"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.
"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."
More words by Guy Debord from his The Society of the Spectacle, although I agree less with these paragraphs than the last entry I made. I have been trying understand what I think about time and it's relationship to my work over the past while after someone pointed out that one of the principle factors in everything created is the creator's perception of time. This thread of thought can only be grasped when you consider what would change about your work if your perception of time were to change. I know my work would change dramatically. Maybe that is only because my work so dependently works with time. Yet, I don't even understand clearly how I view time.
Time, for me, ultimately doesn't exist. Call me quaint, but I've always believed that time is a referential creation by man which is terribly superficial. It only exists as a counting system which purports to give us a reference point for history. Time and history are two separate entities which are often confused, but must be kept separate. History relates better to memory and symbolic representations than to a numbering system, like time. Sometimes the two cross over: usually in the present tense, which can't actual be measured, calculated or captured which has lead many to claim that it doesn't exist. Time is fictional. Memory and history are put into a different category.
I view memory and history as being a rhizomatous archive which is recategorized and reorganized according to the present experience of memories. In my recent studies, I have been fascinated with how data holds no intrinsic value, but is given value through collection and categorization. Often people talk about how "you can make the numbers speak" in anyway you want. I'm not sure about that, but what I do know is that the "numbers," as they stand, are numbers only. Memory works in the same vein: erratic and shifting, creating new structures in accordance with our contemporary purposes. Last week my professor cited Walter Benjamin that "you can only understand a point in history at some other point in history." I'm bothered by the idea of points in time and "clearly" understanding, but I do think that historical repossession happens all the time. We give meaning to the past, the past does not give us meaning.
Returning to Guy Debord, I don't know if I believe the Marxist concept of wealth-power and it's control over historical time.
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