Temporality

Definition

Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is, for heidegger-martin, the ontological meaning of care—the Being of dasein. "Temporality as the ontological meaning of care" (Being and Time, §65, H. 323). Temporality is not linear, clock time but the ecstatic unity of three dimensions: future (ahead-of-itself, projection), past (already-being-in, thrownness), and present (being-alongside, fallenness). "Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in the process of having been" (§65, H. 326). Ordinary time (within-time-ness) derives from Dasein's temporality; it is not the ground but the derivative.

Key Thinkers

• heidegger-martin — developed the concept in Being and Time (1927) as the culmination of the existential analytic; temporality is the horizon for the question of Being.
• arendt-hannah — engages with temporality through natality; the capacity to begin interrupts linear time.
• bergson-henri — duration (durée) as lived time vs. spatialized time; precursor to Heidegger's temporality.
• Agnes Heller — the everyday counter-theory: everyday time is anthropocentric and anchored in the present ("just as everyday life is always related to the 'here' of a person, so is it related to that person's 'now'"); its organic facts are irreversibility ("what has happened has happened, there's nothing to be done about it"), the limit set by death, the accelerating rhythm of life since capitalism, the increasing partition and economization of time (punctuality; "compare the number of people who wear a watch with the number who carry a foot-rule"), boredom as the product of the "feverish 'clock-bound' round" (Kierkegaard), and the kairotic "right time" for action; time-as-experienced is subjective (Proust's recollection) (pp. 239–247).
• Mark Taylor — the design-theoretical register: "time" as "now inherently bound to design thinking" by the responsive, data-driven environment; the two architectural temporal regimes contrasted — the traditional "predictable future informed by stability" vs the data-driven environment that is "inherently unpredictable, as its 'stability' is ever changing."
• Susan Hedges — the interior-temporal register: waiting as suspended time ("the passage of time has slowed down, until later it seems as if no time has passed at all," after Bal); the timetable as "links between the present and the future" making waiting "an interstitial period"; Kwinter's clock — "the clock reduces fraught, immanent time to a single transcendent time… a single 'thin' duration that is general" — installed sixty-two-fold in one station; and drawing as "a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time." See waiting-room, waiting-drawing.
• Lois Weinthal — the representational-temporal register: time as the drawing system's excluded variable — "Time is a variable inherent to the temporal, but absent from this drawing type"; the interior defined temporally against architecture ("Time-based events distinguish interiors from the static form of architecture"), and the programme to make movement representable by deriving its rules "from the documentation of movement first." See orthographic-projection, light-tracing.
• Lewis Mumford (via Jacobus; not yet paged — see log) — abstract clock time as the interior's first dematerialized medium: "Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it"; "Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, and it could even be expanded by the invention of labor saving instruments."
• Anne Massey — the historiographic register: time as what interior-architecture writing must learn to acknowledge. Against the discipline's two frozen conventions — the interior presented as "a freshly constructed, shiny new entity, usually without inhabitants in a fixed moment of time, everlasting and unchanging," and the linear "before and after" narrative — she proposes "a plurality of befores and afters": "Considering the passing of time, interior architecture is subject to a more critical reading of images and the interiors they represent beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes. A consideration of temporalities supports a more critically engaged reading of the interior by adding a new dimension." Her evidence is the installation photograph ("a fleeting moment frozen in time, never to happen again") read in sequence against one constant room — and her terminus a "new temporality" born when an institution's archive returns to its former premises. See plurality-of-befores-and-afters, time-travel.
• Dorita Hannah — the evental-temporal register (via Kwinter): the modernist revolutions "shifted the static spatialization of time to a more dynamic temporalization of space through an emphasis on movement, relativity, and duration" (Kwinter, p. 13); architecture "no longer recognized as a fixed, eternal entity, is rendered performative and realigns itself as active becoming rather than passive being"; and the event's three temporalities — "a range of modalities, scales, and temporalities" in which historic, aesthetic, and quotidian events overlap "manifold, fragmented, overlapping, and mobile." See event-space, objectile.
• Roderick J. Lawrence — the sociological-temporal register (via the editors' headnote): the dwelling's double temporal order — "houses and their internal activities are ordered by long-standing habits in building and living patterns" yet "remain responsive to social influences in ways that have the potential to remake and reform them outside of a static framework of living standards" (p. 184) — persistence and change held together in the built fabric; with the modernist kitchen/dining audit (aesthetic resolution without adaptation to "demographic shifts in family constitution and population") as the case where one temporal order defeated the other. See habit, kitchen, flexible-interior.
• Marian Macken — the museal-temporal register: the preserved interior as time's distension — "Temporally, studio-museums operate similarly, distending time. They too are preserved as a moment in time – when Whiteley last put down his paintbrush – similar to a photograph's capturing of an instant. The studio-museum is a snapshot of inhabitation, no longer undergoing change, yet continuously present"; the visitor's "two presents" held by one room ("the ongoing present of the spatial document… and the current present"); Husserl's "thickened present" as the room's durational quality; Merewether's "deferred temporality"; and the archive's terminus — "Rather than temporal succession of past – present – future within the archive, there exists temporal simultaneity… the future has a presence within the archive." See thickened-present, spatial-document.
• Georges Teyssot — the boredom-temporal register: "pure time, or ennui" (Igitur) as the collapse of past, present and future into one mirrored instant; Benjamin's "lining of time" as the interior's padded fabric; the temporality whose ecstases the over-protected interior dissolves (1996/2006). See aesthetic-boredom.
• John C Turpin — the conversational-temporal register, supplied by the editors' headnote: "The tangible design of such spaces is revealed to be equally manufactured and contrived as the temporality of conversation that occurs within it" (p. 368) — time as the interior's social content, with the room's design and the talk's rhythm jointly contrived: the salon conversation's "smooth pattern of movement" and the drawing room's staccato ("Conversation is to move freely and rather rapidly from one to another") as the temporal forms the interior stages (2003/2006). See conversation, salon.

