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Title: What Time Is It? Author: Bob Brubaker Date: 1983, Summer Language: en Topics: Civilization, anti-technology, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #313 Source: Fifth Estate #313, Summer, 1983, Volume 18, Number 2, page 6. Retrieved February 22, 2020 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/313-summer-1983/what-time-is-it/
In response to “Beginning of Time, End of Time,” FE #313, Summer, 1983.
The question of time and its relationship to domination is central to
understanding our captivity. John’s article attempts to come to grips
with this very difficult subject; while what follows is often critical
of his attempt, I do not want to slight its radical intent or the hard
work he put into it. Nor should these criticisms obscure the fact that
it is an important introduction- to the question of time: it helps us to
see our perception of time as unnatural, as something imposed upon us,
as a force to be overthrown if we are to liberate ourselves.
John’s original manuscript contained 109 footnotes, comprising an
extensive reading list on the subject. I’m sorry that space limitations
and our unwillingness to typeset the footnotes will prevent readers from
having ready access to his sources. These sources stimulated me to do my
own reading on the subject; and if from that reading (and my own
reflections) I conclude that there are some fundamental problems with
John’s argument, I nevertheless acknowledge that he provides an opening
to what promises to be a fruitful dialogue.
While it might seem trivial to begin by complaining about John’s
extensive use of quotations, I think it reveals something more
significant than a hesitant or unsure writing style. Many of us had the
same impression upon reading the article: we think it would have been
more interesting if he had said more things in his own words; but more
importantly, some of us feel that he uses quotes in ways that do not
strengthen his argument. Some of these quotes seem tangential to the
main argument. Others seem to have different meanings than what he
attributes to them, or are torn from their contexts, defeating
understanding. This suggests to me that John is unsure about what he is
trying to say, or unaware of some of the implications of his arguments.
Perhaps we should treat his argument as a suggestive, impressionistic
effort rather than as “something done.”
One of John’s central contentions is that “alienation begins to appear
in the shape of time.” He believes that a sense of time gradually
emerges out of “no-time”, the primordial unity of hunter-gatherer life.
Although it is unclear to me how this sense of time “intrudes upon the
human psyche,” (at one point John says a sense of time emerges in early
infancy) it’s consequence is said to be anxiety and separation—the
genesis of alienation. Once people acquire a sense of time, anxiety
drives them to “spatialization,” the subduing and control of space, as a
kind of compensation. John calls the “large growth of human numbers” the
“first spatialization”; he believes it responsible for the progressive
breakdown of hunter-gatherer life and the emergence of the “division of
labor and other ensuing separations.” Spatialization is the high road to
domination, setting in motion a process which culminates in fixed
property, cities, and the state. Each new surge of spatialization leads
to a further refinement in the sense of time, until the emergence of
linear time and history, a “radical departure.” From which point on we
can say that time, alienation, and domination have become one in their
dominion over the human being.
It seems to me that the sticking point in this argument is what caused a
sense of time to emerge in the first place. As in all attempts to
account for the origins of alienation or domination, it is difficult
indeed to answer the question John poses: who brought the curse?
It is unclear to me how John deals with this question. He seems to
believe that population growth gradually brought forth social changes
which resulted in domination. But if, as he says, the large growth of
human numbers is “the first spatialization,” and spatialization is a
compensation for a sense of time, then a sense of time (and the origins
of alienation) must have preceded the increase in population. This leads
to the dismal conclusion that, once having acquired a sense of time,
people tried deliberately or otherwise to increase their numbers in
order to ameliorate their sense of deprivation. Reproduction leads to
domination. Furthermore, we still haven’t located the origin, or cause,
of the emergence of time. Perhaps the answer is to be found later in the
article, where John says alienation in time can be traced to early
infancy. What, then, is there which distinguishes this position from the
pessimistic “bourgeois” conclusion that “domination was the natural
outcome of population pressures”; or from the even more pessimistic
conclusion that alienation has ontological status—that all individuals,
and all cultures, experience time, and hence alienation? The human being
as the “alienated animal.”
Although it is necessary, on the basis of John’s argument, to accept so
dismal a conclusion, we should not be deterred from questioning the
merits of the argument itself. It seems to me unnecessary to accept
John’s equation that a sense of time equals alienation.
