by Guy Debord
Chapter 5 "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, "the negative being who is only to the extent that he suppresses
Being," is identical to time. Man's appropriation of his own nature is
at the same time his grasp of the unfolding of the universe. "History is
itself a real part of natural history, of the transformation of
nature into man" (Marx). Inversely, this "natural history" has no actual
existence other than through the process of human history, the only part
which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose
sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery
of the universe. History has always existed, but not always in a 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 manifests itself and becomes true within historical consciousness.
126
Properly historical movement, although still hidden, begins in the slow
and intangible formation of the "real nature of man," this "nature born
within human history--within the generating action of human society," but
even though that society developed a technology and a language and is already
a product of its own history, it is conscious only of a perpetual present.
There, all knowledge, confined within the memory of the oldest, is always
carried by the living. Neither death nor procreation is grasped
as a law of time. Time remains immobile, like an enclosed space. A more
complex society which finally becomes conscious of time devotes itself
to negating it because it sees in time not what passes, but only what returns.
A static society organizes time in terms of its immediate experience of
nature, on the model of cyclical time.
127
Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic populations because
they find the same conditions repeated at every moment of their journey:
Hegel notes that "the wandering of nomads is only formal because it is
limited to uniform spaces." The society which, by fixing itself in place
locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized places, thus
finds itself enclosed inside this localization. The temporal return to
similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the
repetition of a series of gestures. The transition from pastoral nomadism
to sedentary agriculture is the end of the lazy liberty without content,
the beg inning of labor. The agrarian mode of production in general, dominated
by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical
time. Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here
on earth. Myth is the unitary construction of the thought which guarantees
the entire cosmic order surrounding the order which this society has in
fact already realized within its frontiers.
128
The social appropriation of time, the production of man by human labor,
develops within a society divided into classes. The power which constituted
itself above the penury of the society of cyclical time, the class which
organizes the social labor and appropriates the limited surplus value,
simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus value of its organization
of social time: it possesses for itself alone the irreversible time of
the living. The wealth that can be concentrated in the realm of power and
materially used up in sumptuous feasts is also used up as a squandering
of historical time at the surface of society. The owners of historical
surplus value possess the knowledge and the enjoyment of lived events.
Separated from the collective organization of time which predominates with
the repetitive production at the base of social life, this time flows above
its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war, when the
masters of the cyclical society travel through their personal histories,
and it is also the time which appears in confrontations with foreign communities,
in the derangement of the unchangeable order of the society. History then
passes before men as an alien factor, as that which they never wanted and
against which they thought themselves protected. But by way of this detour
returns the human negative anxiety which had been at the very origin
of the entire development that had fallen asleep.
129
Cyclical time in itself is time without conflict. But conflict is installed
within this infancy of time: history first struggles to be history in the
practical activity of masters. This history superficially creates the irreversible;
its movement constitutes precisely the time it uses up within the interior
of the inexhaustible time of cyclical society.
130
"Frozen societies" are those which slowed down their historical activity
to the limit and maintained in constant equilibrium their opposition to
the natural and human environment as well as their internal oppositions.
If the extreme diversity of institutions established for this purpose demonstrates
the flexibility of the self-creation of human nature, this demonstration
becomes obvious only for the external observer, for the anthropologist
who returns from historical time. In each of these societies a definitive
structuring excluded change. Absolute conformism in existing social practices.
with which all human possibilities are identified for all time, has no
external limit other than the fear of falling back into formless animality.
Here, in order to remain human, men must remain the same.
131
The birth of political power which seems to be related to the last great
technological revolutions (like iron smelting), at the threshold of a period
which would not experience profound shocks until the appearance of industry,
also marks the moment when kinship ties begin to dissolve. From then on,
the succession of generations leaves the sphere of pure cyclical nature
in order to become an event-oriented succession of powers. Irreversible
time is now the time of those who rule, and dynasties are its first measure.
