The AND of Time

Art is the only thing which resists death.
André Malraux

Gendringen / Amsterdam, May 2024

The AND of TimeThe AND of Time is a new philosophy of time. "AND" refers both to the Boolean AND-operator of Boolean Works (since 1991) and to Gilles Deleuze’s “And, And, And”– the affirmative philosophy of continuous creation and multiplicity opposing homogenisation, identity and fascism.The AND of Time is a concept that operates at various levels; as a self-contained philosophy, an aesthetic and ethical practice, and as one of the kernels that drive the apps of the Technotlogy platform.The AND of Time is a temporal framework that is structured across micro, meso, and macro scales and that liberates causation from time’s direction through the concept of Causa Futura. In Causa Futura, causality flows from the future, activating latent potential in the present.Developed by Johannes Bongers, The AND of Time draws from the temporal philosophies of Aristotle, Bergson, Heidegger, Whitehead, Simondon, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Guattari, and others. This synthesis offers a temporal architecture where the future continually reshapes the now, fostering new forms of life, thought, and subjectivity.

Introduction
The AND of Time is one of the fundamental kernels of Technotlogy, a platform that hosts various artistic-political apps. The AND of Time has started by the intuition that our general understanding of technology and of time is not sufficient to confront the contemporary enslavement and serfdom of nearly all living beings within the production cycles of capitalism. The kind of temporality which is colonised by cognitive capitalism and infects and manipulates our psyche, our psychic-social body and our capacity of individual and collective agency.The AND of Time combines two streams of AND. The first AND is the Boolean Operator that 'unifies difference', the AND that forms together with OR and NOT, the three Boolean operators. Their triadic operation of inclusion, exclusion and negation has, since the 1950's, completely transformed human life on earth, since The Boolean Three is the Symbolic Algebra steering the logical gates resulting in 0 and 1, in False and True; the DNA of the information era. The second stream of AND refers to 'And, And And, And', the philosophy of Spinoza, Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze and Guattari. A philosophy that is open and invites us to invest in the new.The relation between technology and time has been an area of philosophical inquiry for almost a century now. In the heart of it lies the different ideas about the genesis of Being – ontogenesis and the genesis of technics and technology – let's assume they mean the same–: technogenese. In the foundation of Technotlogy we add an even more fundamental beginning, the genesis of life – biogenesis and, which happened at the same moment, the genesis of the milieu – milieugenesis; when life began, the environment began. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler lets technics begin with the birth of the human being, around the concepts of memory. For Martin Heidegger ontogenesis happened with Plato and Aristotle and for him technology is the consequence of how rationality turns everything into exploitation. This difference makes clear that philosophy of time and technology pivots around seemingly conflicting ideas of the nature of being and of human being.The difference between the conflicting concepts of time – we reduce this to the completely different worlds behind SpaceTime versus TimeSpace. SpaceTime is a spatialized time, ruled by measurement without an experiental mode or ontological base, and TimeSpace, a world that is shaped by temporalities, relations, movement and change; corresponding with the processes in nature, in perception and the mind. TimeSpace was introduced by Bergson in 1889 and SpaceTime came later in 1905 with STR with Einstein.The Battle of Time began with the Bergson-Einstein debate in 1927. This debate was won by Einstein – representing 'science' while Bergson lost – qualitative time is related to nature and the mind – and he faded in history. Until Gilles Deleuze reintroduced the philosophy of Bergson in the 1960's, together with the thinking of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Simondon.The AND of Time questions SpaceTime as dominant 'scientific' concept and contested by our definition of Bergson's 'dureé': TimeSpace. The AND of Time challenges Einstein's SpaceTime by showing how TimeSpace could have prevented us from the disasters in our time and of the scientific spatializing reasoning that narrowed and blurred our understanding of being as becoming, in an environment among other living species. SpaceTime, through its accolytes, have significantly contributed to the predicament by propelling and prioritising a non-experiental and irrelevant Weltanschauung at the expense of a global crisis. Logic prevailed over creativity and novelty.Time and technology make such a vital philosophical couple because both are a priori syntheses. One of time as the process between memory, the present and untamed newness, following Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Simondon and Deleuze. Technology as synthesis, not a tool or a means to an end, is formed by the topological closure – the 'relation' – of living beings in their milieus, following Spinoza, Peirce, Von Uexküll, Sebeok, Bateson, Hoffmeyer, Haraway and Joseph Beuys. Entangling these two streams of thought and practice, the two streams of AND, philosophy and material life sciences, fusing a powerful understanding of time.Organism and milieu are one though understood and treated as separate. Now it shows that destroying the one, is destroying the other.The two syntheses become in conflict (and vulnerable for outside manipulation) as they are not understood as sides of the same coin. The production of time (and its features expressed in temporalities) and human consciousness are both in the process of becoming. As is the organism in and through its milieu.

