More on Experiment 3 (Apparatus)
After attending the 2 March 2016 “Horror of the Anthropocene” lecture, I noted a few authors/pieces that might be worth more exploration (listed below):
Samuel Beckett short story, 2014, Echoes Bones
Story was a nightmare, according to editor
Not published until 81 years after being written
Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet
Stewart Kelly, Blog about Horror
Alex and I decided on using The Road (film) and a piece by Veronica Hollinger, Deconstructing the Time Machine (La déconstruction de la machine du temps). I’ve noted a few excerpts from the piece, that would be applicable, below:
“The idea of time travel has for many years exercised the ingenuity not only of SF writers, but of scientists and philosophers as well; neither the equations of quantum physics nor the rules of logic have managed definitively to prove or to disprove the possibility that this most paradoxical of SF concepts may some day be realized.’ The purpose of this present essay is to examine some aspects of time travel within the framework of Derridean deconstruction, since, as I hope to demonstrate, the time-travel story always achieves a deconstruction of certain received ideas about the nature and structure of time.” (Hollinger)
“As linguistic construction, time travel is never “true,” but its very status as pure sign gives rise to one of its most valuable functions within the SF genre: the time-travel story provides literary metaphors of our ideas about the nature of time; it is a means of working out the logical (and the not-so-logical) implications of our interpretations of this most nebulous aspect of human experience.” (Hollinger)
“Time travel is always potentially deconstructive, effecting as it does a displacement of the human “here and now” upon which we tend to base our interpretations of reality.” (Hollinger)
“If the reading of time takes place within the paradigm of Classical Physics, temporal structure will tend to be linear, homogeneous, and consecutive; on the other hand, relative time is nothing if not a “post-structure,” tending towards heterogeneity and indeterminacy.” (Hollinger)
“ This “inevitable drift” of the stars is both a fact of Wells’s narrative universe and a resolutely spatial metaphor for the fixed structure of time.” (Hollinger)
“When time is read as Work, SF tends to function metonymically-that is, as extrapolation-since temporal structure is comprised of a rational and successive series of cause-and-effect events. Temporal free play is usually limited to forward movement in time; the “scandal” of temporal paradox is quite firmly excluded from the game.” (Hollinger)
“Scientific discourse admits its own status as metaphor. Time has no reality outside of our interpretations and it invites a potentially vast variety of possible ‘readings.’“ (Hollinger)
“As as point of reference, the time traveller acts as both the functional (not absolute) center of the temporal structure and as a floating signifier released from any fixed relationship to that structure. Time-travel stories, then, are never “really” versions but are always subversions of traditional temporal structure; their absolute rejection of an absolute Present works to negate the very concept of temporal Presence.” (Hollinger)
“Time is the machine which will eventually crush the life out of the very universe.” (Hollinger)
“Wells’s repudiation of “the anthropocentric fallacy” (Philmus & Hughes: 8) is demonstrated both in the disappearance of the human race from the universe of the far future and in the disappearance of the Time Traveller him- self from the universe of the story.” (Hollinger)
“Parallelling this subversion of logocentrism in Wells’s text is the displacement of the human subject from the center to the periphery of natural structure, and, finally, to a point outside the picture altogether. This movement is analogous to the reversal of the evolutionary process which the Traveller discovers to be the fate of humanity. If we view the time from which the Traveller embarks as one in which humanity is the center and meaning of the natural world, then the world of 802,701 is one in which the Eloi and the Morlocks are less central and more marginal-that is, less “human” and more “natural”-than before; in the distant future at the end of the world, humanity is no longer even a peripheral presence but a complete absence.” (Hollinger)
“[Referencing Wells’ work] The “object” has overwhelmed the “subject” in a deconstructive reversal of the traditional scientific conviction of the power of the Cartesian res cognans over the res extensa.” (Hollinger)
“The Time Machine is essentially an exercise in aporia, an oscillation between the desire for presence and the awareness of absence, between the objectivity of extrapolation and the subjectivity of metaphor, between-one is tempted to add, given its historical moment-the 19th century and the 20th century.” (Hollinger)
“It [The Time Machine] attempts at once to displace a smug humanity from its privileged position at the center of creation and to remind us of our ineluctable ties to the natural world.” (Hollinger)
Hollinger, Veronica. Deconstructing the Time Machine (La déconstruction de la machine du temps). [online] Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4239816 (Last accessed 11/03/2016).
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