June 10, 2000

The Class Structure of Time

1.
The individual has no experience of past, present, or future.

2.
All but the present is memory or imagination, in either case representation. The present is all.

3.
The individual knows only that time passes because the world moves. Motion in space is time.

4.
In talk of modernity as an epoch the world is assumed to take notice of its own motion. The observer who would take such notice has actually been the subordinate class, not the “movers and shakers” of segregated history, positions reserved for those who also hire people to record their mnemonic representations. That class is the guarantor of objectivity, although in principle this class divide can be extended across the face of the earth and into every individual human being.

5.
The textual renditions of world-historic individuals are distorted by subjectivity, and here the sense employed is that class’s favorite: the pejorative. They insist upon its use out of self-hatred: Was there ever a more self-centered, present-oriented class?

6.
The conceptualization of a movement must be informed by the observation of motion; if the observation which inspires the conceptualization is global, epochal, then the observation must be objective in time and space. But the only class capable of serving as a refuge for such objectivity cannot represent its own experience of movement—it has been priced out of the market, and the movement is not taking place in, although it is quite literally powered by, that class anyway.

7.
The movement is not objective, though it is happening to people. Neither can its conceptualization be subjective, though it is happening in people. Both the conceptualization and the observation are class-determined. The entire world cannot be both moving and observant in a class society. Consciousness and motion together is generally restricted to the ruling class.

8.
The conceptualization of motion is naming, textualizing. The textualization serves as a poor substitute for contextualization, requiring armies of academics and spokespersons and talking heads, by repetition, to weave at the very least the illusion of the latter out of the dross of the former; the class society which insists upon reserving the tools of representation of motion and consciousness to economic power destroys the spiritual wealth they thought they could grasp; such milieux are accessible only in and through text-covered pages.

9.
Life is elsewhere. Nunc is not hic. Those capable of representation, especially those, know this to be true.

10.
Antiquity, according to Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, and its own textual self-representations —which were bound up with presence and life in a way we can only refer to as religiomythical, ritualistic—did not know it was antiquarian. Modernity does know it is modern (and even has the hubris to believe that self-knowledge makes it post-; this while the present has yet to be realized).

11.
Historical observation —entailing both the motion of world-historical figures and that motion’s subsumption under the concept of history as the latter’s empirical fillment —was created, and the scope of that observation, participation in creating historical representations, was widened.

12.
The concept of history grew out of empirical data, which were, however, not immediately drawn from the mass sensorium, which was occupied with feeling assaulted from both human authority and nature, but filtered through the textual representations of the ruling class, those world-historical figures who were not yet conscious of their category. This was a temporary state of society, of course, because the ruling class soon began to believe its own press. But it is more than likely that some primitive monarch, e.g., one still subject to instant death upon the dissatisfaction of his subjects, i.e., the wrath of God, might not be conscious of the full extent of his power, which actually created both world-historical motion and memory, even though he wielded power similar to those to whom he also had to answer. But historical observation is condemned to mistaking the representations for the milieux for which they are only standing in, in the prehistory of separated time. This is a very simple historiographical mistake, almost forgivable, but it creates a conceptual aporia that cannot be resolved within that time.

13.
The scope of historical observation and participation—and, as in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, observation is participation when the creation of representations is at issue—widened with technological advancement, geographical exploration, and the Enlightenment ideal of universality. But technology is an instrument of production, exploration is a means of gathering means of production, and production is for the profit of the ruling class. The expansion is riven with the same self-serving subjectivity backing its speculative adventures.

14.
In the global marketplace, geared as a finely calibrated masterwork of Jüngerian planetary technology, the universal humanity held out by the Enlightenment—concretely promised in the rights structure of official public morality in the most highly developed state economies—bumps up against the representation of itself by a segment of itself. The observing class, the class responsible for the production of representations, has no space to which to retreat, or from which to retain its distance any longer. The range of vision can be no more than 24,000 miles in circumference, and then—watch your back.

15.
The world can no longer observe the world changing, precisely because a segment is capable of watching the world, having appropriated historical time and the power of representation. This is true even in the case of the collapse of the class structure into the individual, i.e., “fragmentation” of the personality, expressed not least of all in incoherent patterns of spectacle-consumption.

16.
Even observation—spectatorship —is a site of struggle; observation is a contest, and representation is a fight, and this conflict is constitutive of the republican state structure.

17.
But not even the segment which hires the representationists can enforce representation; no naming goes uncontested. Whatever motion is meant to be categorized in such schemas goes on unnoticed, or at least unconceptualized, in general observation of the representative class—and the battle over any particular representative attempt is discursive and therefore potentially infinite, unbounded and yet closed within the logical sphere of representation: texts and images, like the surface of the earth itself is unbounded and yet closed back in on itself, constrained by three dimensions, formed by three dimensions exerting pressure within time, the fourth.

18.
The technobusiness metaphor celebrating the anarchy of production should not have been to think outside the box; that was just a holdover from Plato’s Timæus: It should have been to think outside the sphere.

19.
The world’s experience, whether there is a viewer, observer, recording secretary or not, goes on, as background noise, as the unconscious context of a partial and restricted discussion that has yet to freely conceptualize, that is, fully experience, the present,which continues, although unconscious, to run ahead, keeping pace with, and outstripping, bourgeois-insured objective time.

20.
It is as likely as not that time continues without representation of it as it is that time stops. The individual only experiences the present. In this case, it doesn’t matter which, because the fact is that there are still discussions over representational attempts which have been in existence for hundreds of years and have not yet been resolved. They are “old”: they were in time, and they are now behind the times. One knows this simply by their being old, and not new anymore. So time moved on without the representation being settled. But that taxonomic operation was constitutive of history. And that taxonomic operation was textual.

21.
When nonobjective time moves along, however indeterminately, as embodied in the presence and official silence of 99% of humanity, history has stopped. Only this much, and this aspect, of the end-of-history thesis is correct.

22.
Clearly, the same process which produced planetary technology and eliminated innocent bystanders is as total as any primary taxonomy or grand narrative in dispute. This is a confirmation of one of those which, quite appropriately, has been eulogized since its theoretical formulation: communism. This is both index and function of the potential fulfillment of the instant of life promised by that humble episteme; its truth is in the fact that it appears just to have died, just to have been crushed, at all times, like the instants into which it seeks to breathe life; its failure to inspire us to do so is accompanied by its noble going down with the ship, every ship leaving dock every instant into life, perpetually mourning the incessant passing of unlived potential of life.

time class identity lit.crit dialectic debord ontology