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Time and History

  O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!...
  An if we live, we live to tread on kings. 

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I 


125 
   Man -- that "negative being who is solely to the extent that he abolishes
   being" -- is one with time. Man's appropriation of his own nature is at the
   same time the apprehension of the unfolding of the universe. "History
   itself," says Marx, "is a real part of natural history, and of nature's
   becoming man." Conversely, the "natural history" in question exists
   effectively only through the process of a human history, through the
   development of the only agency capable of discovering this historical whole;
   one is reminded of a modern telescope, whose range enables it to track the
   retreat of nebulae in time toward the edge of the universe. History has
   always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of
   man, as effected through the mediation of a society, is equivalent to a
   humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and 
   true in historical consciousness. 

126 
   The movement of history properly so called (though still hidden) begins with
   the slow and imperceptible emergence of "the true nature of man," of that
   "nature which was born of human history -- of the procreative act that gave
   rise to human society"; but society, even when it had mastered a technology
   and a language, and even though by then it was already the product of its own
   history, remained conscious only of a perpetual present. All knowledge, which
   was in any case limited by the memory of society's oldest members, was always
   borne by the living. Neither death nor reproduction were understood as
   governed by time. Time was motionless -- a sort of enclosed space. When a
   more complex society did finally attain a consciousness of time, its reaction
   was to deny rather than embrace it, for it viewed time not as something 
   passing, but as something returning. This was a static type of society that
   organized time, true to its immediate experience of nature, on a cyclical
   model. 

127 
   Cyclical time was already dominant in the experience of nomadic peoples, who
   confronted the same conditions at each moment of their roaming; as Hegel
   notes, "the wandering of nomads is a merely formal one, because it is limited
   to uniform spaces." Once a society became fixed in a locality, giving space
   content through the individualized development of specific areas, it found
   itself enclosed thereby within the location in question. A time-bound return
   to similar places thus gave way to the pure return of time in a single place,
   the repetition of a set of gestures. The shift from pastoralism to settled
   agriculture marked the end of an idle and contentless freedom, and the
   beginning of labor. The agrarian mode of production in general, governed by
   the rhythm of the seasons, was the basis of cyclical time in its fullest
   development. Eternity, as the return of the same here below, was internal to
   this time. Myth was the unified mental construct whose job it was to make
   sure that the whole cosmic order confirmed the order that this society had in
   fact already set up within its own frontiers. 

128 
   The social appropriation of time and the production of man by means of human
   labor were developments that awaited the advent of a society divided into
   classes. The power that built itself up on the basis of the penury of the
   society of cyclical time -- the power, in other words, of the class which
   organized social labor therein and appropriated the limited surplus value to
   be extracted, also appropriated the temporal surplus value that resulted from
   its organization of social time; this class thus had sole possession of the
   irreversible time of the living. The only wealth that could exist in
   concentrated form in the sphere of power, there to be expended on
   extravagance and festivity, was also expended in the form of the squandering 
   of a historical time at society's surface. The owners of this historical
   surplus value were the masters of the knowledge and enjoyment of directly
   experienced events. Separated off from the collective organization of time
   that predominated as a function of the repetitive form of production which
   was the basis of social life, historical time flowed independently above its
   own, static, community. This was the time of adventure, of war, the time in
   which the lords of cyclical society pursued their personal histories; the
   time too that emerged in clashes between communities foreign to one another
   -- perturbations in society's unchanging order. For ordinary men, therefore,
   history sprang forth as an alien factor, as something they had not sought and
   against whose occurrence they had thought themselves secure. Yet this turning
   point also made possible the return of that negative human restlessness,
   which had been at the origin of the whole (temporarily arrested) development.

129 
   In its essence, cyclical time was a time without conflict. Yet even in this
   infancy of time, conflict was present: at first, history struggled to become
   history through the practical activity of the masters. At a superficial level
   this history created irreversibility; its movement constituted the very time
   that it used up within the inexhaustible time of cyclical society. 

