1. Walter Kern begins his argument by laying out the two school’s of thought on the ambiguous idea of the present by first writing about the heart-wrenching story of the Titanic, and then attempting to explain it with the experience of the present. Kern states, “the present is a sequence of single local events or multiple distant events, and whether the present is a slice of time between the past and future or of more extended duration” (36). It has been decided that the past is the past with little argument, but with left for interpretation is the idea of is there a real “future” or does the present continue to move with us along the spectrum of time. The future is something that is very illusive, but the present is constantly changing and moving forward on our shoulders, which is an uneasy declaration because the more simplistic view would be the idea of time on a continuum [past, present, future], a clear beginning, middle and end. We perceive the present as a series of local events because by the time one hears about the distant events, events that were present in that specific location, become past events in our mind because we were unable to experience them for ourselves. This concept is very difficult to grasp and one of the only questions that Kern raises that he does not give credit to another.
2. Kern quotes Henri-Martin Barzun’s poetry to further describe our present world as a “simultaneous reality” (38). Barzun’s quotation “aviation has transformed distant…multiplicity of modern life” is a complex synopsis of our world today. The ways in which we have defined the world in the past have changed as much as the world itself. No longer can song use its “monodic” character in an effort to encapsulate the true nature of our world’s tone. But rather, we must look at the world through a “polyphonic lends”. Things as drastic as airplanes and the Internet have brought our world together as one. This is a time where no one can stand-alone but yet everyone has been forced together to operate as a democratic society. Simply put, the innovations of the democracies in control have forced all the others to play its game their way.
3. Einstein argued that there could be “no such thing as a universe with moving parts” (80). Meaning that the present is a series of local events. That one can only define what is going on around them as the present, not events that are happening across the world. But the counterargument to this claim is that on the eve of the war, one historian was able to conclude that the present now had the capability of tying together events taking place around the globe, happening in simultaneous fashion. Previously, our society as a whole, was incapable of drawing these connections due to a lack of technology. As mentioned before, technology has created an “information highway” that no longer allows us to deal only with ourselves, but has forced us to consider what is happening “now” in the rest of the world. While Einstein’s idea made sense during a time when one could only encapsulate the events in its own arena, our world has made massive strides in connecting simultaneously.
Chloe Kloezeman
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4 comments:
The first paragraph addresses the idea of duality in Kern’s work. Chloe presents the dialectic between absolute "sequential local time" and the flow of relative time. The question that seems to plague Chloe is: when the present transitions into the "real" future. In her review, she gives homage to man’s role in transitioning from the past into the future with the metaphor of the "present... moving forward on our shoulders".
Also her use of the first person with phrases such as "our world today (paragraph 2)" and "we are unable to experience them for ourselves (paragraph 1)" show that Chloe is a representative of mans successful move towards, what she calls, "an information highway”. (paragraph 3) She also uses the word "encapsulation" twice (once in paragraph 1 and again in the concluding sentence of paragraph 3) as if to illustrate the bubble that local time creates and how technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, cinema, and advances in poetry and philosophy helped pave the way for instantaneous information on "events that are happening across the world".(paragraph 3)
I think Chloe is right to draw out the role that technology plays in creating a sense of simultaneity, expanding the 'now' to contain more events spread across more places. I think in paragraph 3, however, her argument about the 'information superhighway' actually supports the claim she quotes from Einstein. The way technology 'connects' us seems to reveal that things were not really 'separate' all along, that it was only a matter of perspective. I think the political argument Chloe makes in paragraph two shows a negative side to the 'global-village.' Delaunay may have been inspired by the way the Eiffel Tower was faciliating global communication, but the way these technologcical developments were shrinking space and time also led to what we nowthink of as globalization... McDonalds' golden arches could be like the new Eiffel Tower!
I think that Chloe misread a quote in her third paragraph from page 80, which should read “no such thing in a universe with moving parts.” This change has a drastic effect in how this quote is understood. Instead of referring to the locality or spatial range of the present, as Chloe suggested, this quote relates to Einstein’s theory of relativity and how events cannot be simultaneous while in relative motion. “Two events which, viewed from a system of coordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simulations when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system” (81). I can kind of see how someone might interpret from this that this relative motion “separates” these events, forming some sort of “locality” from that. But this is a huge leap because what Einstein is referring to is purely scientific and has little if not nothing to do with how the world is becoming a smaller place. How can the world be in relative motion with itself? The author goes on to state that Einstein’s theory “applied to subatomic or cosmic events… and could not effect the everyday experience of everybody” (81). This shows us that the author himself does not even believe that Einstein’s theory is that applicable to the issue of what the present is on earth.
-Christopher Melgaard
Chris, thanks for this clarification; it really helped that you went back to the text. This is really relevant to our discussion today about simultaneity. It's an interesting question how things in relative motion can be considered "parts" of different systems of simulateneity. And I agree that it is dangerous to talk about everyday experience as being an experience of relativity as Einstein understood it. It was difficult to find a title for the 'other' column, in opposition to "absolute time"...but I suppose absolute time is purely conceptual or 'scientific' as well. How do we measure the actual time of experience?
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