August 20th, 2024, three unexpected time glitches (‘chronostases’ in Greek) occurred at intervals of roughly three seconds in the Kalvebod Brygge waterfront area in the Vesterbro part of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Once filled with factories, this part of the city has changed a lot over the years. Now, it has many new office buildings, hotels, and public places for recreation and bathing as a result of a project aimed at securing sufficiently clean water.
Mikhail Bakhtin on the ‘Chronotope’
« Art & literature are shot through with chronotopic values of varying degree and scope. Each motif, each separate aspect of artistic work bears value »*
The term ‘chronotope(s)’ consisting of Greek χρόνος (‘time’) and τόπος (‘space’) was coined by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in 1937, shortly before World War II.
Also see:
“The Time Is Out of Joint” – Sanskrit, Shakespeare, Derrida
Definition from ‘The Dialogic Imagination’, 1975-1981
« In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope »*
The Loss of Semantic Stability
« Through contact with the present, an object is attracted to the incomplete process of a world-in-the-making and is stamped with the seal of inconclusiveness. No matter how distant this object is from us in time, it is connected to our incomplete, present-day, continuing temporal transitions, it develops a relationship with our unpreparedness, with our present. But meanwhile, our present has been moving into an inconclusive future. And in this inconclusive context, all the semantic stability of the object is lost; its sense and significance are renewed and grow as the context continues to unfold »*
The Return from Avalon
Saint George’s Lake, February, 2026. Pigments on Japanese kozo paper (made from fibres from the mulberry tree) – 100 cm x 100 cm.
Membranes of the logosphere
In common interpretations of Bakhtin, the chronotope is where meaning enters the ‘logosphere’, leading to the question: how does meaning leave again, if it leaves? And of which material does this membrane consist?
Might chronotopes provide access to iconic substrates of language that other ways of perceiving do not? And could this ‘membrane’ be uniquely related, perhaps, to the modalities of art and artistic experiences?
Also see:
Copenhagen artist Kasper Bergholt
Sources
Bakhtin, M. M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981, pp. 84-258.
Chronotopes values, page 243; Definition of chronotope, page 84; Inconclusiveness, page 30.
Paratext
« Nothing passes without leaving a trace. All foregone will be accounted for. What comes to light is only what was hidden inside. What is gone, but requires external conditions and time to grow in order to open and reveal itself. That is the dominant in man, and the chronotope of Existence! » — Ukhtomsky: A.A.: ‘Dominant of the Soul’ Rybins, page 380.
Bakhtin references Ukhtomsky in a footnote in the essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’: «In the summer of 1925, the author of these lines attended a lecture by A. A. Ukhtomsky on the chronotope in biology: in the lecture questions of aesthetic were also touched upon ». The Dialogic Imagination, ibid., p. 84.