130 
   So-called cold societies are societies that successfully slowed their
   participation in history down to the minimum, and maintained their conflicts
   with the natural and human environments, as well as their internal conflicts,
   in constant equilibrium. Although the vast diversity of institutions set up
   for this purpose bears eloquent testimony to the plasticity of human nature's
   self-creation, this testimony is of course only accessible to an outside
   observer, to an anthropologist looking back from within historical time. In
   each of these societies a definitive organizational structure ruled out
   change. The absolute conformity of their social practices, with which all
   human possibilities were exclusively and permanently identified, had no
   external limits except for the fear of falling into a formless animal
   condition. So, here, in order to remain human, men had to remain the same. 

131 
   The emergence of political power, seemingly associated with the last great
   technical revolutions, such as iron smelting, which occurred at the threshold
   of a period that was to experience no further major upheavals until the rise
   of modern industry, also coincided with the first signs of the dissolution of
   the bonds of kinship. From this moment on, the succession of the generations
   left the natural realm of the purely cyclical and became a purposeful
   succession of events, a mechanism for the transmission of power. Irreversible
   time was the prerogative of whoever ruled, and the prime yardstick of
   rulership lay in dynastic succession. The ruler's chief weapon was the
   written word, which now attained its full autonomous reality as mediation
   between consciousnesses. This independence, however, was indistinguishable
   from the general independence of a separate power as the mediation whereby
   society was constituted. With writing came a consciousness no longer conveyed
   and transmitted solely within the immediate relationships of the living -- an
   impersonal memory that was the memory of the administration of society.
   "Writings are the thoughts of the State," said Novalis, "and archives are its
   memory." 

132 
   As the expression of power's irreversible time, chronicles were a means of
   maintaining the voluntaristic forward progression of this time on the basis
   of the recording of its past; "voluntaristic," because such an orientation is
   bound to collapse, along with the particular power to which it corresponds,
   and sink once more into the indifferent oblivion of a solely cyclical time, a
   time known to the peasant masses who -- no matter that empires may crumble
   along with their chronologies -- never change. Those who possessed history
   gave it an orientation -- a direction, and also a meaning. But their history
   unfolded and perished apart, as a sphere leaving the underlying society
   unaffected precisely because it was a sphere separate from common reality.
   This is why, from our point of view, the history of Oriental societies may be
   reduced to a history of religions: all we can reconstruct from their ruins is
   the seemingly independent history of the illusions that once enveloped them.
   The masters who, protected by myth, enjoyed the private ownership of history,
   themselves did so at first in the realm of illusion. In China and Egypt, for
   example, they long held a monopoly on the immortality of the soul; likewise,
   their earliest officially recognized dynasties were an imaginary
   reconstruction of the past. Such illusory ownership by the masters, however,
   was at the same time the only ownership then possible both of the common
   history and of their own history. The expansion of their effective historical
   power went hand in hand with a vulgarization of this illusory-mythical
   ownership. All of these consequences flowed from the simple fact that it was
   only to the degree that the masters made it their task to furnish cyclical
   time with mythic underpinnings, as in the seasonal rites of the Chinese
   emperors, that they themselves were relatively emancipated therefrom. 

133 
   The dry, unexplained chronology which a deified authority offered to its
   subjects, and which was intended to be understood solely as the earthly
   execution of the commandments of myth, was destined to be transcended and to
   become conscious history. But, for this to happen, sizeable groups of people
   had first to experience real participation in history. From such practical
   communication between those who had recognized one another as possessors of a
   unique present, who had experienced the qualitative richness of events as
   their own activity, their own dwelling-place -- in short, their own epoch --
   from such communication arose the general language of historical
   communication. Those for whom irreversible time truly exists discover in it
   both the memorable and the danger of forgetting: "Herodotus of Halicarnassus
   here presents the results of his researches, that the great deeds of men may
   not be forgotten." 

