Theme introduction
Introduction to Theme II
Material processes do not share a single pace. Their durations become legible through changes of configuration, while complexity appears only where different rhythms and constraints enter relations capable of sustaining further operations.
Chapter 4 distinguishes this material duration from the image of time as an external flow. Chapter 5 confronts the retrospective illusion that complexity was inevitable. Chapter 6 brings chance into the argument as the contingent encounter of causal series from which new concentrations and forms can arise.
The three movements connect timing to organisation without making either a universal programme. Complexity remains a historical achievement, dependent on thresholds that might never have been crossed; chance belongs to this history because material determination can produce encounters whose consequences were not contained in any prior plan.
Theme chapters