mattermorphosis

"Actualization always takes place in the “present of bodies”, that is, all actual events occur in the present time. But the production of “ideal surfaces” must take place in another temporality, one without any actually occurring events. Much as non-metric spaces, spaces in which lengths or areas are meaningless concepts, help us think about the spatial aspects of the plane of immanence, we must try to conceive of a non-metric time proper to it. If metric space is defined by rigid lengths that are measurable and divisible, chronometric time must be thought as defined by rigid durations that are the “lived” and measurable presents of actual entities, from the longest cosmic or geological presents, to the shortest atomic or sub-atomic ones. A topological form of time would, in turn, be one in which the notion of temporal duration is meaningless. Only singularities can be used to think about this non-chronometric time: the minimum thinkable continuous time and the maximum thinkable continuous time; a present without any duration whatsoever that is unlimitedly stretched in the past and future directions simultaneously, so that nothing ever actually happens but everything just happened and is about to happen."

Manuel DeLanda, Deleuze, History and Science, 2010