From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 20:08:26 EST
thanks to Jerry for the commoner website. Time to Revolt Reflections on Empire (1) John Holloway (October 2002) >The negation of doing is the homogenisation of time. To deny >social-purposive doing is to subordinate doing to being, to that >which is. The doing of today is subordinated to the doing of >yesterday, the doing of tomorrow can only be conceived as a >continuation of the doing of today. Time then becomes tick-tick >time, clock time, like a length of railway track. Tick-tick time >measures duration, a being separated from doing, an existence >separated from constitution. Capitalism is the separating of objects >from their subjects, of things which are from the doing that made >them, of existence from constitution. This separating creates >duration, the notion that things 'are', independent of the doing >which created them. Value, for instance, appears to have an >existence independent of the self-divided doing which created it: >Marx's Capital (the labour theory of value) is above all an attack >on duration, a critique of the separation of existence and >constitution, a restoration in thought of the doing denied by >duration. >One of the great advantages of this homogeneous time, duration-time, >is that it can be broken up into periods, into lengths of time. This >is crucial to the organisation of work in the factory and in the >office and in the schools and universities. Homogeneous time is >crucial in the organising of the doing of others for whom doing is >purpose-less, object-less labour. But it goes further than that. It >permeates our social thought, the way we shape and think about our >social relations. Time becomes stodgy, almost solid, something that >can be cut into wedges, into periods, into paradigms, a million >miles removed from the timeless-time of intense love or engagement. >But communism, a world in which we shape our own doing, a world in >which doing is emancipated from being, a world in which doing and >being, constitution and existence are explicitly reunited, can then >be conceived only as a world in which we break the homogeneity of >time, a world in which duration is shattered, in which time is not a >long railway track or a slice of pizza, but tends towards the >intensity of the Jetztzeit (now-time) of Benjamin (1973) or the nunc >stans of Bloch (1964), towards the timeless-time of all-absorbing >love or engagement. An interesting comparison here may be with Henri Bergson who constrasted homogeneous time with what he meant by duration, a notoriously elusive but key concept for which a flowing melody was used as an example of the interpenetration of the only apparently spatially separate past, present and future. John treats homogeneous time and duration as synonyms, though I wonder whether he has the same distinction as Bergson's in mind? John's work raises so many questions. I am only now beginning to think through his very stimulating work. Of course approaching John's comments here through the work of Bergson may not be very illuminating. But I was just reminded of him because of John's usage of homogeneous time and duration and because I had been reading a draft of a chapter on Bergsonian vitalism. So this may well be a false lead. Yours, Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 00:00:01 EST