I think his linkage of the two is the result of a failure to appreciate
that primitive people have a rich and subtle time-sense. Or we could put
it differently: what John calls “no-time” is identical to the
psychological experience others have called “primordial” or “biological”
time. If he could see how different this primitive time-sense was from
our own abstract, linear, alienated sense of time, then he might be less
inclined to equate alienation with any and all senses of time.
In a sense, John is aware of this distinction among different cultural
perceptions of time, referring to distinctions among kinds and qualities
of time. This is one of the most confusing and exasperating things about
the article: if John wants to make such a sharp distinction between
“no-time” and “alienation in time,” why these qualifications and
discriminations? Doesn’t the delineation of “formal time concepts” or
“official time” imply that an informal, unofficial, “vernacular” sense
of time exists in opposition to it? Likewise, when John writes that
“differences in the interpretation of time constituted a demarcation
line between a state of nature and one of civilization,” is this not
tantamount to saying that people in the state of nature perceive and
interpret some sort of time? What exactly is meant by a “qualitative
sense of time” (which he appears to think is a good thing to have)? And
why does he call the emergence of linear time a “radical departure”—is
he arguing that while other time-senses are alienating, they are much
less so than linear time? How, then, does one conceive of these degrees
of alienation?
These confusions illustrate my earlier remark that John’s copious use of
quotes often does his argument no good. Or perhaps we can now state the
reverse: John’s argument is not consistent with the examples he adduces
to support it. These examples, in fact, point to a completely different
interpretation of time.
When John first sent us the article, I wrote to him about some problems
I had with his concept of “no’ time.” In response, he sent me a quote
from the book Political Philosophy and Time by John G. Gunnell, who
contends that primitive people have neither the perception nor the
conception of time. Following Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer, Gunnell
argues that the primary human attribute is symbolization: “For man
reality is what is presented to him in his symbols, and there is no
penetrating beyond symbols to a more ultimate datum; the factual world
is given in the symbolic. Man is continually in the process of creating
a virtual reality which forms the boundaries of his activity.”
Gunnell believes that primitive people order experience through the
symbolic form of myth, and that people in history order their experience
by the symbolic form called time. He writes that “time in the myth is
not really time at all”; continuing, “It may seem odd to maintain that
primitive and archaic societies lack a consciousness of time when it can
easily be demonstrated that such societies possess procedures which it
is difficult to designate by any term other than ‘time-reckoning,’ and
the high cultures of the ancient world developed complex and relatively
sophisticated methods and systems for calculating ‘time.’ But although
ancient man engaged in what, in retrospect, may be termed
‘time-reckoning,’ there is no distinction between the ‘time’ of nature,
the ‘time’ of creation, and the ‘time’ of society.”
But while Gunnell argues strenuously that primitive and ancient people
had no experience of time, he makes no claim that time emerges gradually
out of primitive society, leading to domination. In fact, he sees state
society, specifically ancient Egypt, as still existing within the
mythological order. And he argues that “in the ancient world
time-calculation was not primarily a function of an interest in
chronology as such, although a monopoly on this skill contributed to the
power of the kings and priests; it was essentially related to the
elaboration of the myth and served ultimately to bind together the
rhythms of nature and society. Discrete time symbols could not appear
until human existence emerged as a separate order, even in the societies
of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia which possessed the complex social
structures which are normally associated with refined notions of time
and multiple levels of temporal ordering.” For Gunnell, then,
domination, in the form of state society, precedes the emergence of
time. Whatever one thinks of Gunnell’s argument, it is clear it does not
confirm John’s schema in which the emergence of time engenders
domination.
Gunnell’s argument does, however, support John’s conception of
“no-time.” But Gunnell occasionally exhibits the same problem John has
in taking quotes out of context. For instance, he quotes Ernst Cassirer
in the discussion about the timelessness of myth, arguing that (to quote
Cassirer), that in the myth “there is not only an absence of historical
time but ‘no time “as such,” no perpetual duration and no regular
recurrence or succession.’ ” Gunnell ends this quote with a period, but
in the actual text, from Volume 2 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Cassirer follows the word succession with a semicolon. Let’s look at the
larger passage to see what Cassirer is actually saying: “For myth there
is no time ‘as such,’ no perpetual duration and no regular recurrence or
succession; there are only configurations of particular content which in
turn reveal a certain temporal gestalt, a coming and going, a rhythmical
being and becoming. Thus, time as a whole is divided by certain
boundaries akin to musical bars. But at first its ‘beats’ are not
measured or counted but immediately felt….The fact is that long before
the human consciousness forms its first concepts concerning the basic
objective differentiations of number, time, and space, it seems to
acquire the subtlest sensitivity to the peculiar periodicity and rhythm
of human life. Even at the lowest stages of culture, even among
primitive peoples who have barely arrived at the first beginnings of
enumeration and who consequently cannot possibly have any exact
quantitative conception of temporal relations, we often find this
subjective feeling for the living dynamic of the temporal process
developed in astonishing subtlety and precision….Thus we see that for
mythical consciousness and feeling a kind of biological time, a rhythmic
ebb and flow of life, precedes the intuition of a properly cosmic time.”