134 
   To reflect upon history is also, inextricably, to reflect upon power. Greece
   was that moment when power and changes in power were first debated and
   understood. This occurred under a democracy of society's masters, a system
   diametrically opposed to that of the despotic State, where power settled
   accounts only with itself, in the impenetrable obscurity of its densest
   point, by means of palace revolutions whose outcome, whether success or
   failure, invariably placed the event itself beyond discussion. The shared
   power of Greek communities inhered solely, however, in the expending of a
   social life whose production remained the separate and static domain of the
   slave class. The only people who lived were those who did not work. The
   divisions between Greek communities, and the struggle to exploit foreign
   cities, were the externalized expression of the principle of separation on
   which each of them was based internally. Greece, which dreamed of a universal
   history, was thus unable to unite in the face of invasion from without; it
   could not even manage to standardize the calendars of its constituent cities.
   Historical time became conscious in Greece -- but it was not yet conscious of
   itself. 

135 
   The regression of Western thought that occurred once the local conditions
   favoring the Greek communities had disappeared was not accompanied by any
   reconstruction of the old mythic structures. Clashes between Mediterranean
   peoples and the constitution and collapse of the Roman State gave rise
   instead to semi-historical religions that were to become basic components of
   the new consciousness of time, and the new armature of separated power. 

136 
   Monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, between
   the cyclical time which still dominated the sphere of production and the
   irreversible time which was the theater of conflicts and realignments between
   peoples. The religions that evolved out of Judaism were the abstract
   universal recognition of an irreversible time now democratized, open to all,
   yet still confined to the realm of illusion. Time remained entirely oriented
   toward a single final event: "The Kingdom of God is at hand." These religions
   had germinated and taken root in the soil of history; even here, however,
   they maintained a radical opposition to history. Semi-historical religion
   established qualitative starting points in time -- the birth of Christ, the
   flight of Muhammad -- yet its irreversible time, introducing an effective
   accumulation which would take the form of conquest in Islam and that of an
   increase in capital in the Christianity of the Reformation, was in fact
   inverted in religious thought, so as to become a sort of countdown: the wait,
   as time ran out, for the Last Judgment, for the moment of accession to the
   other, true world. Eternity emerged from cyclical time; it was that time's
   beyond. Eternity was also what humbled time in its mere irreversible flow --
   suppressing history as history continued -- by positioning itself beyond
   irreversible time, as a pure point which cyclical time would enter only to be
   abolished. As Bossuet could still say: "So, by way of the passing of time, we
   enter eternity, which does not pass." 

137 
   The Middle Ages, an unfinished mythical world whose perfection lay outside
   itself, was the period when cyclical time, which still governed the major
   part of production, suffered history's first real gnawing inroads. A measure
   of irreversible time now became available to everyone individually, in the
   form of the successive stages of life, in the form of life apprehended as a
   voyage, a one-way passage through a world whose meaning was elsewhere. Thus
   the pilgrim was the man who emerged from cyclical time to become in actuality
   the traveler that each individual was qua sign. Personal historical life
   invariably found its fulfillment within power's orbit -- either in struggles
   waged by power or in struggles in which power was disputed; yet power's
   irreversible time was now shared to an unlimited degree within the context of
   the general unity that the oriented time of the Christian era ensured. This
   was a world of armed faith in which the activity of the masters revolved
   around fealty and around challenges to fealty owed. Under the feudal regime
   born of the coming together of "the martial organization of the army during
   the actual conquest" and "the action of the productive forces found in the
   conquered countries" (The German Ideology) -- and among the factors
   responsible for organizing those productive forces must be included their
   religious language -- under this regime social domination was divided up
   between the Church on the one hand and State power on the other, the latter
   being further broken down in accordance with the complex relations of
   suzerainty and vassalage characteristic, respectively, of rural landed
   property and urban communes. This diversification of possible historical life
   reflected the gradual emergence, following the collapse of the great official
   enterprise of this world, namely the Crusades, of the period's unseen
   contribution: a society carried along in its unconscious depths by
   irreversible time, the time directly experienced by the bourgeoisie in the
   production of commodities, the founding and expansion of the towns, the
   commercial discovery of the planet -- in a word, the practical
   experimentation that obliterated any mythical organization of the cosmos once
   and for all. 

