RANT - Time is the Enemy; Pleasure is the Aim
There are only two kinds of time in life: production time
and consumption time. The concept of time plays an incarcerating role in all
our existences, from the present to the past, in the form of history.
Politicos continually harp on about past glories and even
defeats. John McQuarrie declared, “This dwelling in the past has, like other
cases, various ways in which is manifests itself. Always, however, it is
typical of the man who, in common parlance, has no will of his own – the
irresolute man, the man of bad faith, the scattered man”.
The nihilist militants must fight in a battleground of the
present, unshackled by the weight of history. The history of the socialist
movement is ultimately depressing, a catalogue of individual self-sacrifice. By
looking forward, we can win, shattering the con that passes as civilisation. We
only have to be lucky once and we have cracked it.
However, that is not to say that we should not heed the
lessons of the past, rather that necrophilia is a pretty dead end occupation. Time
does give us important lessons. Time is irreversible; the present is unique and
does not repeat itself. Time cannot be revisited, like a place. Living in the
past is relying on memory and memory is fallible. There is never forever, only
the moment.
Time (past, present or future, and productive or
consumerist) is a symbol of stability. It explains stability i.e. if the nature
of the world was to change tomorrow then humans would seek elements of sameness
in it and observe these events with clocks.
TIME IS A DICTATOR.
TIME IS A TYRANT
‘Free time’ is consumption time; work is production time.
Work is dictated by clocks: the established tradition of the rigours of 9-5,
despite the fact that these are the best hours of the day, a time when we
should be laughing and playing in the sun and the rain. The reformist illusion
is a shameful con, merely adjusting the proportions of consumer and production
time. ‘Free time’ is given to older pupils in schools as a carrot to pacify their
naturally restless spirit.
Humans and time need to be considered in tandem – time is
not a natural phenomenon; it exists as a social control and is a subtle, if
omnipresent, element of spectacular oppression.
Time, stripped to its basics, is only a dimension. It is not
substantial and so cannot be just smashed, but has to be psychologically
overcome. Time constrains our actions, but it must be reiterated that it is
merely a ploy. Sartre once said that the time of personal experience is part
imagination and part fact.
Our lives are not only dictated by timetables and clocks,
but also by our inner clocks. It is not time that is complex but human
relations with time. Even depression has daily and seasonal fluctuations.
Perhaps the strangest thing about time is the importance
placed on the week, the working week etc. But a striking feature of the origins
of our modern 7 day week is the failure to trace it to any lunar cycle or any
geo-physical time patterns. In the entire ancient world only the Jewish week
was 7 days long. Eviatar Zerubavel stated “The disassociation of the 7 day week
from nature has been one of the most significant contributions of Judaism to
civilisation”. Like the invention of the mechanical clock some 1500 years
later, it facilitated the establishment of what Lewis Mumford identified as
“mechanical periodicity”. Hence, the distance between human beings’ lifestyle
and nature is increasing.
Time and space seem less rigid and less well organised in
dreams, so that perhaps we should return to the slogan, “Take your dreams for
reality”.
An awareness of the role of time in dictating our lives
(including our resistance) within the context of the illusion that passes for
reality is an important first step in challenging the total oppression of the
dominant society.
AntiClockWise #14.
Time Zone – Ian, Sheffield
The following are some more thoughts on the subject of time
as discussed in #14 of AntiClockWise:
“Time, stripped to its basics, is just a dimension” … but,
in the modern cultures of today, time achieves some kind of hyper-real status
or monolithic presence. TIME AND ALIENATION. We see the packaging of time as
some kind of tool for each individual to help blank out the overbearing
alienation of their own lives in society, and this time is used ultimately to
support the mass alienation of society by detracting the problems from each
individual.
Time is your measure of certainty and safety. The knowledge
that your movement is predetermined by yourself, that you will be at a certain
place at a certain time to do a certain task. Total order. You set times using
a mental model that tells you how to act out each process and where you need to
be so that your dependence on, and communication with, strangers is cut down to
nothing. Time is your defence for having to communicate with a world that is
necessarily portrayed as hostile. All that remains is the safe haven of your
destination (whether a mental or physical one). Job done.