Related Concepts

• care — temporality is the ontological meaning of care.
• dasein — the entity that is temporal.
• being-toward-death — the future-oriented ecstasis of temporality.
• fallenness — the present-oriented ecstasis of temporality.
• being-in-the-world — the structure within which temporality operates.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss temporality:

• source-notes/heidegger-1927-being-and-time — the foundational analysis (§65-83); temporality as the meaning of care, ecstatic unity, within-time-ness.
• source-notes/arendt-1958-the-human-condition — natality as interrupting linear time; action's unpredictability.
• Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — everyday time: anthropocentric present, irreversibility, death, generations, boredom, partition of time, the right moment, time-as-experienced (ch. 12e).
• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — temporality as a design discipline's operating medium: interior architecture as "a critical amalgamation of the past and present through spatial design to enable the future," balancing "a variety of interests and temporalities" — a designed, built counterpart to the ecstatic unity of future, past, and present (see spatial-therapy).
• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the technological re-posing of the concept: ubiquitous computing and "asynchronous structures" challenge architecture "as a device that measures specific events and moments in time"; the contrast of temporal regimes — traditional architecture's "recurrent process of time measured from the past through to the present anticipat[ing] a predictable future informed by stability" vs "the data-driven environment… inherently unpredictable, as its 'stability' is ever changing"; monumental architecture as "the signifier of the ability to transcend death" vs the responsive environment's "immanent relationship to lived space" in "a real-time scenario"; and the closing Lefebvrian citation (via The Production of Space, p. 221): the dynamic interior "enables individuals and groups to sustain shared concepts of changes in meanings and values," such that "'time' is now inherently bound to design thinking." See interactive-architecture, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the interior's suspended time: the waiting room where "time slows" and no "actual movements of the journey occur, but… time is implied"; the interstitial period of waiting between timetable-certain and timetable-uncertain events; Kwinter's two modern time-regimes quoted against each other — the clock's transcendent "thin duration that is general – the same for everyone, for all processes" (p. 21, sixty-two clocks run from one master) vs modernism's time that "no longer remains spatialized… but meshes inextrically" with phenomena (p. 36); and the drawing as time's spatialization ("Making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time"; Sheet No. 24 as "a paneled interior of recurrence, an experience of time, and a prediction of time on itself"). See waiting-room, waiting-drawing.
• A pirouette on the orthographic hinge (Weinthal 2018) — time as representation's excluded variable: "Time-based events distinguish interiors from the static form of architecture, yet the documentation of both these spatial realms defer to orthographic drawings as the unifying form of representation"; "Time is a variable inherent to the temporal, but absent from this drawing type"; the occupants who move "in and out without a trace of their presence in the room" while the drawing prefers the space "clean and objective rather than muddy with the ephemeral shoes of people walking through it"; and the chapter's four documentation experiments (the pirouette's plan-dot, Pavlova's light-point, the space-shapes, the dark-technique tracings) as attempts to admit the temporal to the drawn — movement "to be distilled down to a set of rules… derived from the documentation of movement first." See orthographic-projection, light-tracing, space-shape, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — abstract time as the interior's media-historical medium: Mumford's clock quoted as mechanization's prototype — "With the clock arose the invisible umbrella of time, organized and structured on a mass scale, 'giving human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine'" — and time's commodification ("Timekeeping, or the notion that we can divide, organize, and commodify that which does not have a physical existence… is perhaps another of the first signs that the material is beginning to relinquish control"). The interior consequence: "the clock gave rise to new conceptions of abstract space, interchangeable and relatable over any distance, transportable in the minds of humans" — abstract time as the model for abstract space, the temporality that let interiors become neutral backdrops ("Space had become neutral," Giedion via Jacobus). See mechanization, comfort.
