In this context,

27  J. von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Springer, 1909) and Streifzüge
durch die Umwelten on Tieren und Menschen—Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten (Berlin:
Springer, 1932).
28  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2003), 174.

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Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance 13

one may take into account how Bergson finds in living beings various degrees
of freedom or possibilities of choice, which leads him to call them “centers of
indetermination” from which action may radiate (MM 64/36). Furthermore,
one would have to account for how, for instance, memory and desire play a role
in configurations of durations of different life-forms.
Since duration indicates not simply time-spans but qualitative states, we
may reflect on adjectives qualifying peculiar temporalities such as: sluggish,
vibrant, still, unleashed, swift, sudden, hasty, low, energetic, languid. It is not
by accident that, when we describe the character of a living being, temporal
characteristics play a primary role. Perhaps one could speak of living beings as
having temporal styles.
Yet non-living things and events endure as well and there are to be con-
sidered again multiple forms of temporal configurations, from manufactured
things, to institutions, to stones, weather phenomena, and the course of celes-
tial bodies.
The difference between a living and non-living being could be also described
in terms of qualitative time-differences. A living being “unfurls” its own rhyth-
mic configuration; it has its own principle of movement. Birth, growth, decay
and death are temporal qualities marking living things in their temporal styles.
In order to develop further the notion of configurations of durations, I now
turn to the notion of rhythm. Bergson has recourse to the idea of rhythm when
describing differences in durations.29 In Matter and Memory he writes how it is
possible to imagine “many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure
the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness” (MM
208/123). He also addresses the movement of matter in terms of rhythms of
vibrations. As mentioned above, Bergson understands rhythm, similarly to the
phrase of a melody, not in a linear fashion but as a qualitative multiplicity.
I would like to draw attention, in this context, to what—according to the
linguist Emile Benveniste—was the meaning of ῤυθμός in pre-Platonic texts.
In Problems in General Linguistics he writes that in pre-Platonic texts ῤυθμός
“designates the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving,”30 and
“could have been the most proper term for describing ‘dispositions’ or ‘configu-
rations’ without fixity or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement

29  Describing the qualitative multiplicity of sounds or the movement of the pendulum of a
clock, Bergson writes of a “rhythmic organization of the whole” (TFW 106/79).
30  Emile Benveniste, “The Notion of Rhythm in its Linguistic Expression,” in Problems in
General Linguistics, trans. Mary E. Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971),
285.

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14 Vallega-Neu

which is always subject to change.”31 We may, then, call temporal configura-

tions of beings “rhythmic configurations” staying attuned more to a sense of
a qualitative multiplicity than to a quantitative multiplicity that one would
count (as in regular beats).
In Time After Time, David Wood thinks what I call rhythmic configurations
in terms of “time shelters.” He describes these as “local economies of time” that
“belong to the pole of neither the object nor the subject.”32 The word economy,
he says, captures “the possibility of formally describing the modes of constitu-
tive and regulative management of the boundaries of things of all sorts, by
which their being and identity is created and preserved.”33 Examples of time
shelters he lists are “things, events, complexes of relationships, institutions,
persons.”34 Some more concrete example he gives are football matches, musi-
cal performances, chemical reactions, trees, states, and universities.35 Wood
reflects on the boundaries of time-shelters, their permeability and the ways
they allow interruption, which is why he speaks of them as “semi-autono-
mous.” He writes: “A boundary is not a thing but a cluster of procedures for the
management of otherness.”36
Once we begin to think in terms of the complexity of durations and rhyth-
mic configurations and the fact that durations of other things, events, or
institutions are constitutive of the multiplicity of the duration of a being, the
notions of boundary, identity, and otherness become more and more difficult
since there occur not only interruptions but also what we may call temporal
and rhythmic overlaps. Think, for example, of a factory worker in an assembly
line, the regulation of sleep patterns and daily activities in relation to other
events, or a child in its mother’s womb. Think of engines or a swarming bee-
hive. Temporal overlaps become most conspicuous when they are permeated
at the same time by resistances, when they are crossed or interrupted by other
durations or rhythmic configurations.
In the midst of this complexity of durations and rhythmic configurations,
which durations could be called our own or durations proper to a specific thing
or being or event, and which to others?

31  Benveniste, “The Notion of Rhythm,” 286.

32  Wood, Time After Time, 26.
33  Ibid.
34  Ibid.
35  Wood, Time After Time, 27.
36  Wood, Time After Time, 26ff.

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Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance 15

Another complex of questions arises when the relation between various

rhythmic configurations in terms of more or less dominant or encompassing
durations comes into question.
The orbits of the sun, especially, seem to have precedence over other dura-
tions not only because they provide a measure that we translate into hours,
minutes, and seconds, making possible so called “objective” time. The shifts of
day and night and the seasons constitute durations that encompass innumer-
able others also in a more qualitative sense; they co-constitute the multiplic-
ity of innumerable durations of especially but not only living beings on earth.
However, as Sallis notes in Force of Imagination, the precedence of the tempo-
rality of the sun “is not one of reducibility”; it does not constitute an originary
time and does not cancel what he calls “the polytopical character of time.”37
The duration of a rain shower, of the growth of a plant or of the movement of
a deer cannot be reduced to the movement of the sun.
Thinking especially of the qualitative aspect of durations, one can experi-
ence how rhythmic configurations of groups of animals are often encompass-
ing with respect to the rhythmic configurations of single animals pertaining
to that group. Think of beehives or ants with different degrees of agitation,
with different characters, so to speak. But as Nietzsche pointed out, humans,
too, are herd animals and it is safe to assume that the rhythmic configurations
organizing our lives are far less free and individualistic than we like to assume.
There are, for sure, durations of biological nature that we have little control
over, but there are also encompassing historical and cultural rhythmic configu-
rations. Think of the differences of rhythms between cities or between cities
and the countryside. The increase in speed constitutive of institutional and
other human activities in the West seems to unhinge many of us more from
other rhythmic configurations like the night and day. Time seems to ‘press
on us.’ Waiting becomes more difficult. We adjust to the acceleration without
noticing it. Old movies now seem to us to take place in slow motion.
When paying attention to encompassing or dominating temporal con-
figurations, one is easily led to construct generalizing images of temporal
configurations or to think of rhythmic configurations in terms of necessary
cause-and-effect relations. In these contexts especially, I would like to bring
into play chance and draw attention to rhythmic configurations in so far as
these occur fortuitously and are unique.

37  Sallis, Force of Imagination, 194.

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4 Chance

The work of chance is not easy to see for we who are trained to think in terms
of structures and regularities, who think of nature in terms of natural laws and
of society in terms of social laws, and who like to plan our days and secure our
future.
The word “chance” in English has both a sense of possibility but also unpre-
dictability. Chance events arise freely, in a middle voice manner,38 i.e. outside
the structure of active or passive agents, without an explainable “why,” from
the midst of the multiplicity constituting temporal configurations. The sense
of chance I wish to address here may be characterized as follows:

Chance is the freeing of time-spaces of indeterminacy in which rhythmic

configurations take shape or manifest themselves.

The composer John Cage had a predilection for this sense of chance and found
different strategies to bring it into play. He used, for instance, chance opera-
tions drawn from the I-Ching39 in order to expose his listeners and himself to
unpredictable sounds and to the unpredictable arising of sense.40
Those who have listened to a concert of Cage’s music may have experienced
sounds coming from loudspeakers placed not only in front of the audience
but also behind it and to the side so that the listener is enveloped by waves
of sound traveling through space from unpredictable directions and at unpre-
dictable intervals. Since one cannot anticipate from where the sounds come
one becomes attentive to what happens all around in the concert room. One
also becomes attentive to silences and what happens in these, for instance,
noises in the concert hall, that Cage understands as being constitutive of the
musical event. Thus, one is exposed not only to the rhythms of the music in a
more narrow sense, i.e. the rhythms of the sounds of instruments and voices,
but also to the rhythms of noises and movements all around. One becomes,
or may become, an attentive witness to the free arising and manifestation of
rhythmic configurations of sounds.
In the case of a performance that includes dance, the audience may also
have a heightened sensibility for rhythmic configurations of movements.
Furthermore, the interplay of audible and visible rhythms begins to reveal a

38  The middle voice is an Ancient Greek verb form that does not exist in English.
39  The Chinese Book of Changes.
40  For a more detailed description of this method see John Cage, Silence (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 57ff.

