O, gentlemen, the time of life is
short! . . . An if we live,
we live to tread on kings.
Shakespeare, Henry IV
125
Man, the negative being who is solely
to the extent that he suppresses Being, is one with
time. Mans appropriation of his own nature is at
the same time his grasp of the development of the universe.
History is itself a real part of natural history,
of the transformation of nature into man (Marx).
Conversely, this natural history has no real
existence other than through the process of human history,
the only vantage point from which one can take in that
historical totality (like the modern telescope whose power
enables one to look back in time at the receding
nebulas at the periphery of the universe). History has
always existed, but not always in its historical form.
The temporalization of humanity, brought about through
the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization
of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest
and true within historical consciousness.
126
True (though still hidden) historical movement
begins with the slow and imperceptible development of
the real nature of man the nature
that is born with human history, out of the generative
action of human society. But even when such a society
has developed a technology and a language and is already
a product of its own history, it is conscious only of
a perpetual present. Knowledge is carried on only by the
living, never going beyond the memory of the
societys oldest members. Neither death nor procreation
is understood as a law of time. Time remains motionless,
like an enclosed space. When a more complex society finally
becomes conscious of time, it tries to negate it
it views time not as something that passes, but as something
that returns. This static type of society organizes
time in a cyclical manner, in accordance with
its own direct experience of nature.
127
Cyclical time is already dominant among the nomadic peoples
because they find the same conditions repeated at each
stage of their journey. As Hegel notes, the wandering
of nomads is only nominal because it is limited to uniform
spaces. When a society settles in a particular location
and gives space a content by developing distinctive areas
within it, it finds itself confined within that locality.
The periodic return to similar places now becomes the
pure return of time in the same place, the repetition
of a sequence of activities. The transition from pastoral
nomadism to sedentary agriculture marks the end of an
idle and contentless freedom and the beginning of labor.
The agrarian mode of production, governed by the rhythm
of the seasons, is the basis for fully developed cyclical
time. Eternity is within this time, it is the
return of the same here on earth. Myth is the unitary
mental construct which guarantees that the cosmic order
conforms with the order that this society has in fact
already established within its frontiers.
128
The social appropriation of time and the production of
man by human labor develop within a society divided into
classes. The power that establishes itself above the poverty
of the society of cyclical time, the class that organizes
this social labor and appropriates its limited surplus
value, simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus
value resulting from its organization of social time:
it alone possesses the irreversible time of the living.
The wealth that can only be concentrated in the hands
of the rulers and spent in extravagant festivities amounts
to a squandering of historical time at the surface
of society. The owners of this historical surplus
value are the only ones in a position to know and enjoy
real events. Separated from the collective organization
of time associated with the repetitive production at the
base of social life, this historical time flows independently
above its own static community. This is the time of adventure
and war, the time in which the masters of cyclical society
pursue their personal histories; it is also the time that
emerges in the clashes with foreign communities that disrupt
the unchanging social order. History thus arises as something
alien to people, as something they never sought and from
which they had thought themselves protected. But it also
revives the negative human restlessness that
had been at the very origin of this whole (temporarily
suspended) development.
129
In itself, cyclical time is a time without conflict.
But conflict is already present even in this infancy of
time, as history first struggles to become history in
the practical activity of the masters. This history creates
a surface irreversibility; its movement constitutes the
very time it uses up within the inexhaustible time of
cyclical society.
130
Static societies are societies that have
reduced their historical movement to a minimum and that
have managed to maintain their internal conflicts and
their conflicts with the natural and human environment
in a constant equilibrium. Although the extraordinary
diversity of the institutions established for this purpose
bears eloquent testimony to the flexibility of human natures
self-creation, this diversity is apparent only to the
external observer, the anthropologist who looks back
from the vantage point of historical time. In each of
these societies a definitive organizational structure
has eliminated any possibility of change. The total conformism
of their social practices, with which all human possibilities
are identified for all time, has no external limit but
the fear of falling back into a formless animal condition.
The members of these societies remain human at the price
of always remaining the same.
131
With the emergence of political power — which seems to
be associated with the last great technological revolutions
(such as iron smelting) at the threshold of a period that
would experience no further major upheavals until the
rise of modern industry — kinship ties begin to dissolve.
