Ontological incompleteness in temporality

I had earlier sought to present a short introduction to the idea of ontological incompleteness between image and concept - an important question today given the extent to which we depend on pictorial and visualistic representations in our day-to-day decision-making, to say nothing of the concept of aesthetics whose very word seems embedded today in visual media perhaps thanks to the ubiquity of portable screens carried by us, in a way which may not have been logistically feasible earlier. 

And this amassing predominance is real for certain, just as certain however as our dependence on concepts to be able to understand and express what is it that we may be seeing, or hearing for that matter. The word still remains the instrument which cuts meaning out of noise. 

What would it mean then to speak of ontological incompleteness in temporality? Does it imply to an extent that time itself may be incomplete? I think it is important to remember here that we are using the term temporality and not time in some absolute sense of a totality. This is because the phenomenological experience of time, as opposed to any sense of time in itself makes itself apparent to us in the form of events and their contingent processes. Happenings which more often than not, inasmuch as we are spatial presences in a world - are often beyond our active control - inasmuch as we are referring here not merely to mute nature in the form of a stone but other people for example, to say nothing of companies, schools and countries etc. 

Yet the way these temporalities make sense to us remains in their narratorial medium, that is by our comprehension of the sequence of events which allowed for a certain development to take place. If you notice the comprehension of this narratorial sequence is vital for any understanding of causality, and indeed association and influence. 

The question of ontological incompleteness however entails that such sequences are not merely not yet replete in their entirety like some buffered video you may scroll back and forth in. Rather drawing from an example from Zizek, it means that perhaps like how a computer renders a part of a map into the playable screen only when the character enters into it - there may be aspects of time in its narratorial dimension which would remain foreclosed unless we were to be able to witness that which was recognizable in them as a desire to us, that is as an aspect of the background so to speak which comes alive because of a way in which we seek to acquire, work with or change it, transforming it as it were into a constituent agent and bringing it into the foreground - adding depth and dimension into the rendered image to remain with the metaphor we were working with. 

This kind of ontological incompleteness would remain spatial,

however - even if the experience of it which may require our own enmeshment in such affairs necessarily entails a temporal expenditure. It fits into something like a grid upon whose coordinates we may find agents, resources, and dwellings that provide opportunities that other areas may not. As such traversals perhaps for meetings or acquisitions, remain the primary mode of temporal engagement - a certain poverty of experience which is not quite the same as saying that our experience of time is incomplete.

What for instance is a judgment, for instance - we make them every day; simple choices, based upon criteria immanent to the question at hand. To begin to speak of ontological incompleteness in time is to consider a form of evidence which had not presented itself to us earlier in the making of a decision. Perhaps as simple as learning about the nutritional value of a packet of biscuits which would change our choice of brand. An aspect or element in the background, upon whose awareness the choice of our decision changes - hence altering the narrative in question. This is perhaps best encapsulated in the phrase ‘if I had known…then.’ 

The complexity of this dimension is irreducible to a fact for often an account - that is the testimony of a person may intersect at a moment of ambiguity in a case only at a certain point and discernible in its entirety only in the form of a narrative, which may testify to the consistency of the position iterated. In this sense we may be tempted to describe ontological incompleteness as ontological inconsistency. Inasmuch as what we understand the truth to be is not homogenous and it is this very fact that inscribes within understanding the importance and necessity of a narrative via which any notion of causality pure and simple may emerge. 

The other way to think about this position or approach it, or rather the only pole from where such a position is discernible is that of the subject and what constitutes the coordinates of their inquiry. And here we do see how the construction of any given narrative in question, is contingent on that which may be driving the inquiry undertaken or not undertaken - and this fragmented mesh of incompleteness both within the subject and within the world is what makes that which we have been describing as a properly ontological condition. That is a part of reality which is a part of that which is not a part of reality - or perhaps as Ernst Bloch may have put it, that which is not yet constituted as reality.

Here I should bring to notice the crucial break which Lacan makes from Freud in his teaching of psychoanalysis. An elementary coordinate within the act of a child growing up is the realization or their confrontation of authority - not within the familial triangle itself with the father figure presenting that which is determinative of meaning or domesticity etc., but the symbolic order embodied in language and the word representing the acts and deeds of institutions and offices that may have laid down precedents alive to our interpretation. In other words, the point is not to find inconsistencies in the character of a person hence presenting what is effectively a smear campaign, but to see whether the deeds presented are in accord with acts and understandings of institutions, which themselves may be constructed politically. 

There is however another way in which the symbolic order as opposed to the metaphor of familialism becomes vital and that is the constitution of the relation or rather the non-relation between the centre and the periphery. How is this so? Think of a house which may be in a particular neighbourhood, it may have a family living in it - who after a few years move to another part of the city and leave this house to rent. They still formally own the house but the people who actually occupy it have changed. There may be a relation between the new occupants and the old ones especially if the latter still retain ownership over it but as to how this new family were to live in the neighborhood their relations would be largely a break from that of the previous set of neighbors. How would the block in question experience this sequence of events? They have effectively witnessed two families living in the same house, and they may be unaware of the relation or the non-relation between the two families in question which in any case have now given us two households. 

The only consistency discernible in this thread of events is narratorial, and this is why I believe despite my reservations about Victorian literature; there is a very acute sense of familiability which the enmeshing of the lives of such individuals from families - and their interactions can present to us, which a work of biography for example or a sustained monological or even a strictly dialogical meditation is simply not capable of taking into account. 

Who enters and who leaves, and how they change the coordinates in question is clearly not a question which matters at the purely neighbourly level but one which is a decision if not a series of them that we make in our everyday lives. And many of these are products of influences, of those close to us - spatially and perhaps those further away. Mediation today is a matter of choice but it is also a practice of cultivating those relations which appear favourable - and often confronting how much we don’t know about them, and in a sense this has always been a part of being a neighbour.