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more complex rhythmic structure than one may experience inside and outside
a theater or concert hall. Precisely in order not to intentionally construct a har-
monic interplay between music and dance but to show their interplay more as it
would occur ‘in nature,’ Cage is interested in maintaining the independence of
dance and music precisely as they occur together. This is why, in his work with
the choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage and Cunningham would compose
and choreograph independently, having agreed beforehand only on the length
of time of a given piece. In Silence, Cage writes: “From this independence of
music and dance a rhythm results which is not that of horses’ hoofs or other reg-
ular beats but which reminds us of a multiplicity of events in time and space—
stars, for instance, in the sky, or activities on earth viewed from the air.”41
Chance is not at odds with delimiting structures or regularities as it can
occur with or within them. In this respect, I can again point to Cage’s strate-
gies of composition since they would include, for instance, the determination
of certain numbers of sounds on a page or how certain tones are to be played.
A chance event may surprise one in the middle of one’s daily routines and
free for someone unexpected possibilities, make visible what was not visible
before. Certainly such moments will open up with much more difficulty—if
at all—when our sensibilities are taken over by dominating and constricting
temporal configurations.
Does this mean that chance occurs only when we humans are in disposi-
tions that allow us to witness it? Certainly, as we witness chance and with it
the opening of a time-space in which become visible rhythmic configurations
of things and events, we become part of these rhythmic configurations and
they of us. Temporal configurations manifest themselves to us. But chance,
the freeing of time-spaces of indeterminacy in which rhythmic configurations
take shape, may well occur, in different ways, in the surging of moments for
other lives, lives of animals, lives of plants. Unexpectedly, a cat finds a piece
of dry moss that becomes a new toy for an imaginative play; the wind blows a
seed on a spot where it finds soil to grow while another seed is washed down
the gutter by the rain. Indeed chance can issue in the ending or destruction of
rhythmic configurations.
Notwithstanding the fact that there are durations of phenomena that we
can divide into measurable time spans and that there are, under the calcula-
tive perspective, movements or events that return with a certain regularity and
predictability, is it not the case that when we consider durations or rhythmic
configurations from within or in process, we always find them to be, in differ-
ent ways, permeated or accompanied by chance?

41  Cage, Silence, 94.

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Perhaps some of you might concede that this may apply to living beings, to
the weather, and to the stock market; but at the same time, one can argue that,
given certain permanent and equal conditions, durations of things can be pre-
dicted, for instance the time it takes a projectile to get from a gun to its target.
Natural science rests, after all, on experimentations that confirm the regularity
of certain events. Still, we might say that, seen from within the process, the
duration of each projectile involved in the experimentation, will be unique.
And does uniqueness or singularity not imply indeterminacy, and thus chance?
One could say, then, that chance characterizes the duration of things or
events. In the light of chance every temporal happening, every rhythmic con-
figuration, albeit complex and with open or porous borders, appears to have its
time that remains unaddressed or overlooked by only calculative or abstract
conceptions of time.

5 Conclusion

What I am proposing, in this essay on the dissemination of time, is not only a

deconstruction of unifying senses of time by unhinging them from a primacy
of subjectivity or consciousness by scattering and multiplying them. I also
wish to draw attention to the necessity to address local temporal occurrences
in light of the temporal complexity in which they are embedded. This arises
out of a sense of the irreducibility and uniqueness of durations or temporal
configuration of things and events in the largest sense. It is also influenced by a
worry about the reluctance or incapacitation of too many people, in the midst
of all the pressing issues of our times, in the midst of economic and power
struggles, to give chance a chance.
My account of chance thus highlights more the arising of rhythmic con-
figurations than their ending, the opening up of possibilities rather than their
closure. The question of beginning and ending of opening or closure brings
with it another set of questions, especially when it comes to the surging and
disappearing of living beings. For a moment, I was tempted to end this essay
with a quasi-cosmological vision of the endless reconfigurations of temporal
occurrences, things, and living beings, some enclosed, some encompassing,
some overlapping, some without relation to each other, all happening through
chance, without a unifying τέλος or ἀρχή. For many this might appear like a
hopeless image. For some reason I find solace in it. But this image, too, has its
temporal configuration, its time, and has to come to an end.

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