We have nothing of our own
except time, which even the homeless can experience.
Baltasar Gracián, The Art of
Worldly Wisdom
147
The time of production — commodified time — is an infinite
accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is irreversible
time made abstract, in which each segment need only demonstrate
by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all
the others. It has no reality apart from its exchangeability.
Under the social reign of commodified time, time
is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass
of time (The Poverty of Philosophy). This
devalued time is the complete opposite of time as terrain
of human development.
148
This general time of human nondevelopment also has a
complementary aspect — a consumable form
of time based on the present mode of production and presenting
itself in everyday life as a pseudocyclical time.
149
This pseudocyclical time is in fact merely a consumable
disguise of the production systems commodified
time. It exhibits the latters essential traits:
homogenous exchangeable units and suppression of any qualitative
dimension. But as a by-product of commodified time whose
function is to promote and maintain the backwardness of
everyday life, it is loaded with pseudovalorizations and
manifests itself as a succession of pseudoindividualized
moments.
150
Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption
of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in
which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking
and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the
pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite
natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed
survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the
natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new
variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations.
151
Pseudocyclical time is a time that has been transformed
by industry. The time based on commodity production
is itself a consumable commodity, one that recombines
everything that the disintegration of the old unitary
societies had differentiated into private life, economic
life, and political life. The entire consumable time of
modern society ends up being treated as a raw material
for various new products put on the market as socially
controlled uses of time. A product that already
exists in a form suitable for consumption may nevertheless
serve as raw material for some other product (Capital).
152
In its most advanced sectors, concentrated capitalism
is increasingly tending to market fully equipped
blocks of time, each functioning as a unified commodity
combining a variety of other commodities. In the expanding
economy of services and leisure activities,
the payment for these blocks of time is equally unified:
everythings included, whether it is
a matter of spectacular living environments, touristic
pseudotravel, subscriptions to cultural consumption, or
even the sale of sociability itself in the form of exciting
conversations and meetings with celebrities.
Spectacular commodities of this type, which would obviously
never sell were it not for the increasing impoverishment
of the realities they parody, just as obviously reflect
the modernization of sales techniques by being payable
on credit.
153
Consumable pseudocyclical time is spectacular time, both
in the narrow sense as time spent consuming images and
in the broader sense as image of the consumption of time.
The time spent consuming images (images which in turn
serve to publicize all the other commodities) is both
the particular terrain where the spectacles mechanisms
are most fully implemented and the general goal that those
mechanisms present, the focus and epitome of all particular
consumptions. Thus, the time that modern society is constantly
seeking to save by increasing transportation
speeds or using packaged soups ends up being spent by
the average American in watching television three to six
hours a day. As for the social image of the consumption
of time, it is exclusively dominated by leisure time and
vacations moments portrayed, like all spectacular
commodities, at a distance and as desirable by
definition. These commodified moments are explicitly presented
as moments of real life whose cyclical return we are supposed
to look forward to. But all that is really happening is
that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself
at a higher level of intensity. What is presented as true
life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular
life.
154
Although the present age presents itself as a series
of frequently recurring festivities, it is an age that
knows nothing of real festivals. The moments within cyclical
time when members of a community joined together in a
luxurious expenditure of life are impossible for a society
that lacks both community and luxury. Its vulgarized pseudofestivals
are parodies of real dialogue and gift-giving; they may
incite waves of excessive economic spending, but they
lead to nothing but disillusionments, which can be compensated
only by the promise of some new disillusion to come. The
less use value is present in the time of modern survival,
the more highly it is exalted in the spectacle. The reality
of time has been replaced by the publicity of time.
155
While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies
was consistent with the real labor of those societies,
the pseudocyclical consumption of developed economies
contradicts the abstract irreversible time implicit in
their system of production. Cyclical time was the really
lived time of unchanging illusions. Spectacular time is
the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality.
156
The production processs constant innovations are
not echoed in consumption, which presents nothing but
an expanded repetition of the past. Because dead labor
continues to dominate living labor, in spectacular time
the past continues to dominate the present.
157
The lack of general historical life also means that individual
life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie
for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been
lived by those who are informed about them; and in any
case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly
frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular
machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation
to the societys official version of irreversible
time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of
that times consumable by-products. This individual
experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without
language, without concepts, and without critical access
to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated,
misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacles
false memory of the unmemorable.
158
The spectacle, considered as the reigning societys
method for paralyzing history and memory and for suppressing
any history based on historical time, represents a false
consciousness of time.
159
In order to force the workers into the status of free
producers and consumers of commodified time, it was first
necessary to violently expropriate their time.
The imposition of the new spectacular form of time became
possible only after this initial dispossession of the
producers.
160
The unavoidable biological limitations of the work force
evident both in its dependence on the natural cycle
of sleeping and waking and in the debilitating effects
of irreversible time over each individuals lifetime
are treated by the modern production system as
strictly secondary considerations. As such, they
are ignored in that systems official proclamations
and in the consumable trophies that embody its relentless
triumphant progress. Fixated on the delusory center around
which his world seems to move, the spectator no longer
experiences life as a journey toward fulfillment and toward
death. Once he has given up on really living he can no
longer acknowledge his own death. Life insurance ads merely
insinuate that he may be guilty of dying without having
provided for the smooth continuation of the system following
the resultant economic loss, while the promoters of the
American way of death stress his capacity
to preserve most of the appearances of life in
his post-mortem state. On all the other fronts of advertising
bombardment it is strictly forbidden to grow old. Everybody
is urged to economize on their youth-capital,
though such capital, however carefully managed, has little
prospect of attaining the durable and cumulative properties
of economic capital. This social absence of death coincides
with the social absence of life.
161
As Hegel showed, time is the necessary alienation,
the terrain where the subject realizes himself by losing
himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself.
In total contrast, the current form of alienation is imposed
on the producers of an estranged present. In this
spatial alienation, the society that radically
separates the subject from the activity it steals from
him is in reality separating him from his own time. This
potentially surmountable social alienation is what has
prevented and paralyzed the possibilities and risks of
a living alienation within time.
162
Behind the fashions that come and go on the frivolous
surface of the spectacle of pseudocyclical time, the grand
style of an era can always be found in what is governed
by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution.
163
The natural basis of time, the concrete experience of
its passage, becomes human and social by existing for
humanity. The limitations of human practice imposed
by the various stages of labor have humanized time and
also dehumanized it, in the forms of cyclical time and
of the separated irreversible time of economic production.
The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an
all-embracing historical life, implies the withering away
of the social measurement of time in favor of a federation
of independent times — a federation of playful individual
and collective forms of irreversible time that are simultaneously
present. This would be the temporal realization of authentic
communism, which abolishes everything that exists
independently of individuals.
164
The world already dreams of such a time. In order to
actually live it, it only needs to become fully conscious
of it.
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