6) The temporal structures or lines of time implicated in the sign, and the corresponding type of truth.

“It always takes time to interpret a sign; all time is that of an interpretation, that is, of a development… Time wasted, time lost, time rediscovered, and time regained are the four lines of time. But we must note that if each type of sign has its particular line, it participates in the other lines as well, encroaches on them as it develops. It is therefore on the lines of time that the signs intersect and multiply their combinations.”

“Proust and Signs”, pages 86-87.

              In that everything which has been encountered in the course of this research has proven itself to be best defined in terms of nonnumerical multiplicities; and, given that the key to establishing a grammatological description for non-metrical image writing seems to rest in using terms which are conceptually linked to ‘difference’ (as opposed to identity), there is no reason to suspect that any determinations we make here concerning the nature of time will be any different. In fact, we have every reason to suspect that the schemata for temporal differentiation presented in “Proust and Signs” will by necessity have to be extended to its uttermost possibilities before it will prove adequate to those tasks which we may yet need to assign to it. This, the sixth, criterion is of great use in that it shifts our Eurocentric conceptualization of temporality at least somewhat away from the “past-present-future” sequence so deeply inherent in the phonocentric expressivism (“hearing/heard; thinking/thought; speaking/spoken” articulated at a future tense of the “Other’s” reciprocal sequence of “hearing…”) of performative-response speech acts.

            The distance between a time of the word and a time of the image can be very far indeed: and in fact, the ways in which temporality can be conceptualized just within the languages of the First Nations is remarkably different from our common concepts of ‘past/present/future’. Hence, the ‘lines of time’ that produce ‘signs’ upon intersecting must be approached in a manner quite different than that utilized by Proust.

            “In English we divide most of our words into two classes, which have different grammatical and logical properties. Class 1 we call nouns, e.g., “house, man’; class 2, verbs, e.g., ‘hit, run’. Many words of one class can act secondarily as of the other class, e.g., ‘a hit, a run’, or, ‘to man (the boat)’, but, on the primary level, the division between the classes is absolute… It will be found that an “event” to US means “what our language classifies as a verb” or something analogized therefrom. And it will be found that it is not possible to define ‘event, thing, object, relationship’, and so on, from nature, but that to define them always involves a circuitous return to the grammatological categories of the definer’s language.

            “In the Hopi language, ‘lightning, wave, flame, meteor, puff of smoke, pulsation are verbs – events of necessarily brief duration cannot be anything but verbs. “Cloud’ and ‘storm’ are at the lower limit of duration for nouns. Hopi, you see, actually has a classification of events (or linguistic isolates) by duration type, something strange to our modes of thought. On the other hand, in Nootka, a language of Vancouver Island , all words seem to us to be verbs, but really there are no classes 1 and 2; we have, as it were, an monistic view of nature that gives us only one class of word for all kinds of events. ‘A house occurs’ or ‘it houses’ is the way of saying ‘house’, exactly like ‘a flame occurs’ or ‘it burns’. These terms seem to us like verbs because they are inflected for durational and temporal nuances, so that the suffixes of the word for house event make it mean long-lasting house, temporary house, future house, house that use to be, what started out to be a house, and so on.” 

Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Language, Thought, & Reality”, copyright 1956 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; pages 215-216.  

            While it would be wise to abandon here any attempt to force non-metrical image writing into conforming with ‘four lines of time’, we can still retain (from this sixth criterion for sign differentiation) the idea that signs intersect and multiply their combinations upon lines of time.

            “A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogenous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors.”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, page 249.

            In such cases, we must define these ‘lines of time’ through a conceptualization of temporal dimensionality quite different than that which our linguistically determined concepts of ‘past/ present/ future’ have habitualized us toward. Indeed, one must say that the lines of time are without measure, and cannot be counted – literally, because (as Bergson demonstrated) such sytems of numerical measure are characteristic of space. Time divides by changing in kind, and realistically there is no possible way to enumerate such changes through any transcendental ideal that is divorced from the actuality of their occurrence. This is precisely why the temporalizations of non-metrical image composites are so well suited for displaying the exteriority of territorial interrelationships: in presenting differences in kind, composite assemblages are formed which are capable of encompassing the innumerable variations that are essential in grasping such events as are characteristic of territorialization.