The succession of generations within a natural, purely
cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession
of powers and events. This irreversible time is the time
of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of
measurement. Writing is the rulers weapon. In writing,
language attains its complete independence as a mediation
between consciousnesses. But this independence coincides
with the independence of separate power, the mediation
that shapes society. With writing there appears a consciousness
that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among
the living an impersonal memory, the memory
of the administration of society. Writings are the
thoughts of the state; archives are its memory (Novalis).
132
The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time
of power. It also serves to inspire the continued progression
of that time by recording the past out of which it has
developed, since this orientation of time tends to collapse
with the fall of each particular power and would otherwise
sink back into the indifferent oblivion of cyclical time
(the only time known to the peasant masses who, during
the rise and fall of all the empires and their chronologies,
never change). The owners of history have given
time a direction, a direction which is also a
meaning. But this history develops and perishes
separately, leaving the underlying society unchanged,
because it remains separated from the common reality.
This is why we tend to reduce the history of Oriental
empires to a history of religions: the chronologies that
have fallen to ruins have left nothing but the seemingly
independent history of the illusions that veiled them.
The masters who used the protection of myth to make
history their private property did so first of all
in the realm of illusion. In China and Egypt, for example,
they long held a monopoly on the immortality of the soul;
and their earliest officially recognized dynasties were
nothing but imaginary reconstructions of the past. But
this illusory ownership by the masters was the only ownership
then possible, both of the common history and of their
own history. As their real historical power expanded,
this illusory-mythical ownership became increasingly vulgarized.
All these consequences flowed from the simple fact that
as the masters played the role of mythically guaranteeing
the permanence of cyclical time (as in the seasonal rites
performed by the Chinese emperors), they themselves achieved
a relative liberation from cyclical time.
133
The dry, unexplained chronology that a deified authority
offered to its subjects, who were supposed to accept it
as the earthly fulfillment of mythic commandments, was
destined to be transcended and transformed into conscious
history. But for this to happen, sizeable groups of people
had to have experienced real participation in history.
Out of this practical communication between those who
have recognized each other as possessors of a
unique present, who have experienced a qualitative richness
of events in their own activity and who are at home in
their own era, arises the general language of historical
communication. Those for whom irreversible time truly
exists discover in it both the memorable and
the threat of oblivion: Herodotus of Halicarnassus
here presents the results of his researches, so that time
will not abolish the deeds of men. . . .
134
Examining history amounts to examining the nature
of power. Greece was the moment when power and changes
in power were first debated and understood. It was a democracy
of the masters of society a total contrast
to the despotic state, where power settles accounts only
with itself, within the impenetrable obscurity of its
inner sanctum, by means of palace revolutions,
which are beyond the pale of discussion whether they fail
or succeed. But the shared power in the Greek communities
was limited to the consumption of a social life
whose production remained the separate and static
domain of the servile class. The only people who lived
were those who did not work. The divisions among the Greek
communities and their struggles to exploit foreign cities
were the externalized expression of the internal principle
of separation on which each of them was based. Although
Greece had dreamed of universal history, it did not succeed
in unifying itself in the face of foreign invasion, or
even in unifying the calendars of its independent city-states.
Historical time became conscious in Greece, but it was
not yet conscious of itself.
135
The disappearance of the particular conditions that had
favored the Greek communities brought about a regression
of Western historical thought, but it did not lead to
a restoration of the old mythic structures. The clashes
of the Mediterranean peoples and the rise and fall of
the Roman state gave rise instead to semihistorical
religions, which became a new armor for separate
power and basic components of a new consciousness of time.
136
The monotheistic religions were a compromise between
myth and history, between the cyclical time that still
governed the sphere of production and the irreversible
time that was the theater of conflicts and regroupings
among different peoples. The religions that evolved out
of Judaism were abstract universal acknowledgments of
an irreversible time that had become democratized and
open to all, but only in the realm of illusion. Time is
totally oriented toward a single final event: The
Kingdom of God is soon to come. These religions
were rooted in the soil of history, but they remained
radically opposed to history. The semihistorical religions
establish a qualitative point of departure in time (the
birth of Christ, the flight of Mohammed), but their irreversible
time introducing an accumulation that would take
the form of conquest in Islam and of increasing capital
in Reformation Christianity is inverted in religious
thought and becomes a sort of countdown: waiting
for time to run out before the Last Judgment and the advent
of the other, true world. Eternity has emerged from cyclical
time, as something beyond it. It is also the element that
restrains the irreversibility of time, suppressing history
within history itself by positioning itself on the
other side of irreversible time as a pure point into
which cyclical time returns and disappears. Bossuet will
still say: By way of time, which passes, we enter
eternity, which does not pass.