Writing is its weapon. In writing, language attains its complete independent
reality as mediation between consciousnesses. But this independence is
identical to the general independence of separate power as the mediation
which constitutes society. With writing there appears a consciousness which
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 and also
the instrument that preserves the voluntaristic progression of this time
from its predecessor, since this orientation of time collapses with the
fall of every specific power and returns to the indifferent oblivion of
cyclical time, the only time known to peasant masses who, during the collapse
of empires and their chronologies, never change. The owners of history
have given time a meaning: a direction which is also a significance.
But this history deploys itself and succumbs separately, leaving the underlying
society unchanged precisely because this history remains separated from
the common reality. This is why we reduce the history of Oriental empires
to the history of religions: the chronologies which have fallen to ruins
left no more than the apparently autonomous history of the illusions which
enveloped them. The masters who make history their private property,
under the protection of myth, possess first of all a private ownership
of the mode of illusion: in China and Egypt they long held a monopoly over
the immortality of the soul, just as their famous early dynasties are imaginary
arrangements of the past. But the masters' possession of illusion is at
that moment the only possible possession of a common history and of their
own history. The growth of their real historical power goes together with
a popularization of the possession of myth and illusion. All this flows
from the simple fact that, to the extent that the masters took it upon
themselves to guarantee the permanence of cyclical time mythically, as
in the seasonal rites of Chinese emperors, they themselves achieved a relative
liberation from cyclical time.
133
The dry unexplained chronology of divine power speaking to its servants,
which wants to be understood only as the earthly execution of the commandments
of myth, can be surmounted and become conscious history; this requires
that real participation in history be lived by extended groups. Out of
this practical communication among those who recognized each other
as possessors of a singular present, who experienced the qualitative richness
of events as their activity and as the place where they lived--their epoch--arises
the general language of historical communication. Those for whom irreversible
time has existed discover within it the memorable as well as the
menace of forgetting: "Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents
the results of his study, so that time may not abolish the works of men
...
134
Reasoning about history is inseparably reasoning about power. Greece
was the moment when power and its change were discussed and understood,
the democracy of the masters of society. Greek conditions were the
inverse of the conditions known to the despotic State, where power settles
its accounts only with itself within the inaccessible obscurity of its
densest point: through palace revolution, which is placed beyond
the pale of discussion by success or failure alike. However, the power
shared among the Greek communities existed only with the expenditure
of a social life whose production remained separate and static within the
servile class. Only those who do not work live. In the division among the
Greek communities, and in the struggle to exploit foreign cities, the principle
of separation which internally grounded each of them was externalized.
Greece, which had dreamed of universal history, did not succeed in unifying
itself in the face of invasion--or even in unifying the calendars of its
independent cities. In Greece historical time became conscious, but not
yet conscious of itself.
135
After the disappearance of the locally favorable conditions known to the
Greek communities, the regression of western historical thought was not
accompanied by a rehabilitation of ancient mythic organizations. Out of
the confrontations of the Mediterranean populations, out of the formation
and collapse of the Roman State, appeared semi-historical religions
which became fundamental factors in the new consciousness of time, and
in the new armor of separate power.
136
The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history,
between cyclical time which still dominated production and irreversible
time where populations clash and regroup. The religions which grew out
of Judaism are abstract universal acknowledgements of irreversible time
which is democratized, opened to all, but in the realm of illusion. Time
is totally oriented toward a single final event: "The Kingdom of God is
at hand." These religions arose on the soil of history, and established
themselves there. But there they still preserve themselves in radical opposition
to history. Semi-historical religion establishes a qualitative point of
departure in time (the birth of Christ, the flight of Mohammed), but its
irreversible time--introducing real accumulation which in Islam can take
the form of a conquest, or in Reformation Christianity the form of increased
capital is actually inverted in religious thought and becomes a countdown:
the hope of access to the genuine other world before time runs out, the
expectation of the last Judgment. Eternity came out of cyclical time and
is beyond it. Eternity is the element which holds back the irreversibility
of time, suppressing history within history itself by placing itself on
the other side of irreversible time as a pure punctual element to which
cyclical time returned and abolished itself. Bossuet will still say: "And
by means of the time that passes we enter into the eternity which does
not pass."
