Tag: Epicurus

  • “Primer” and the Impossibility of Time Travel

    “Primer” and the Impossibility of Time Travel

    Whoever cannot seek
    the unforeseen sees nothing
    for the known way
    is an impasse.

    —Heraclitus

    In his Grundrisse, Karl Marx noted the capitalist tendency to “annihilate space by time,” to shrink temporal distance with rail, telegraph and the like.1 Since time and distance are both barriers to capital circulation and the realization of exchange value, the capitalist mode of production has always made time-space compression a top priority of innovation. It is within this economic context that time travel emerged as a cultural fantasy, first popularized by H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895. If shrinking temporal distance is so valuable to the modern world, manipulating the entire space-time continuum would have to be endlessly more powerful.

    The force of time is colossal and its hypothetical manipulation lends well to fantastical storytelling, sometimes verging on the comic disbelief. What makes Shane Carruth’s Primer stand out from other time travelling tales is its realistic presentation. The early 2000s was when the “tech bros” were only just emerging from the garages where they had cooked up personal computers, digital search engines and online retail. Primer captures this suburban zeitgeist with Aaron and Abe, two engineers working on an atomic mass reduction machine in Aaron’s garage. The technical aspects are a bit of a witch’s brew—some electromagnetic plates here, a lead-acid battery there, a dash of argon gas—but they are ultimately successful at reducing the mass of an object. With a twist.

    The pair discover that their mass reduction box creates a time loop between the point when the machine is turned on and the present point in time. Therefore, if the machine was turned on one hour prior to the present, the energy field within the box enables an object to loop back one hour and exit at the point when the box was activated. If the machine was turned on one day or one week prior, the loop then extends that far. There are hard limitations to the time travel that the box offers and also a paradox: any object travelling to the past will exist alongside a double for the amount of time travelled. Although Abe admits there is “no way in which this thing could be considered anywhere remotely close to safe,” curiosity gets the better of the two friends and they enter the box anyway.

    Image: Wikimedia Commons

    Concerning mortality, Marx wrote that “death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular individual.” By travelling backward in time, Abe and Aaron appear to have reversed this power; they have gained a victory over the species. They know which stocks will perform in the market, which sports teams win their games, what their doubles will eat for breakfast, when to expect a gunman at a house party. In the words of Aaron: “We know everything, okay? We’re prescient.”

    Narcissistic Knowing

    The real paradox of Primer is that, in the process of gaining prescience, Abe and Aaron actually see less. They are engineers but what they really needed was philosophy—any dialectician could have told them that “the future is an essential moment in the present” and “whatever happens in the future exists in the present, as potential.”2 They have knowledge of a present only as it was, unaware that, all along, they were busy constructing a new present moment by directly looping it with a future point in time. So, the plot unravels.

    Thomas Granger, one of their potential investors, gains access to the box and his double begins stalking Abe and Aaron in a dishevelled state. Their bodies collapse from fatigue, ears bleeding and shaky hands unable to write. Future versions of themselves show up to attack and detain their past selves, taking the place of their doubles. Aaron becomes mired in an addictive cycle of time travel, eventually fleeing to Europe in order to build an industrial-sized box. The film ends with at least two Abes and three Aarons wreaking havoc on the timeline.

    In psychoanalytic terms Lacan has said: “What is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that you never look at me from the place from which I see you.”3 When future versions of Aaron and Abe invade the past, they see a world in which they are uniquely clairvoyant. But that same world does not submit—it looks at them as the unwelcome intruders that they truly are. This is why they must shroud themselves from it, hole away in hotel rooms and use violence against their doubles. Unable to “seek the unforeseen” they actually “see nothing,” not even themselves.4 Put another way, thinking you know the future is far worse than knowing you do not know it.  

    The misdeeds of Abe and Aaron upon stumbling into time travel bring to the fore the impossibility of the proposition. Who among us wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of a do-over to correct past mistakes? But if this were a real option that people could exercise then the existing chaos of the world, held together in a delicate flux, would rupture into endless permutation. Reality would become blurred by the thousands—millions—of alternate individuals, transported by time-portals laying open like festering wounds.

