The Manipulation of Time

Abstract

Inquiring into the phenomenological roots of time, and more specifically, that of the now as an immediate subjective experience, this work approaches the aporia of the apprehension of time from the point of view of perception. In order to do this, we review the concept of manipulation in the most elemental sense: that of the hand, an excellent instrument for apprehending, that strives to appropriate some object with the idea of transforming it. Starting from some reflections that Paul Valéry formulated on the subject, we try to show how the now in French, maintenant: possessing hand, holding hand (an object), as a minimal unit in lived time and object of manipulation (manipulus: handful) disintegrates upon coming into contact with the hand in the same way that water, air or sand which are substances that, after all, in their evanescence yield to the very hand that tries to grab them. Retaking the concept of vertical duration proposed by Bachelard, along with some of the principal postulates on the instant, we suggest that the passage toward proprioceptiveness through the now, constitutes the threshold of access to the domain of the instant. Thus, manipulation as a transitive activity aimed at a specific object, different from the subject that acts over it, would give way to an intransitive activity by virtue of which, the act of measuring time, in the sphere of perception, would inevitably give way to the act of measuring itself in time. Yet in this measuring, the subject would reveal to us an intimate constitution which is as evanescent as that of time. Such proposals are applied to the analysis of The bath and At the beginning there will be the dream by Paul Valéry. These are texts that permit us to outline a typology of the instant founded on the aspectual opposition inchoative-terminative, as well as the consequences that this would have from the point of view of discourse, if the inchoative instant is associated with the process of enunciative disengagement and the terminative instant with the engagement.