138 
   As the Middle Ages came to an end, 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 could still balance history; and
   for this melancholy all earthly things were inevitably embarked on the path
   of corruption. The great European peasant revolts were likewise a response to
   history -- a history that was wresting the peasantry from the patriarchal
   slumber thitherto guaranteed by the feudal order. This was the moment when a
   millenarian utopianism aspiring to build heaven on earth brought back to the
   forefront an idea that had been at the origin of semi-historical religion,
   when the early Christian communities, like the Judaic messianism from which
   they sprang, responded to the troubles and misfortunes of their time by
   announcing the imminent realization of God's Kingdom, and so added an element
   of disquiet and subversion to ancient society. The Christianity that later
   shared in imperial power denounced whatever remained of this hope as mere
   superstition: this is the meaning of the Augustinian pronouncement -- the
   archetype of all the satisfecits of modern ideology -- according to which the
   established Church was itself, and had long been, that self-same hoped-for
   kingdom. The social revolt of the millenarian peasantry naturally defined
   itself as an attempt to overthrow the Church. Millenarianism unfolded,
   however, in a historical world -- not in the realm of myth. So, contrary to
   what Norman Cohn believes he has demonstrated in The Pursuit of the
   Millennium, modern revolutionary hopes are not an irrational sequel to the
   religious passion of millenarianism. The exact opposite is true:
   millenarianism, the expression of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the
   language of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary
   tendency, lacking only the consciousness of being historical and nothing
   more. The millenarians were doomed to defeat because they could not recognize
   revolution as their own handiwork. The fact that they made their action
   conditional upon an external sign of God's will was a translation onto the
   level of thought of the tendency of insurgent peasants to follow outside
   leaders. The peasant class could achieve a clear consciousness neither of the
   workings of society nor of the way to conduct its own struggle, and it was
   because it lacked these prerequisites of unity in its action and
   consciousness that the peasantry formulated its project and waged its wars
   according to the imagery of an earthly paradise. 

139 
   The Renaissance embodied the new form of possession of historical life.
   Seeking its heritage and its juridical basis in Antiquity, it was the bearer
   of a joyous break with eternity. The irreversible time of the Renaissance was
   that of an infinite accumulation of knowledge, while the historical
   consciousness generated by the experience of democratic communities, as of
   the effects of those forces that had brought on their ruin, was now, with
   Machiavelli, able to resume its reflection upon secular power, and say the
   unsayable about the State. In the exuberant life of the Italian cities, in
   the arts of festival, life came to recognize itself as the enjoyment of the
   passing of time. But this enjoyment of transience would turn out to be
   transient itself. The song of Lorenzo de' Medici, which Burckhardt considered
   "the very spirit of the Renaissance," is the eulogy delivered upon itself by
   this fragile historical feast: "Quant' ? bella giovinezza / Che si fugge
   tuttavia." 

140 
   The tireless pursuit of a monopoly of historical life by the
   absolute-monarchist State, a transitional form along the way to complete
   domination by the bourgeois class, clearly illuminates the highest expression
   of the bourgeoisie's new irreversible time. The time with which the
   bourgeoisie was inextricably bound up was labor-time, now at last emancipated
   from the cyclical realm. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, work became that
   work which transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie was the first
   ruling class for which labor was a value. By abolishing all social privilege,
   and by recognizing no value unrelated to the exploitation of labor, the
   bourgeoisie effectively conflated its own value qua ruling class with labor,
   and made the progress of labor the only measure of its own progress. The
   class that accumulated commodities and capital continually modified nature by
   modifying labor itself -- by unleashing labor's productivity. All social life
   was by this time concentrated in the ornamented poverty of the Court -- in
   the chintzy trappings of a bleak State administration whose apex was the
   "profession of king"; and all individual historical freedom had had to
   consent to this sacrifice. The free play of the feudal lords' irreversible
   time had exhausted itself in their last, lost battles: in the Fronde, or in
   the Scots' uprising in support of Charles Edward. The world had a new
   foundation. 

