# Chronotopes, Time Glitches, and Bakhtin

*November 8, 2025 — Kasper Bergholt*

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.

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?

Bakhtin himself suggests what such a membrane might look like in practice. In a late essay, he writes of Shakespeare that the semantic treasures embedded in his works were created and collected through centuries and millennia — they lay hidden in the language, in strata of popular speech that had not yet entered literature, in carnival forms shaped over deep time, in plots whose roots reach back to prehistory. 

The works, Bakhtin insists, were constructed not out of inert material but out of forms already heavily laden with meaning. This is a description of the chronotope as an accumulative structure: meaning does not simply enter the logosphere at a single point and remain there; it sediments, thickens, and resurfaces under new conditions. 

The line from “The Time Is Out of Joint” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is itself such a sedimented form, a phrase that compresses a physical sensation (a bone wrenched from its socket) into a metaphysical claim about temporal dislocation, and that has continued to accrue meaning through Derrida’s Specters of Marx, through Solvej Balle’s time loops, through its reappearance in photographic work made in Copenhagen nearly four centuries later. 

In a different register, the Danish names of plants and flowers in Drejer’s 1838 Flora Excursoria Hafniensis — tusindfryd, skovstjerne, vinterblomme — are chronotopic in the same way: folk compounds that carry within them centuries of encounter between people and a specific landscape, vernacular traces that persist alongside the Linnaean system’s aspiration to timeless universality. The chronotope, in both cases, is not merely a concept applied from outside but a description of how meaning actually behaves: arriving, withdrawing, resurfacing, refusing to stay either fully present or fully absent.

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.