    Humanity, as a species-being, already has the capacity to pursue a multitude of individual, contradictory aims without reference to any universal concept of human nature. The aggregate disorder of human societies, the unpredictable events and contrary effects of our actions is, ironically, the product of individual efforts to exert control over their slice of the social pie. Primer is a story not unlike Jurassic Park or Westworld: it is the presumption of control that leads to total chaos.

    Exiting the Multiverse

    The futility of prediction is recognized by Epicurus with his concept of clinamen which says that atomic particles will swerve in uncaused motions.5 The associated disorders of time travel go even further than the clinamen: instead of unpredictable motion, time travel causes the unpredictable appearance of matter into the void.

    To leap backward or forward in time posits an existence on a timeline owing solely to the leap itself, ignoring the causal mechanics of existence. It would be something like trying to visit Earth after it is swallowed by the Sun. The past cannot embed a future which leads back to its own alteration, as the alteration would inevitably deny a pathway back to that same future. For this reason comprehending time travel can never be more than an exercise of mind-bending.

    Due to the paradoxes of time travel and the non-linearity necessarily contained in its process, Primer requires multiple viewings in order to digest the plot sequence. But it is a testament to the medium that a $7,000 film can so forcefully wade into the most speculative of scientific subjects.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005): 530. ↩︎

    2. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003): 121. ↩︎

    3. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (WW Norton, 1998): 103. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (The MIT Press, 1992): 125-6 for a more detailed interpretation of this concept. ↩︎

    4. Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003): 7. ↩︎

    5. Pierre-Marie Morel, “Epicurean atomism” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 76-7. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: “I’m Afraid of Dying”

    Ask the Editor: “I’m Afraid of Dying”

    Dear editor,



    I’ve been surrounded by death recently. At least it feels like that. My mentor from college passed away from metastatic breast cancer a few months ago. She was in her thirties. Then it was a cherished family friend; in her sixties, also cancer. Most recently a co-worker’s heart gave out on the job. That was only two months ago. I have felt doom since then. It is affecting my sleep. What if I don’t wake up in the morning? Any moment my life could be torn away from me. Will I receive a cancer diagnosis? Brain aneurysm? Could my heart explode next time I am on the treadmill? What happens afterward? I’m afraid of dying.

    Thanks,

    Charlotte.

    Dear Charlotte,

    I find the present age a little too scientific about this issue. Regularly attend the doctor, have blood analyzed, wear a helmet on the bike and don’t think about mortality. That’s a long ways off. And it might be. But it might not be. In my own experience, grief is almost “not supposed to be” discussed past the funeral and, for pensive people, this prohibition may exacerbate the death anxiety. In order to live with the uncertainty of existence we must dispel the image of a hungry grim reaper hanging about our shadows with a gleaming sickle.

    Freud saw death as a drive to “restore an earlier state”—the state of inorganic being. And Marx said that “death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to contradict their unity.” Both are true in that rational Enlightenment sort of sensibility but they have all the comfort of a cold steel bed. 

    Religious beliefs aside, I’ll point out that the ancient philosophers tended to be more confrontational with this subject than those that came later. At the height of Christendom all attention was paid to the afterlife and in modernity all attention is paid to rigid inquiry. For this subject I turn to to the Epicureans who lived by the adage: “Death is nothing to us.” As atomic beings, once we lose our senses, we lose our ability to perceive, worry or fear anything. It is therefore irrational to worry about non-existence as there is nothing that can be feared in that state. What you are experiencing is neither an authentic fear of death nor a fear of loss. We do not lose our lives, we only cease to live them.

    It seems to be the suddenness by which your loved ones and colleague stopped living that has aggravated your grief and catalyzed anxiety. There may be unfulfilled wishes that flummox you. Epicurus said: “He who is in least need of tomorrow will approach it with the greatest pleasure.”1 This is where I believe you should channel your conscious energy. What provides you enjoyment? Try to arrive happy every night to bed. There are likely social pressures and internal judgements that you are facing. Consciously and humbly work through them. Do you have unfulfilled goals and aspirations stoking this “need for tomorrow”? It is important that you locate these because they are the true sources of anxiety. The fear of dying is relieved once you temper the need for tomorrow and render it no more than a pleasant want.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, eds., The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Hackett Publishing, 1994), 103. ↩︎