Our inspiration
We are inspired by the intuition that art is the only thing that resists death. To us, this does not imply that art overcomes entropy and degradation, asserting temporal superiority over death. Instead, through art, through concepting, or building speculative organizations, our primary aim has always been to resist death by avoiding all forms of containment — the drift towards fixation, stagnation, and homogenization. Todays commodification of art is just one expression of laborization and productivity as human being’s essence and its teleos. But, happily, there is nothing less than art.One of the speculative organizations we established is Boolean Works (1991), which engages with projects framed within the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT. Althought already merely coding and programming operators, AND OR NOT could still be transformed as operators of newness. Today thirty years later, these operators form a three-worded death spiraled poem, producing the DNA of the ultimate dystopia, where mankind stupidly replicates and fertilizes its failing reasoning, leading to its predicament. However, in 1991, we suspected that there is a timespace hidden within and between these three dividers: AND as the synthesis within diversity, OR as the expansion within unity, and NOT as the critical edge that fosters, rather than forecloses, transformation. What divides and negates, since these operations are results of Euclidean closure procedures turned into affirmation and continuity.
Now, more than thirty years later, and even longer since our great teacher in art school Raymond Barion planted the seeds of philosophy and critical thinking, AND has evolved into, I should say aligned with an already existing ethico-esthetical school of thought and connectivity raised by Simondon, Deleuze and Stengers and Beuys. This mode celebrates life and pioneers different images of thought and, as a consequence it stands against the dark forces of cybernetics. Once defined by us as “AND as the synthesis within diversity”, in this mode we understand our work as having been always in search of the plane of immanence, our speculative organisations as bodies without organs and the synthesis within diversity as the collapse of the wave function. Finally to ‘become material’ and overcome being the product of our epistemological disaster there is one force or dimension that finally needs to be re-inverted. Resisting death requires making new time.About the title
The AND of Time is both the End of Time as we know it, that has lead us in our predicament, and The AND of Time points at what we comprehend as what a new time is: a TimeSpace where continuity continuously flips, meaning Moebius-like loops, where organism=milieu, and ontology and epistemology are in a second-order cybernetics relation, rather then hierarchical different.

