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
manifesting itself in everyday life as a pseudocyclical time.
149
This pseudocyclical time is in fact merely a consumable disguise of
the production system’s commodified time. It exhibits the latter’s 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 pseudo-valorizations and
manifests itself as a succession of pseudo-individualized moments.
150
Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic
survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from
decision-making 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, 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 pseudo-travel, 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 American population 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 its time to 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 pseudo-festivals 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 clashes 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 financial 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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