Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 18:03:16 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: [Fwd: The scandal of obligation]


Dear Hugh:

Re: Time

Thanks for your post on #260-265.  I have to confess I read this section
quite differently and in a way that is far more favorable to Lyotard.  I see
him here operating in a way that is similar to Benjamin in “The Storyteller”
and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.  Both writers
are lamenting the decline of traditional forms of social organization, while
they look to new political possibilities based on the contemporary changes
taking place.  With Benjamin it was the decline of storytelling and the loss
of aura.  With Lyotard it is the end of narrative (too many sound bites) and
the obliteration of culture (too much time required).

I don’t think it is possible to maintain that Lyotard failed to foresee the
instantaneous transfer of information or that his insight is dated because he
didn’t anticipate the eighties. On the contrary, he prophesizes exactly this
development in the Postmodern Condition.  What is key to his insight,
however, is that this new development he calls the postmodern changes the way
the legitimentation game is played.   Capitalism no longer need tie itself to
metanarratives of emancipation.   It no longer constitutes itself as
universal history.  Instead it merely constitutes itself as a world market.
 (see #255).

With this comes the new relationship to government and the media.  These now
become simply the continuation of corporate public relations by other means
(to paraphrase Clausewitz).  A certain cynicism prevails.  The spectacle of
scandal, hipness, cool, and frivolity displaces the previous need to promote
ideology.  (The hipster as young reactionary- see #262) Any aspect of revolt,
from Dilbert to William Burroughs, becomes easily assimilated.  The central
genius of postmodern capitalism is  to process dissent and repackage it as a
commodity.   If you’re concerned about the environment, eat lunch at the
RainForest Cafe.   Buy a tee shirt and teach the world.

This exploitation extends to time as well.  In fact the commodification of
temporality is, I would argue, the chief characteristic of postmodern
capitalism.  It is the site of its new colonialism.  This takes two forms
which can be best illustrated as rhetorical questions.  Why in America do
more members of the household need to work longer hours for progressively
less pay?  Why are leisure activities increasingly mallified into the
Disneyfication of everything?  

If you want to have soul, buy the book.  If you want to be happy, attend the
seminar.  And work overtime to pay for it all.  

The elite owns the future - It is measured in discounted present value cash
flows. The Apocalyse as swamp land.  Time becomes  money to a much greater
extent than anyone ever realized before.  The rest of us must mortgage our
present in order to gain the future. We have nothing but our time to give.
(see #247)  The name of the gain is social control. The concentration and
consolidation of power.    

The critical question today concerns this politics of temporality; the need
to give up our time simply in order to live.  The devil’s wager.  A valid
politics would teach we cannot control our bodies until we can control our
time.  Lyotard recognizes this fact.  His reading dossier at the start of The
Differend parodies our need for it.  “Culture, as a consumer of time, ought
to be eliminated.” (#260)  That is what capitalism says. There is no time
left to think. That is exactly the corporate strategy. In the beginning there
was history, in the end the commodity.  The true Hegelian end-of-history.
Culture, community, narrative and traditional forms are obsolete to the
extent they fail to participate in this potlatch fetish of the commodities.
  “Free time” has become an anachronism.

That is why I am incredulous of the possibility of civil government or
voter-workers as sites of resistance.  However, the goal of reclaiming time
beyond corporate control; beyond work and “leisure”; time without any
redeeming characteristics; our time; that is the politics of today.  To the
extent that workers, temps, the underemployed, workfare slaves, the
chronically unemployed, the nomads, artists, gypsies, homeless and all the
rest of us organize around these differends, occurrences, the IS IT HAPPENING
(#263), the possibilities still exist to disrupt the postmodern capitalist
hegemony.  We must refuse the bait whereby capitalism limits the supply of
meaningless work and makes us fight against each other so that one can
survive while the other starves.  The zero-sum game of competitive
disadvantage.  Work must no longer exist as a gated community.

We need to act soon, however, because we are all running out of time.