For a convoluted anti version of this sad model, check out
the film After Hours – here, the concept of time as a guide for security is
turned on its head, with glimpses of pleasure being alliterated by an
overbearing nightmarish feeling. We must question why the beauty of spontaneity
– the opposite of complete timetabling – is either controlled or totally
eliminated in our lives.
The natural progression from using time in this way is to
‘competition for time’, where times planned in future coincide for two or more
individuals or bodies. This enforces more discipline on how you should regulate
your time, and your control over your life is slowly to be eroded, to be
replaced by further seemingly irreversible alienation.
The pleasure invoked from coincidence is replaced by
feelings of anger and frustration (to see a vision of time out of context, of
coincidences and freedoms you need only look at the fiction of Thomas Pynchon
or Paul Auster). The prime exponents of such devious theories on time are the
ruling classes and the bosses … the real TIME BANDITS.
In modern society, the phrase of work being a ‘prison of
measured time’ could not ring more true. 9-5 is their time, but what about the
rest of the day? You have a choice to either submit to the comforts of passive
consumption, to scramble after the products of your own labour in ‘their’ time
and so 9-5 becomes their time when you fuel their capitalist system through
consuming. Or, you can look beyond … to pursue your own desires under the
constriction of these hours allotted to you. But this is the true prison of
measured time, the worst type of prison when you have an illusory freedom …
but, in reality, only the contractual regulation of turning up at 9am to give
them your time. And so, you proceed to divide the 9-5 such that an optimum amount
of time can be spent on a maximum amount of activities. But optimisation and
maximisation are products of their thinking, of their hold over time, until
eventually these free time activities become duties and ultimately your whole
time is their time. By thinking in these ways it is impossible to win and
eventually control is complete.
TIME IS THE ENEMY, PLEASURE IS THE AIM. By using pleasure as
a true guide for time, the concept of ‘their time’ can be smashed. The empty
vacuum of alienation, supported by complex social behaviour, can only be
destroyed when people negate the precise timetabling of all things considered
constructive. From this, time can be reclaimed and be
free to each individual … pleasure will override. As the
original article stated, an awareness of the conceived roles of time must be
gained before nihilists can shake the foundations of a hilarious society and
Democracy.
Another viewpoint on Time came in a letter from American
correspondent Elliot Cantsin.
“Time is just a word that labels something that seems
somehow real. Even the clock and the week of seven, rather than six of eight,
days are just measurements that might be useful. It’s not TIME that is evil,
it’s the system that puts a dollar value on your time by the hour and uses a
punch clock as an excuse to dump you out of bed in the morning in order to rush
with a herd of zombies to a dreary place in which you are forced to spend a
life of meaningless drudgery. You don’t need to be an existential analysis of
time to see this”.
Time to Clock Off! (Editorial of AntiClockWise #1)
· Do you feel like your everyday actions are
controlled by the clock on the wall?
·
Is your job at set hours? Why are most jobs 9-5
when there is no particular reason why it should be those hours: in fact, these
are the brightest parts of the day?
·
How many times do you look at your watch every
day?
·
Do you feel lost without a watch or a clock to
look at?
·
Are you afraid of missing your favourite soap
opera if you don’t keep check of the time?
·
When you are making love, how often do you fail
to relax because of other commitments at specific times?
·
Why do football matches last exactly 90 minutes,
and why are Stockport County always a goal down after 90 minutes?
·
Why is that when we want to travel from A to B,
it is dictated by rigid timetables that we panic over but are rarely adhered
to?
·
Why do watches have hands and hands have
watches?
·
Could it be that time is the supreme form of
social control, where even our resistance is timetabled. Our lives are run on a
timetable – who the hell created it all?
We should have our own ideas of time and
motion. Pleasure is timeless; motion should be at our pace.
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