Structure of The AND of Time
The AND of Time is structured along streams and flows, temporalising the plateaus of Thousand Plateaus of D&G that are spatial representations. Each plateau in Milles Plateaux opens with a timestamp, a temporal primer and molding of the particular. In The AND of Time we propose a spatial inverse that opens a crucial spatial event whereas the flow that follows is time-oriented. In this switch, we argue, the dominance of space is unfolded, a dominance that may be compared with the dominance of writing over speech.0. Organism = Milieu
Temporality as one of the dimensions in Umwelten of Von Uexkull (1934). We redesign these Umwelten into temporal caves, constructed out of temporal functionality and perceptions.1. TimeSpace vs SpaceTime (Bergson 1889 - Einstein 1905 debate revisited).
The scientific regime of SpaceTime (of spatializing time) posited itself against the inversed reality of living beings, not a regime but the natural mode of being, of becoming, where space is product of time. TimeSpace (our concept that covers Bergson, Spoinoza, Hume and Deleuze & Guattari) precedes SpaceTime. By reversing the order in SpaceTime, laying the scientific rationale over the living one, the lamination and suppressing the virtual and real over the illusion and simulacrum, has not served one single living being since its incendance (??).3. Cyclical vs. Linear Processes
Linear time typically suggests a straightforward progression from past to future, whereas cyclical time suggests a repeating pattern. However, change and repetition can occur within a linear framework if we consider looping back in a non-identical way. This is where the idea of a spirallike ‘naailus’ becomes useful—it combines elements of cyclical repetition with linear progression, reflecting both Nietzsche's eternal return and Heraclitus' notion of constant change in Deleuzes third synthesis.
Deleuze's adoption in his third synthesis of Nietzsche's eternal return emphasizes difference and transformation within each cycle. Rather than a mere repetition of the same, each return brings newness and divergence, which can be thought of as an AND-loop, that loops, relates, weaves past with untamed energy and solving disparities like the collapse of the wavefunction, rather than a closed loop.4. Loops, 8's and Moebius Bands (Foerster, Closure)
Euclidian Math, 2nd order Cybernetics, Bateson5. Rhizomatic Time
(De-spatializing and Rhizomising time and temporality)6. The Three Anxieties of Time (The capture of ‘imagined’ temporalities)7. Ontogenesis is Technogenisis (Stiegler, Heidegger, Agency)8. It is not the machine, nor the technical object, stupid! (Simondon, Haraway)9. The AND of Time: step 1, the deconstruction of time10. The ideological difference between time and temporality (step 2 of the deconstruction of time).The definition and understanding of time is unfinished, is put in a dichiotomical divide where the second, temporality, is built on an ontological void. Political sciences, biology, critical feminism, all focus on temporality, not recognising the epistemological void of ‘progress’, the productivity frame – the teleos of human being, captured in capitalism as the ruling principle of life, and of human existence, that grounds the whole enterprise.12. Perception happens outside the brain (Holographic principle of reality, Bergson and Steve Robbins)13. Communication (not semiotics) comes with not just one price, a reversing result, but with two prices. The first is homogenisation. Problem with today's communication is not too much communication – overload – , the problem is too much communication in too less time, that leaves no peace for the organism to maintain its multiplicity and it becomes unfolded as a result. The second price is Identity as an effect of homogenization. Homogenisation is the process of unfolding of the multiplicity.14. Information is The Dark Horse: the difference that makes the difference, the not-yet – the untamed, it is the driving force behind the driving force of entropy.15. The essence of the essence of the danger of technology (Labyriths of Information, Claudio Ciborra 2002)16. Time out of Joint, the expected future that is disturbed according to Hamlet/Deleuze, is not just fun fact for scholars, but is also the most disturbing description of our time: technology not alone colonises future potential, to create causes after the fact, but is harvesting future becomings, future virtuals and future reals, and fuses micro- and macro-temporalities into temporary subjectivities to attract and distract consumers, media etc.NL
Met The AND of Time wil ik verschillende inzichten die de afgelopen decennia zijn ontstaan, maar ook enigszins zijn vastgelopen, lostrekken en ze gezamenlijk in een nieuw perspektief plaatsen dat ik The AND of Time noem. Allereerst betreft dat het fundament onder Bernard Stiegler’s filosofie; de 1e, 2e en in het bijzonder de tertitiaire retentie. Deze is teveel op het geheugen gericht, op het retentiaire, hetgeen achterblijft. Dat wil ik transformeren naar iets dat ook naar de toekomst en het nieuwe wijst. Stiegler transformeert deze energie nu naar een politieke economie, die van groot belang is met onder andere het begrip proletarisering – maar zijn alternatieven bewegen te veel ‘after the cause’. Als tweede wil ik een enkele slag maken rond de derde tijdssynthese van Deleuze, die van de toekomst, en hoe daarin het nieuwe, dat nu heel metafysisch blijft, iets materieler kan worden. Via het begrip ‘The Future Cause’, dat ik baseer op Whitehead en Simondon, zoek ik in The AND of Time naar manieren om de strikte tijdsordening van verleden, heden en toekomst, met de strikte opvattingen over causaliteit, opvattingen die ook aan de psyche en het psychisch-sociaal lichaam zijn opgelegd, los te wrikken. Daarvoor introduceer ik het begrip TimeSpace dat de totale inversie – voor en achter, binnen en buiten – van SpaceTime is. Zonder het Bergson-Einstein debat opnieuw op te rakelen, is het belangrijk de wending van de wording van de Westerse wereld, die toen bijna achteloos plaatsvond, terug te draaien en daarvoor het counterfact TimeSpace te introduceren. TimeSpace laat zien dat de ingezette route van de wetenschap, die is geculmineerd in een scheiding tussen science en humanities, failliet is. Beiden zijn op geen enkele manier in staat gebleken een halt toe te roepen aan de voortdenderende homogenisering aangedreven door Heidegger’s Gestell die alle domeinen van het moderne leven heeft getransformeerd, en nu ook de consument tot producent van deze stellingkast, bestelling en stellingname heeft weten om te vormen.

Memorial Sewer by Adam van Vianen (1614)

The AND of Time is a research project by Johannes Bongers and is part of Technology.com

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