Time and Matter: Temporality, Embodied Subjectivity and Film Phenomenology

Abstract

An approach to subjectivity of any sort demands a persistent, if rarely linear, engagement with notions of time and temporality. Time is vital to lived experience; lived experience is vital to the encounter with time as a phenomenon. And yet, without an a priori or rational acknowledgement of time, so many notions of the subject, of subjectification and subjectivity would fail to develop. Take, for example, Freud’s stages of childhood, or Lacan’s formative Mirror Stage, which presuppose a passage of the self from infancy to adult maturity (Freud 2001; Lacan 1977). Alternatively, Foucault’s trajectories of subjectification rely upon concepts of socialisation and historical genealogy that must acknowledge the position of the past with relation to the present (Foucault 2006). In terms of thinking about non-linear time, Bergson’s thoughts on consciousness, perception and duration, or Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with moments of apprehension as conditions of being-in-the-world as in the epigraph above, depend upon a non-linear, concertina-like form of time, which extends and collapses infinitely according to subjective conditions of interiority.

Contemporary philosophy consists not in stringing concepts together but in describing the mingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its coexistence with others; […] this is movie material par excellence.

(Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 59)