• Time travel (Massey 2018) — time as the discipline's method deficit and method solution: the frozen conventions named (the "shiny new entity… in a fixed moment of time"; the "before and after" narrative; Till's "freezing time" quote), and the plurality-of-befores-and-afters demonstrated on the ICA's Dover Street gallery across sixteen years — installation photographs read in sequence until "the boundaries between past, present, and future become blurred," closing on the facsimile return where "a new temporality was born." The exhibition-interior register of the concept: an interior whose temporal life is its use, knowable only through its dated images. See plurality-of-befores-and-afters, time-travel, ephemeral-interior.
• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — time as architecture's re-ontologization: Kwinter's "static spatialization of time" giving way to "a more dynamic temporalization of space" (p. 13); "Architecture, no longer recognized as a fixed, eternal entity, is rendered performative and realigns itself as active becoming rather than passive being"; the objectile's "temporal modulation that implies a continual variation of matter" (via Deleuze/Cache/Eisenman) — space "temporally defined and multiplied by an accelerated succession of actions"; and Derrida's spacing as time's architectural operation ("the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space"). The concept's evental register: time not as a variable the interior contains but the medium through which it exists — see event-space, objectile, spacing, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the concept's title-word at the scale of the dwelling: the chapter's own triad — social, spatial and temporal factors — orders domestic space through time: "houses and their internal activities are ordered by long-standing habits in building and living patterns, they remain responsive to social influences in ways that have the potential to remake and reform them outside of a static framework of living standards" (editors, p. 184); the modernist kitchen/dining audit ("aesthetic resolution" without adaptation to "demographic shifts in family constitution and population") as the failure case; and "ecological reflection" pointing to designs "attuned to the dynamic processes that occur within them." Where this page's other registers are ontological (Heidegger), technological (Taylor) or evental (Hannah), Lawrence's is sociological: the dwelling's time is the coexistence of habit-persistence and social responsiveness — see habit, dwelling, flexible-interior, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the museal-temporal register: the preserved interior as time's distension — "a snapshot of inhabitation, no longer undergoing change, yet continuously present"; Batchen's photograph-time ("to experience a temporal movement back and forth between past and present") extended to walkable rooms; the visitor's "two presents"; Husserl's "thickened present" and Kern's "retentions and protentions"; Ricoeur's "a passed past that nevertheless remains preserved in its vestiges"; Merewether's "deferred temporality, a strange suspension of time"; the correction to Doane (the archivable keeps its past-present connection but loses "the connection to the future"); and the archive's terminus — "Rather than temporal succession of past – present – future within the archive, there exists temporal simultaneity… the future has a presence within the archive." Where this page's other registers temporalize space in motion (Taylor's real time, Hannah's event, Hedges's suspension), Macken's temporalizes it by halting it — the static pole given its own durational theory. See thickened-present, spatial-document, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the editors' headnote gives the concept its design-disciplinary vocation before the 2018 chapter's technological version: "through the use of close and gentle observation, it positions intimate detail and temporality in the discourse of interior design as a creative act" (p. 339) — temporality not as a design variable but as the discipline's creative act itself, enacted in the essay's own day-structure (late October, "day becoming night," lamps lit, blinds drawn). The essay's temporal ontology is Deleuzian: the interior "becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (p. 343) — the interior individuated by hour and season (the haecceity-register), ever-changing ("becoming-interior is ever-changing," p. 341), with memory as its re-living engine ("the manner in which we re-live memories and are moved by them," p. 342). The 2001 essay is the conceptual ancestor of the 2018 "dynamic" thesis: before the data-driven environment, the interior's temporality was already its mode of being — lived, gentle, observed. See haecceity, becoming-interior, everyday-life.
• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — boredom's temporal register, the concept's pathological pole: Mallarmé's Igitur at the mirror — "past, present, and future merge to form the pure time of boredom, crystallizing only at the instant of death" (p. 347), with the clock's hour "precipitating this ennui in heavy, smothering time" (p. 347) — boredom as the collapse of the ecstatic unity into one mirrored instant, the quasi-opposite of Heidegger's temporality and the darkest elaboration of Heller's clock-bound boredom; and Benjamin's lining-of-time image — "who would be able to turn inside-out in one motion the lining of time?" (p. 346) — the everyday's time as the padded fabric of the interior ("the arabesque of the box… the design of the carpet, of the wall," p. 346), which Teyssot's essay proposes to turn inside out. Where Heidegger's temporality projects and Heller's anchors in the present, Teyssot's boredom dissolves the ecstases — time without difference, the habitual's repetition perfected. See aesthetic-boredom, habit, repetition.
• Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the conversational-temporal register: time as the interior's social content and joint manufacture — "The tangible design of such spaces is revealed to be equally manufactured and contrived as the temporality of conversation that occurs within it" (headnote, p. 368). The register's historical forms: the salon's ideal conversation as a temporal order ("a smooth pattern of movement between the participants and a broad view of the world outside," p. 370 — talk paced like circulation) against the drawing room's staccato ("Conversation is to move freely and rather rapidly from one to another… the avoidance of long stories… prevents any one individual from being a point of focus," p. 372 — talk paced like the roving eye). Where this page's other registers temporalize space ontologically (Heidegger), technologically (Taylor), eventally (Hannah), museally (Macken) or sociologically (Lawrence), Turpin temporalizes it socially: the interior's time is its gathering's rhythm, and the design's contrivance mirrors the conversation's. See conversation, salon, drawing-room.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — architecture 'exists only in time' (Johnson, p. 98): procession, the plan as a guide to movement, and the fourth dimension of architectural experience; time also visible in the city as the accumulated layers of its buildings (pp. 97–103, 146–48).
• source-notes/dubbeldam-2006-thing-shapes
• source-notes/goulthorpe-2006-notes-on-digital-nesting
• source-notes/marinic-2018-why-this-why-now

Open Questions

• How does temporality relate to dwelling? Is dwelling a temporal phenomenon?
• Can temporality be operationalized for architectural critique, or does it remain a philosophical abstraction?
• What is the relationship between temporality and spectacle? Does spectacular culture distort temporality?
• Taylor's contrast — the "predictable future informed by stability" vs the data-driven environment whose "stability" is ever changing — sets Heidegger's thrown projection and Qureshi's past-present-future therapy against a real-time perpetual present. Is the responsive environment's "immanent relationship to lived space" a new ecstatic unity of temporality, or its abolition (a present without thrownness or future)? See interactive-architecture, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• Macken's preserved interior is time halted and distended: "no longer undergoing change, yet continuously present," with the connection to the future severed ("no future paintings with Whiteley's signature"). Is the thickened present of the preserved room then a temporality against Heidegger's — retentions without projection, a thrownness without a future — or its museal parody? And does "temporal simultaneity" in the archive (where "the future has a presence") restore the ecstasis the preservation removed, or merely freeze it at the archive's door?