137
The Middle Ages, this incomplete mythical world whose perfection lay outside
it, is the moment when cyclical time, which still regulates the greater
part of production, is really chewed away by history. A certain irreversible
temporality is recognized individually in everyone, in the succession of
stages of life, in the consideration of life as a journey, a passage
with no return through a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim
is the man who leaves cyclical time and becomes in reality the traveller
that everyone is symbolically. Personal historical life still finds its
fulfillment within the sphere of power, within participation in struggles
led by power and in struggles over disputed power; but the irreversible
time of power is shared to infinity under the general unification of the
oriented time of the Christian era, in a world of armed faith, where
the game of the masters revolves around fidelity and disputes over owed
fidelity. This feudal society, born out of the encounter of "the organizational
structure of the conquering army as it developed during the conquest" with
"the productive forces found in the conquered country" (German Ideology)
and in the organization of these productive forces one must count their
religious language divided the domination of society between the Church
and the state power, in turn subdivided in the complex relations of suzerainty
and vassalage of territorial tenures and urban communes. In this diversity
of possible historical life, the irreversible time which silently carried
off the underlying society, the time lived by the bourgeoisie in the production
of commodities, in the foundation and expansion of cities and in the commercial
discovery of the earth--practical experimentation which forever destroyed
all mythical organization of the cosmos--slowly revealed itself as the
unknown work of this epoch when the great official historical undertaking
of this world collapsed with the Crusades.
138
During the decline of the Middle Ages, the irreversible time which invades
society is experienced by the consciousness attached to the ancient order
in the form of an obsession with death. This is the melancholy of the demise
of a world, the last world where the security of myth still counterpoised
history, and for this melancholy everything worldly moves only toward corruption.
The great revolts of the European peasants are also their attempt to respond
to history--which was violently wrenching the peasants out of the patriarchal
sleep that had guaranteed their feudal tutelage. This millenarian utopia
of achieving heaven on earth revives what was at the origin of semi-historical
religion, when Christian communities which grew out of Judaic messianism
responded to the troubles and unhappiness of the epoch by looking to the
imminent realization of the Kingdom of God and brought a disquieting and
subversive factor into ancient society. When Christianity reached the point
of sharing power within the empire, it exposed what still survived of this
hope as a simple superstition: that is the meaning of the Augustinian affirmation,
archetype of all the satisfecit of modern ideology, according to
which the established Church has already for a long time been this kingdom
one spoke of. The social revolt of the millenarian peasantry defines itself
naturally first of all as a will to destroy the Church. But millenarianism
spreads in the historical world, and not on the terrain of myth. Modern
revolutionary expectations 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, it is millenarianism,
revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the
last time, which is already a modern revolutionary tendency that as yet
lacks the consciousness that it is only historical. The millenarians
had to lose because they could not recognize the revolution as their own
operation. The fact that they waited to act on the basis of an external
sign of God's decision is the translation into thought of the practice
of insurgent peasants following chiefs taken from outside their ranks.
The peasant class could not attain an adequate consciousness of the functioning
of society or of the way to lead its own struggle: because it lacked these
conditions of unity in its action and consciousness, it expressed its project
and led its wars with the imagery of an earthly paradise.
139
The new possession of historical life, the Renaissance, which finds its
past and its legitimacy in Antiquity, carries with it a joyous rupture
with eternity. Its irreversible time is that of the infinite accumulation
of knowledge, and the historical consciousness which grows out of the experience
of democratic communities and of the forces which ruin them will take up.
with Machiavelli, the analysis of desanctified power, saying the unspeakable
about the State. In the exuberant life of the Italian cities, in the art
of the festival, life is experienced as enjoyment of the passage of time.
But this enjoyment of passage is itself a passing enjoyment. The song of
Lorenzo di Medici considered by Burckhardt to be the expression of "the
very spirit of the Renaissance" is the eulogy which this fragile feast
of history pronounces on itself: "How beautiful the spring of life which
vanishes so quickly."
