Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 2, August 2015
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Arstila, Valtteri, and Lloyd, Dan (eds.), Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Temporality, London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2014, xviii + 668pp., ISBN 978-0-262-01994-1, £44.95 hb.
Reviewed by
Aberystwyth University
This very substantial collection of essays considers the triangulation of perception, memory and anticipation, in subjective time: something embedded as a constantly (and constantly changing) distinguishing and ubiquitous feature of consciousness, determining yet diversifying its “streams”. The volume gathers and progresses through a diverse variety of perspectives, including: historical and contemporary philosophical approaches, psychophysical and neural accounts, the distortions of inconsistent and aberrant (altered and dysfunctional) states of awareness. The editors provide engagingly direct introductions to various sections (including ‘Historical Sources’, ‘Contemporary Philosophies of Lived Time’, ‘Choppy Streams of Consciousness’, ‘What and When’, ‘Action and Passion’, ‘Altered States’) in which individual or teamed contributors pursue trajectories of enquiry, at least some of which are likely to be unfamiliar to each reader, whatever their discipline. At times, individual essays may prove daunting in their density of data and discourse; however, no one who wishes to approach and engage with subjective time as integral constituent of philosophy, psychology, social structures and cultural practices can afford to ignore the considerations to which this volume alerts them, in its principal focus on the ‘discrepancy between experienced and represented time’ (Andersen, 26), when our vantage point on time can never be outside of time. The collection suggests, that though time may be represented socially and scientifically as a ‘single dimension with a steady rate of passage’, ‘time in the brain emerges more and more as the distributed and variable product of many time-givers’ (Arstila and Lloyd, 327), including biological mechanisms which we share with other animal species. One contributor identifies the last ten years as the site of a remarkable upsurge of interest in ‘time distortions and the effect of emotions as a major cause of these distortions’ of time estimation; and how this is ‘highly dependent on both external and internal contexts’ (Droit-Volet, 477-8).
The editors begin with selections from the writings of William James and Edmund Husserl, and flanking commentaries on their work, articulating perspectives in structuring experience, in episodic succession and flow. Essays negotiate various alternative paradigms, whereby the mind may be conceived, in Cartesian terms, as ‘at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities’ (James, 10), or else in terms of cinematic theory which ‘likens consciousness to a video camera’ (Arstila and Lloyd, 77). The editors intriguingly observe how our ‘immediate experience of the present moment is laden with an awareness of the past and an anticipation of the future, neither of which could be directly caused by the environment right here and now’ (323) and propose that ‘time and body are equally dimensions of our experience’ (317). Thomas Fraps contributes a particularly engaging essay on the ways that performances of conjuring and magic tricks manipulate subjective temporality through explicit and consciously performative senses of ‘timing’. Marc Wittman, in an essay on ‘Embodied Time’, notes how subjective time ‘emerges through (or is bound to) the existence of the self across time as an enduring and embodied entity’ (512). Here and elsewhere, music and language are often cited as working through terms of succession and anticipation, retention and protention (‘what happened to me and what might come about for me’ (Wittman 514). In the later stages of the collection, contributors extend their enquiries to autism spectrum disorders, drug-taking behaviour, psychopathology and hypnosis. Not all essays may command the same degree of interest in all readers, indeed this is unlikely; but this does not constitute a major criticism of this trans-disciplinary volume’s impressive, salutary and highly informative reach. No one can claim to be divorced from its concerns and considerations, when, as the editors note, our ‘active engagement with the future and the past is our foundation for caring and daring, and the source of imagination, ethics, and (sometimes) wisdom’ (662).