"To be more precise, (duration) is the virtual insofar as it is actualized, in the course of being actualized, it is inseparable from the movement of its actualization. For actualization comes about through differentiation, through divergent lines, and creates so many differences in kind by virtue of its own movement."

“Bergsonism”, pages 42-43.

When we re-define the ‘lines of time’ whereupon signs intersect and multiply their combinations, we find that the composite multiplicities which result have a very distinct kind of quality which is quite different from the ‘linguistic objects’ that populate the signifier/signified pairings of semiological expressivism. We find ‘actualizations’ that are not objects, and are not subjects, but are instead just (composite) ‘differences’.

“There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, page 261.

            So, the constituent elements of non-metrical image writing are composite assemblages that can be described as nonnumerical multiplicities actualizing upon lines of differentiation distinguishable by that movement which we call territorialization.

            In short, non-numerical image writing is a form of event-language. In its grammatic structure, constituent elements are related to the extent that they are compositional of events. The compositional principle uniting images and image elements together into composite assemblages is that of the ‘event horizon’, which is a differential threshold of actualization that can be distinguished through reference to the process of territorialization… a process of differentiation in kind through which relative states of affairs cease being as they were, and become different without becoming other; or, absolute states of affairs become other through ceasing to be. In this, we can find an absolutely essential characteristic of any narrative structure: that the grammatological elements which define it can be compositionally joined as well as separated. This is accomplished in non-metrical image writing quite simply by the production of sign-assemblages upon intersecting lines of time (as differences in kind). Of course, all determinations regarding where events begin and end are always problematic since, temporality divides through continuous variation. However problematic this might be (for instance, the study of any historical event is always accompanied by innumerable revisions regarding ‘new information’ about which elements are ‘actually’ compositional of said event), in reality narrative structures demand such a differential mechanism in order to function linguistically.

            Throughout the course of the evolution that the development of this written language followed, it can be shown that the images produced as, and which are characteristic of, non-metrical image writing are always quite dynamic in nature, with relatively few of those static qualities so dominant and prevalent within most other linguistic and image-oriented processes of reification. We are instead, throughout non-metrical image writing, being presented with a multitude of what Proust called “A morsel of time in the pure state.” (“In Search of Lost Time”, volume III, page 872 in the three-volume edition of A la Recherche du temps perdu, published in the Bibliotheque de la Pléiade)

            “”A morsel of time in the pure state” is not a simple resemblance between the present and the past, between a present that is immediate and a past that has been present, not even an identity in the two moments, but beyond, the very being of the past in itself, deeper than any past that has been, than any present that was “A morsel of time, in the pure state”, that is, the localized essence of time.”

“Proust and Signs”, page 61.

In non-metrical image writing, the processes of territorialization define the narrative structure, which is by definition composed of event horizons. As such, and due to the fact that event horizons actualize as composite assemblages of nonnumeric multiplicities, the overall grammatic structure of non-metrical image writing is presented through meta-narratives that realize all of the essentially differential characteristics of its component elements. To the extent that the ‘signs’ presented in non-metrical image writing are ‘produced at the intersection of lines of time’; and, given that the number of such temporal ‘lines’ (here taken to be inclusive of event horizons) cannot be of a limited quantity, it should be noted the overall complexity of the images which characterize this form of writing developed well beyond what can reasonably be conceived of as simple ‘signs’. In the examples I have found of the farthest development this form of writing underwent, the linguistic complexity of the grammatological textures this writing produced are simply astonishing in their presentation of that finely detailed depth of understanding which characterizes active thought… that is to say, thought which is of the world and its contingent temporal complexities: for, if ever any manner of truth can be determined, it can only be so established relative to the defining temporal realizations of the actual.

The composite multiplicities being described here are not most properly indicated by the word ‘signs’; in their essence, the image assemblages produced of intersecting event horizons are called by a different name: they are called “concepts”.