140
The constant movement of monopolization of historical life by the State
of the absolute monarchy, transitional form toward complete domination
by the bourgeois class, brings into clear view the new irreversible time
of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is attached to labor time, which
is liberated for the first time from the cyclical. With the bourgeoisie,
work becomes labor which transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie
is the first ruling class for which labor is a value. And the bourgeoisie
which suppresses all privilege, which recognizes no value that does not
flow from the exploitation of labor, has justly identified with labor its
own value as a dominant class, and has made the progress of labor its own
progress. The class which accumulates commodities and capital continually
modifies nature by modifying labor itself, by unleashing its productivity.
All social life has already been concentrated within the ornamental poverty
of the Court, the tinsel of the cold state administration which culminates
in "the vocation of king"; and all particular historical liberty has had
to consent to its defeat. The liberty of the irreversible temporal game
of the nobles is consumed in their last lost battles, the wars of the Fronde
and the rising of the Scotch for Charles-Edward. The world's foundation
has changed.
141
The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of profoundly historical
time, because this is the time of economic production which transforms
society, continuously and from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production
remains the central activity, the cyclical time which remains at the base
of society nourishes the coalesced forces of tradition which fetter
all movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates
these vestiges on every corner of the globe. History, which until then
had seemed to be only the movement of individuals of the ruling class,
and thus was written as the history of events, is now understood as the
general movement, and in this relentless movement individuals are
sacrificed. This history which discovers its foundation in political economy
now knows of the existence of what had been its unconscious, but this still
cannot be brought to light and remains unconscious. This blind prehistory,
a new fatality dominated by no one, is all that the commodity economy democratized.
142
The history which is present in all the depths of society tends to be lost
at the surface. The triumph of irreversible time is also its metamorphosis
into the time of things, because the weapon of its victory was precisely
the mass production of objects according to the laws of the commodity.
The main product which economic development has transferred from luxurious
scarcity to daily consumption is therefore history, but only in
the form of the history of the abstract movement of things which dominates
all qualitative use of life. While the earlier cyclical time had supported
a growing part of historical time lived by individuals and groups, the
domination of the irreversible time of production tends, socially, to eliminate
this lived time.
143
Thus the bourgeoisie made known to society and imposed on it an irreversible
historical time, but kept its use from society. "There was history, but
there is no more," because the class of owners of the economy, which cannot
break with economic history, is directly threatened by all other
irreversible use of time and must repress it. The ruling class, made up
of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore
a possession of things, must link its fate with the preservation of this
reified history, with the permanence of a new immobility within history.
For the first time the worker, at the base of society, is not materially
a stranger to history, because it is now the base that irreversibly
moves society. In the demand to live the historical time which it
makes, the proletariat finds the simple unforgettable center of its revolutionary
project; and every attempt (thwarted until now) to realize this project
marks a point of possible departure for new historical life.
144
The irreversible time of the bourgeoisie in power at first presented itself
under its own name, as an absolute origin, Year One of the Republic. But
the revolutionary ideology of general freedom which had destroyed the last
remnants of the mythical organization of values and the entire traditional
regulation of society, already made visible the real will which it had
clothed in Roman dress: the freedom of generalized commerce. The
commodity society, now discovering that it needed to reconstruct the passivity
which it had profoundly shaken in order to set up its own pure reign, finds
that "Christianity with its cultus of abstract man . . . is the most fitting
form of religion" (Capital). Thus the bourgeoisie establishes a
compromise with this religion, a compromise which also expresses itself
in the presentation of time: its own calendar abandoned, its irreversible
time returns to unwind within the Christian era whose succession it continues.
145
With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on
a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire
world is gathered under the development of this time. But this history,
which is everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal
within history of history itself. What appears the world over as the
same day is the time of economic production cut up into equal abstract
fragments. Unified irreversible time is the time of the world market
and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle.
146
The irreversible time of production is first of all the measure of commodities.
Therefore the time officially affirmed over the entire expanse of the globe
as the general time of society refers only to the specialized interests
which constitute it and is no more than a particular time.
Chapter
6 Spectacular Time
voxfux