137
The Middle Ages, an incomplete mythical world whose consummation
lay outside itself, is the period when cyclical time,
though still governing the major part of production, really
begins to be undermined by history. An element of irreversible
time is recognized in the successive stages of each individuals
life. Life is seen as a one-way journey through
a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim
is the person who leaves cyclical time behind and actually
becomes the traveler that everyone else is symbolically.
Personal historical life still finds its fulfillment within
the sphere of power, whether in struggles waged by power
or in struggles over disputed power; but powers
irreversible time is now shared to an unlimited degree
due to the general unity brought about by the oriented
time of the Christian Era a world of armed
faith, where the adventures of the masters revolve
around fealty and disputes over who owes fealty to whom.
Feudal society was born from the merging of the
organizational structures of the conquering armies that
developed in the process of conquest with the
productive forces found in the conquered regions
(The German Ideology), and the factors contributing
to the organization of those productive forces include
the religious language in which they were expressed. Social
domination was divided between the Church and the state,
the latter power being in turn subdivided in the complex
relations of suzerainty and vassalage within and between
rural domains and urban communities. This diversification
of potential historical life reflected the gradual emergence
(following the failure of that great official enterprise
of the medieval world, the Crusades) of the eras
unnoticed innovation: the irreversible time that was silently
undermining the society, the time experienced by the bourgeoisie
in the production of commodities, the foundation and expansion
of cities, and the commercial discovery of the planet
a practical experimentation that destroyed every
mythical organization of the cosmos once and for all.
138
With the waning of the Middle Ages, the irreversible
time that had invaded society was experienced by a consciousness
still attached to the old order as an obsession with death.
This was the melancholy of a world passing away, the last
world where the security of myth still counterbalanced
history; and for this melancholy all earthly things move
inevitably toward decay. The great European peasant revolts
were also an attempt to respond to history
a history that was violently wresting the peasants from
the patriarchal slumber that had been imposed by their
feudal guardians. The millenarians utopian aspiration
of creating heaven on earth revived a dream that
had been at the origin of the semihistorical religions,
when the early Christian communities, like the Judaic
messianism from which they sprung, responded to the troubles
and misfortunes of their time by envisioning the imminent
realization of the Kingdom of God, thereby adding an element
of unrest and subversion to ancient society. When Christianity
reached the point of sharing power within the empire,
it denounced whatever still remained of this hope as mere
superstition. This is what St. Augustine was doing when,
in a formula that can be seen as the archetype of all
the modern ideological apologetics, he declared that the
Kingdom of God had in fact already come long ago
that it was nothing other than the established Church.
The social revolts of the millenarian peasantry naturally
began by defining their goal as the overthrow of that
Church. But millenarianism developed in a historical world,
not on the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary hopes
are not irrational continuations of the religious passion
of millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated
in The Pursuit of the Millennium. On the contrary,
millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking
the language of religion for the last time, was already
a modern revolutionary tendency, a tendency that lacked
only the consciousness that it was a purely historical
movement. The millenarians were doomed to defeat because
they were unable to recognize their revolution as their
own undertaking. The fact that they hesitated to act until
they had received some external sign of Gods will
was an ideological corollary to the insurgent peasants
practice of following leaders from outside their own ranks.
The peasant class could not attain a clear understanding
of the workings of society or of how to conduct its own
struggle, and because it lacked these conditions for unifying
its action and consciousness, it expressed its project
and waged its wars with the imagery of an earthly paradise.
139
The Renaissance was a joyous break with eternity. Though
seeking its heritage and legitimacy in the ancient world,
it represented a new form of historical life. Its irreversible
time was that of a never-ending accumulation of knowledge,
and the historical consciousness engendered by the experience
of democratic communities and of the forces that destroy
them now took up once again, with Machiavelli, the analysis
of secularized power, saying the previously unsayable
about the state. In the exuberant life of the Italian
cities, in the creation of festivals, life is experienced
as an enjoyment of the passage of time. But this enjoyment
of transience is itself transient. The song of Lorenzo
de Medici, which Burckhardt considered the
very spirit of the Renaissance, is the eulogy this
fragile historical festival delivers on itself: How
beautiful the spring of life and how quickly it
vanishes.
140
The constant tendency toward the monopolization of historical
life by the absolute-monarchist state — a transitional
form on the way to complete domination by the bourgeois
class — brings into clear view the nature of the bourgeoisies
new type of irreversible time. The bourgeoisie is associated
with a labor time that has finally been freed
from cyclical time. With the bourgeoisie, work becomes
work that transforms historical conditions. The
bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which work is
a value. And the bourgeoisie, which suppresses all privilege
and recognizes no value that does not stem from the exploitation
of labor, has appropriately identified its own value as
a ruling class with labor, and has made the progress of
labor the measure of its own progress. The class that
accumulates commodities and capital continually modifies
nature by modifying labor itself, by unleashing labors
productivity. At the stage of absolute monarchy, all social
life was already concentrated within the ornamented poverty
of the Court, the gaudy trappings of a bleak state administration
whose apex was the profession of king; and
all particular historical freedoms had to surrender to
this new power. The free play of the feudal lords
irreversible time came to an end in their last, lost battles
in the Fronde and in the Scottish uprising in support
of Bonny Prince Charlie. The world now had a new foundation.
141
The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly
historical time, because it is the time corresponding
to an economic production that continuously transforms
society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production
remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time
that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint
forces of tradition, which tend to hold back
any historical movement. But the irreversible time of
the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout
the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve
only the actions of individual members of the ruling class,
and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology
of events, is now understood as a general movement
a relentless movement that crushes any individuals
in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy,
history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious;
but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be
brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate
that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity
economy has democratized.
142
The history that is present in all the depths of society
tends to become invisible at the surface. The triumph
of irreversible time is also its metamorphosis into a
time of things, because the weapon that brought
about its victory was the mass production of objects in
accordance with the laws of the commodity. The main product
that economic development has transformed from a luxurious
rarity to a commonly consumed item is thus history itself
but only in the form of the history of the abstract
movement of things that dominates all qualitative aspects
of life. While the earlier cyclical time had supported
an increasing degree of historical time lived by individuals
and groups, the irreversible time of production tends
to socially eliminate such lived time.
143
The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical
time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented
society from using it. Once there was history,
but not any more, because the class of owners of
the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic
history, must repress every other irreversible use
of time because it is directly threatened by them all.
The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession
of things who are themselves therefore possessed
by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation
of this reified history, that is, with the preservation
of a new immobility within history. Meanwhile
the worker at the base of society is for the first time
not materially estranged from history, because
the irreversible movement is now generated from that base.
By demanding to live the historical time that
it produces, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable
core of its revolutionary project; and each previously
defeated attempt to carry out this project represents
a possible point of departure for a new historical life.
144
The irreversible time of the bourgeoisie that had just
seized power was at first called by its own name and assigned
an absolute origin: Year One of the Republic. But the
revolutionary ideology of general freedom that had served
to overthrow the last remnants of a myth-based ordering
of values, along with all the traditional forms of social
organization, was already unable to completely conceal
the real goal that it had draped in Roman costume: unrestricted
freedom of trade. Commodity society, discovering
its need to restore the passivity that it had so profoundly
shaken in order to establish its own unchallenged rule,
now found that, for its purposes, Christianity with
its cult of man in the abstract . . . is the
most fitting form of religion (Capital).
The bourgeoisie thus entered into a compromise with that
religion, a compromise also reflected in its presentation
of time: the Revolutionary calendar was abandoned and
irreversible time returned to the straitjacket of a duly
extended Christian Era.
145
With the development of capitalism, irreversible time
has become globally unified. Universal history
becomes a reality because the entire world is brought
under the sway of this times development. But this
history that is everywhere simultaneously the same is
as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history.
What appears the world over as the same day is
merely the time of economic production, time cut up into
equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time
belongs to the global market, and thus also to
the global spectacle.
146
The irreversible time of production is first of all the
measure of commodities. The time officially recognized
throughout the world as the general time of society
actually only reflects the specialized interests that
constitute it, and thus is merely one particular type
of time.
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