As we can see, the contextual emphasis of this passage is counter to
Gunnell’s truncated usage of it. The same fault plagues Johns article:
one would never know from his scattershot style of quotation that
Frankfort, Eliade, and Levy-Bruhl each are describing what they consider
to be a sense of time in primitive cultures.
Aside from this, Cassirer’s seems to me a plausible way to describe the
primitive sense of time. Indeed, as Frederick Turner points out in
Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness,
“consciousness of the passage of time is inevitable in deaths, births,
natural disasters, and other phenomenon that willy-nilly record
duration.”
Perhaps one problem with John’s article, although I won’t insist on it,
is that he has what I would call a “naive” conception of primitive,
specifically hunter-gatherer, society. He equates their way of life with
Eden, and history with the Fall. Primitives are seen as living “only in
a now, as we all do when we are having fun.” Neitzsche on the eternity
of pleasure is also summoned to convey John’s impression of
hunter-gatherer life. While all this is suggestive it is probably too
utopian. Perhaps John is so allergic to anything smacking of anxiety, or
conflict, that he perceives as alienation what is only primitive
society’s ingenious ability to mollify its problems. Let me illustrate
what I mean by quoting Meyer Fortes, who is cited by Stanley Diamond in
his book In Search of the Primitive.
Fortes: “I do not mean to imply that everybody is always happy,
contented, and free of care in a primitive society. On the contrary,
there is plenty of evidence that among them, as with us, affability may
conceal hatred and jealousy, friendliness and devotion enjoined by law
and morals may mask enmity, exemplary citizenship may be a way of
compensating for frustration and fears. The important thing is that in
primitive societies there are customary methods of dealing with these
common human problems of emotional adjustment by which they are
externalized, publicly accepted, and given treatment in terms of ritual
beliefs; society takes over the burden which, with us, falls entirely on
the individual. Restored to the esteem of his fellows he is able to take
up with ease the routine of existence which was thrown temporarily off
its course by an emotional upheaval. Behavior that would be the maddest
of fantasies in the individual, or even the worst of vices, becomes
tolerable and sane, in his society, if it is transformed into custom and
woven into the outward and visible fabric of a community’s social life.
This is easy in primitive societies where the boundary between the inner
world of the self and the outer world of the community marks their line
of fusion rather than of separation.”
In my opinion, this passage conveys a much more accurate impression of
primitive society than anything in John’s article. And it raises yet
another question about the pessimistic implications of his argument. The
above description is meant to apply to all primitive-societies,
including those which practice agriculture. But according to John,
agricultural societies are already hopelessly mired in time and
alienation. When Diamond, or Fortes, or Pierre Clastres refer to
primitive society, they are assuming an essential continuity between
hunter-gatherer and agricultural communities. Clastres, for one,
explicitly argues that the movement of societies from hunting to
agriculture “appears to have been affected without changing the nature
of those societies in any way.” Perhaps John would consider the above
description of the resolution of conflict in primitive societies to
actually be a betrayal of alienation. If so, this would indicate with
utmost precision the pessimistic connotations of his argument: his
envisioned society would belong not to the earthly plane of existence
but could only be situated in heaven.
By now I have hammered away at virtually the entire scaffolding of
John’s argument. I began by criticizing its pessimistic implications; I
criticized numerous confusions in his usage of the word time; I
questioned his central notion of “no-time”; I questioned whether time in
fact engenders domination; finally, I questioned his “naive” version of
primitive society. But where does this leave me? I have no more answered
the question “Who brought the curse?” than has John. But if this
question is answerable, I believe it is more likely to be found when we
see with utmost clarity what primitive society is and is not.
Related
See “Confronting the Enemy, A response on Time,” FE #314, Fall 1983 (
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/314-fall-1983/confronting-the-enemy/
)