141 
   The victory of the bourgeoisie was the victory of a profoundly historical
   time -- the time corresponding to the economic form of production, which
   transformed society permanently, and from top to bottom. So long as
   agriculture was the chief type of labor, cyclical time retained its deep-down
   hold over society and tended to nourish those combined forces of tradition
   which slowed down the movement of history. But the irreversible time of the
   bourgeois economic revolution eliminated all such vestiges throughout the
   world. History, which had hitherto appeared to express nothing more than the
   activity of individual members of the ruling class, and had thus been
   conceived of as a chronology of events, was now perceived in its general
   movement -- an inexorable movement that crushed individuals before it. By
   discovering its basis in political economy, history became aware of the
   existence of what had been its unconscious. This unconscious, however,
   continued to exist as such -- and history still could not draw it out into
   the full light of day. This blind prehistory, a new fatality that no one
   controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized. 

142 
   Though ever-present in society's depths, history tended to be invisible at
   its surface. The triumph of irreversible time was also its metamorphosis into
   the time of things, because the weapon that had ensured its victory was,
   precisely, the mass production of objects in accordance with the laws of the
   commodity. The main product that economic development transformed from a
   luxurious rarity to a commonly consumed item was thus history itself -- but
   only in the form of the history of that abstract movement which dominated any
   qualitative use of life. Whereas the cyclical time of an earlier era had
   supported an ever-increasing measure of historical time lived by individuals
   and groups, irreversible time's reign over production would tend socially to
   eliminate all such lived time. 

143 
   So the bourgeoisie unveiled irreversible historical time and imposed it on
   society only to deprive society of its use. Once there was history, but
   "there is no longer any history" -- because the class of owners of the
   economy, who cannot break with economic history, must repress any other use
   of irreversible time as representing an immediate threat to itself. The
   ruling class, made up of specialists in the ownership of things who for that
   very reason are themselves owned by things, is obliged to tie its fate to the
   maintenance of a reified history and to the permanent preservation of a new
   historical immobility. Meanwhile the worker, at the base of society, is for
   the first time not materially estranged from history, for now the
   irreversible is generated from below. By demanding to live the historical
   time that it creates, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable
   core of its revolutionary project; and every attempt to carry this project
   through -- though all up to now have gone down to defeat -- signals a
   possible point of departure for a new historical life. 

144 
   The irreversible time of a bourgeoisie that had just seized power was called
   by its own name, and assigned an absolute origin: Year One of the Republic.
   But the revolutionary ideology of generalized freedom that had served to
   overthrow the last relics of a myth-based ordering of values, along with all
   traditional forms of social organization, was already unable completely to
   conceal the real goal that it had thus draped in Roman costume -- namely,
   generalized freedom of trade. The society of the commodity, soon discovering
   that it must reinstate the passivity which it had to shake to its foundations
   in order to inaugurate its own unchallenged rule, now found that, for its
   purposes, "Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract was
   the most fitting form of religion" (Capital). So the bourgeoisie concluded a
   pact with this religion, an arrangement reflected in its presentation of
   time: the Revolutionary calendar was abandoned and irreversible time was
   returned to the straitjacket of a duly extended Christian Era. 

145 
   The development of capitalism meant the unification of irreversible time on a
   world scale. Universal history became a reality because the entire globe was
   brought under the sway of this time's progression. But a history that is thus
   the same everywhere at once has as yet amounted to nothing more than an
   intrahistorical refusal 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. Unified irreversible time still belongs to the world
   market -- and, by extension, to the world spectacle. 

146 
   The irreversible time of production is first and foremost the measure of
   commodities. The time officially promoted all around the world as the general
   time of society, since it signifies nothing beyond those special interests
   which constitute it, is therefore not general in character, but particular. 


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord