Introduction, Part 2: Project Overview

Below I have posted segments from my recent dissertation proposal, in order to provide a fuller account of the project and its current structure.  While I’ve already begun to plan some significant structural transformations to the project, the following offers a rough blueprint.   

In coming days and weeks, I will post sections from, and reflections upon, the first chapter I have written (I have begun with Chapter 2 on Marx and Capital).  From those more detailed posts, it will become clear to what extent the outline provided below has already begun to transform.

1. The Context: The Problem of Revolutionary Time

My project is a theoretical response to the Occupy movement’s refusals of the existing political-economic system in America, part of a much wider unrest taking place in Spain, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Chile, and elsewhere that shook the globe in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.  These struggles rejected decades of neoliberal deregulation of capital, aggressive privatization of public spaces and services, and transferal of the disastrous social consequences of those practices upon the back of the public.  They have put the concept of “revolution” back into circulation as a radical hope for a popularly enacted economic and political transformation towards a more egalitarian future.^[1]

The events in Egypt, Spain, America, and elsewhere did not simply occur within some ready-made temporal medium, but rather began disruptively rearranging the very frameworks of social, economic, and political temporality in which they were found.  They were practices of “temporalization”: reconfigurations of the relation of the past, present and future via disruptions of the material-historical processes that establish existing orders of time.[2] Public squares, private buildings, various services, and concepts like “democracy” were partially dislodged from their embeddedness within the system of capitalist production and exchange—which demands that the privately owned “dead labor” of value be constantly reproduced on an ever-increasing scale, and so that a heteronomous material past be constantly reproduced to dominate the living present—and were displaced into trajectories of radical democracy.  The emerging experiments in horizontal political formations were thereby also temporal experiments: reconfigurations of the relation between an inherited, heteronomous past, on the one hand, and on the other, the present and future ruled by it.  These experiments resulted in a partial rupture in the precise rhythms of politics and economics.  In Dilworth Plaza, Zuccotti Park, Tahrir Square and elsewhere, in which protesters set up ad hoc, 24 hour prefigurative camps, as well as in direct actions that overtook streets, bridges, and ports, the distinction between the time of work and the time of recreation was disrupted in the festival atmosphere of protest.  Likewise, the instant of voting and the interim of being ruled, central to “democratic” politics today, overlapped almost completely in ongoing practices of direct democracy.

In this way, understanding the nature and effectiveness of the revolutionary movements emerging in the last few years, as well as their relation to existing economic and political systems, requires an account of their dynamic temporality.  Yet most attempts^[3] to analyze these recent events have immediately situated them within pre-established historical frameworks.  For instance, Žižek presents Occupy as a new iteration of “communism” (broadly construed) sparked by and belonging to an “inexorable” capitalist process of self-disintegration.  Occupy is thereby conceptualized within the framework of existing historical trends.  Butler too subsumes Occupy within a ready-made historical frame—it is, for her, primarily a response to the unfolding socio-economic process of “precaritization.”^[4]

The Marxist heritage offers some of the most important conceptual tools by which to understand revolution, but it largely lacks a theory of revolutionary time with which to analyze recent struggles.  On the one hand—and I will expand on this point below—Marx’s Capital offers a tacit but extensive analysis of the historical production of a quantitative “labor-time” central to capitalist production and to which the worker must be subsumed.  On the other, Marx’s concept of revolutionary temporality is dominated by the unexamined assumption that socio-economic time is a univocal structure.  In other words, despite the fact that in Marx and Engels’ work the temporality of the capitalist totality contains many distinct but interlocking rhythms of production, exchange, circulation, and consumption, as well as multiple delays (as Marx argues in volume two of Capital), there is still only a single time at work: socially necessary labor time.  More than this, capital’s univocal time is assumed to be a linear, a priori structure of history.  Marx analyzes the revolutionary inauguration of a new mode of production as a development growing naturally out of the laws of value (the “burst[ing] asunder” of the capitalist “integument”).^[5]  This “bursting” of capitalism is presented as a result of the inner contradictions of the accumulation of surplus value; and yet it is also recognized (in a way consistent with most of Marx and Engels’ work after 1843, with at least one notable exception) as part of the natural movement of social history itself, by which the past is “shed” for the sake of the future.

In Marx’s concept of revolution, the specific form of time inhering within the capitalist processes from which revolution emerges is made indistinguishable from an a priori time of history.  Within such a framework, the question of revolutionary time cannot be asked, since revolution can have no time of its own, but rather shares in an uncreated time.  The time of capital out of which revolution emergesis made indistinguishable from time as such; revolution is simply another event within the unfolding of that time.  This framework has by and large dominated Marxist thought about revolutionary temporality.  Its legacy can perhaps be glimpsed in the paucity of sustained engagements with the issue of revolutionary time; it is as though the suppression of the issue by Marx and Engels has had a sustained effect upon the Marxist tradition.  Where the concept of revolutionary time has become an explicit object of sustained study—as in Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital and Negri’s Time for Revolution—the issue often remains occluded.^[6] On the one hand, Althusser and Balibar’s analysis of time relies upon a static temporal schema that excludes the possible emergence of altogether new temporal logics.  On the other hand, Negri’s conception of capitalist time imposes upon temporality an a priori linearity as well as a rigid, binary structure.  Althusser, Balibar, and Negri thereby carry on (though in distinct modes) the tendency to analyze revolution within theoretical frameworks that shut down the possibility of grasping the revolutionary reconfiguration of temporality.

2. Chapter Outline

Chapter One

The first chapter of my project will lay out the historical-material conditions out of which recent revolutionary struggles have emerged, as well as the problem of revolutionary time in the present and the need to develop concepts of that time with which to break through the inability of Marxism to analyze revolutionary temporality—tasks towards which I have begun to gesture above.

Chapter Two

To begin developing those concepts I will turn, in my second chapter, to certain productive inconsistencies in the work of Marx and Engels that can be useful for this project.  While Marx and Engels tend to understand revolution in terms of an aprioristic and univocal temporality, their work is far from homogeneous on the issue of time.  This is clearest in the first volume of Marx’s Capital.  “Part One” of that text argues that commodity production necessarily presupposes the generation of an abstract, quantitative labor-time to which all quality must be subordinated.  One can push this argument beyond Marx by noting that production therefore requires a subordination of the qualitatively distinct historical temporality of a use-value—its entanglement in diverse rituals, practices, and provenances—to a specifically capitalist labor-time, an idea towards which Marx himself tacitly gestures.[7]  More than this, chapter 10 of Capital, on the struggle over the length of the working day in the 19^th century, offers an account of workers’ resistance against the incorporation of the qualitative times in which they were enmeshed into labor-time—times of sleep and recreation, as well as times of production and exchange surviving from a mode of production predating capitalism.[8]  In this way, Marx offers analyses of capitalist time’s antagonistic multiplicity, seen at the moment of the developing real subsumption of time within capitalist production, as well as resources with which to begin interrogating the antagonistic construction of capitalist time.[9]

Chapter Three

In chapter three I will claim that, within some of Ernst Bloch’s much-neglected major early works, we find an incipient account of the antagonistic production of capitalist and revolutionary time with which to develop Marx and Engels’ isolated insights.  Spirit of Utopia and Traces contain an analysis of commodity production as the installation of the qualitative historical-material world—and the multiple, qualitatively distinct historical temporalities in which it is enmeshed—into homogeneous systems of profit-production.  Capital thereby locks that world into a homogeneous, frozen “past” set over against the present and future, deadening the human capacity to creatively and autonomous shape its world.  Yet Bloch also means to identify survivals of certain elements within that alienated past which are not entirely subordinated to capitalist time and which can, as a result, function as sites of potential disruption to capitalism (Bloch calls those elements remainders of an “expressive exuberance”).[10]  Revolution is thereby understood as a kind of temporalizing “memory”: the antagonistic redeployment of recalcitrant, nearly forgotten elements surviving in capitalism, inaugurating a liberated relation between humanity and its material past.

Bloch most fully expands and develops this account in Heritage of Our Times.  Heritage suggests that capitalism is a non-contemporaneous totality, that is to say, made up of superstructural and infrastructural holdovers from previous modes of production and therefore of multiple historical times (which capital attempts to bend to the time of production and exchange).  The time of capitalism, therefore, is neither univocal nor a priori, but composed of multiple temporalities antagonistically subordinated to a single, dominant time.  The task of Marxist revolutionary politics thereby becomes “robbing the enemy”: the redeployment of elements in which alternative times survive, by which to rupture and reconfigure capitalist time.

Bloch’s work therefore offers the beginnings of an account of revolutionary temporal reconfiguration.  He tacitly understands such reconfiguration in terms of a temporal “misuse,” that is, a redeployment of elements lodged within capital’s alien past, which is aimed at a free and creative reconfiguration of the relation of the material past to the present.  Yet Bloch’s work is also deeply limited for the purposes of this project. Spirit of Utopia and Traces ground their analyses in an ahistorical ontology of historical experience.  Bloch claims that capitalism is simply the expression of a basic tendency of human being to alienate and lose itself in the material world it creates; and revolution is simply the recollection, out of the material past, of scattered traces of the human being’s drive to creative self-alienation.  Heritage, partially escaping this tendency, nevertheless ultimately refers the antagonistic multiplicity of time to an a priori common denominator: the linear unfolding of history. The question of temporal production in capital and revolution is thereby retracted almost as soon as it is asked.

Chapter Four

In chapter four, I will read Walter Benjamin alongside Bloch in order to draw out and emphasize the often-ignored ways Benjamin’s analyses of revolution and time resonate with, diverge from, challenge, and supplement Bloch’s early work.  On the one hand, I will turn to Benjamin’s explicit engagements with revolution in “On the Concept of History,” “Paris: Capital of the 19^th Century (1935),” and “Convolute N”.  Benjamin, with Bloch, frames revolution as a radical political “memory”—for Benjamin, a “dialectical image”—which disruptively and creatively reconfigures historical time to resemble “messianic” time.  Yet Benjamin’s concept of revolutionary memory largely operates without Bloch’s commitment to aprioristic frameworks.  The concept of revolutionary time developed there is quite useful as a result, but it is also limited relative to the needs of this project.  For instance, “On the Concept of History” gestures towards the possibility of a reconfiguration of time in a radical political memory, and it generates a profusion of terms with which to understand such reconfiguration (a “standstill” of time, as well as time’s “explosion” and a “leap” into the past).  But it ultimately lacks a concrete analysis of the generation and structure of the temporality to be ruptured as well as of revolutionary time.

On the other hand, I will turn to two Benjamin texts that do not touch on the theme of revolution.  “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” offers an account of the concrete possibilities for temporal ruptures developing within capitalist production: mass production empties cultural objects of their traditional meanings, Benjamin claims, and so enables radical and liberating reconfigurations of the relation of elements of the past to the present.  “Work of Art” thereby provides a tacit account of the conditions for and mechanisms of a revolutionary temporal “misuse”—redeployments of elements of the past in ways that rearrange the relation of past to present—which both complements and supplements Bloch’s work in Heritage, and on which I will draw to understand revolutionary time.  And in the preface to Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin riffs upon but goes beyond the theme of the multiplicity of times embedded in capital’s products found at the beginning of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia.  Benjamin offers an understanding of historical phenomena as constituted at the intersection of multiple historical trajectories, an idea useful for developing a concept of capital’s products as “eddies” of contradictory times.

Chapter Five (a) 

The last chapter of the dissertation will tentatively construct a concept of revolutionary time out of insights identified in Marx, Bloch, and Benjamin for the purpose of analyzing temporal reconfigurations in recent struggles.  To begin that task, I will note that developing a concept of revolutionary time first requires a break with the understanding of capitalist time as univocal and aprioristic, a limiting presupposition inherited by Marxism.  To perform that break I will generate the hypothesis—out of the neglected elements gathered from the first volume of Capital and from Bloch and Benjamin’s work—that capitalist temporality constitutes an antagonistic temporal multiplicity, a subordination of multiple, qualitative historical temporalities to a dominant, quantitative labor-time.[11]  This hypothesis must be articulated in relation to recent developments of capitalist production and exchange and their effect on capitalist temporality.  It must also be articulated in conversation with the revolutionary struggles of our present.  This hypothesis makes it possible to recognize in recent upheavals an antagonistic mobilization of subordinated, surviving temporalities by means of communal redeployments of elements of the commodified capitalist world (public spaces, private buildings, various public services, and so on)—and it thereby offers possibilities for understanding revolutionary temporality precluded in the conceptual framework inherited from Marx and Engels.

Bloch’s early work, alongside the key Benjamin texts I have mentioned, contains a conceptual tool with which to begin analyzing the redeployment of elements lodged in capital’s commodified world which lies at the heart of recent revolutionary temporal reconfigurations.  The two authors tacitly frame radical temporal disruption as a “misuse,” or a mobilization of recalcitrant elements from the past in ways that rupture the capitalist present in which they are ensconced.  But that concept, which remains rather vague and quasi-mystical for the purposes of this project, must be developed beyond Bloch and Benjamin through conversation with struggles developing in the last few years.  In this project, such temporalizing “misuse” will be understood[12], through interrogation of recent revolutionary activity and its precursors in the last two decades, as a concrete practice of liberating elements of the commodified world for a free, common use.  While there is not enough time to develop the point here, I will ultimately argue that such a practice disrupts capital’s generation and circulation of value by mobilizing the surviving, subordinated, qualitative times presupposed in its products for the construction of a festival-like temporality irreducible to, and ranged against, the time of capital.[13]  “Misuse” ruptures the oppressive relation of an alienated past to the present and future (a relation prevailing in capitalism) by means of the construction of that alternative time, opening up possibilities of further free and communal temporal reconfigurations.[14]

Chapter Five (b)

In the final part of the dissertation I will claim that the development of a concept of revolutionary temporality requires a methodology capable of grasping revolution’s temporal innovations as they develop at the intersection of the antagonistic times of capital.  Such a method must interrogate academic philosophical practice’s own embeddedness within the capitalist production of time in order to thematize the tension between theory and revolutionary practices.  On the one hand, I will argue that, due to theory’s place in the division of labor (its separation from society’s production), it tends to view its objects as established “facts” to which ready-made theoretical schemata are then to be applied—and so tends to view its world within a fixed temporal frame.[15]  On the other hand, I will suggest that theoretical practice tends to constantly reproduce a set of heteronomous traditions and structures set over against the present, thereby functioning as a moment in the alienating reproduction of the capitalist totality and threatening to capture the concept of revolution within the temporal framework of that reproduction.[16]  The concept of revolution is therefore in danger of having its challenge to existing temporalities negated by theoretical incorporation into existing temporal frameworks.  The last half of chapter five will therefore ask in what way one can analyze revolutionary time without imposing heteronomous times upon it.