Non-Time
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” — Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher
If you’ve been keeping up with my previous blog posts, you may have realized that many of them have to do with Time. In all honesty, the idea of time is one that I find particularly pressing. In “Acid-Communism: The Struggle for Free Time,” I mention how the pursuit of free time itself can be characterized as a class struggle. Free time is produced through technological innovation that liberates individuals from time spent doing labor.
The best way to make sense of Non-Time is by using Mark Fisher’s notion of canceled futures and Hauntology. “Ghosts of My Life” is a development in many ways to Fisher’s Capitalist Realism notion. Capitalist Realism can be understood as the lack of any possibility of a socio-economic system or arrangement outside of the Neoliberal-Capitalist Regime we find ourselves in today.
The rise of Neoliberalism due to the fall of the Soviet Union as world power led to what could be called “The End of Ideology.” It led to Francis Fukuyama writing, “The End of History and The Last Man.” This work’s central thesis is not that there will no longer be “events” in the future. Instead, it argues that liberal democracies will ultimately be found consistently favorable than any other form of socio-political arrangement.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
This notion of the inescapability of Neoliberal-Capitalist Democracies is the central point behind Capitalist Realism. This pervasive atmosphere creates a constraint on cultural production by limiting culture to the act of maximizing profitability.
“In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought, and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain in precisely the one that Fredric Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum’.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
In a recent video by Jonas Čeika — CCK Philosophy, CCK demonstrates how an ideological libertarian might argue that the best products are always those which automatically rise to the top in an open market. This is because free markets rely on competition, and by this competition, the best of the best commodities will rise to the top. The video illustrates that this is far from the truth and part of this has to do with the notion of brand familiarity. When a product becomes extremely popular, it is no longer purchased for its direct quality or utility, but instead, it is purchased for what it signifies. This means this because capitalism already has its internal critique assimilated into it. There is nothing outside of Capitalism since capitalism has already subsumed the opposition as something marketable. Thus the grand narrative of “progress” is constantly repurposed or shifted to perpetuate one thing: Capital. In this sense, we are already trapped in Capitalist Realism.
Thus, the notion of a novelty and, by extension, the future outside of Capitalism is completely lost or has become inaccessible to most people. On top of this, you have a constant compression of time due to technological acceleration due to capital aggregation, as explained in Memetic-Current. This accrument of capital intensifies the signifying chains we use to make sense of the world, which directly ties to how we perceive time, but just because it appears like we are progressing towards something doesn’t mean we are. Time is perceived as an intensity, which means that its intensive magnitude is directly related to the material conditions and not the actual narrative or linear progressivity claim. This is what I find so compelling of Accelerationist lines of thinking in both Z/Acc and U/acc, which are both ways of describing Acceleration through non-standard linear interpretations of time, but What does this mean?
The shift into so-called Post-Fordism — with globalization, ubiquitous computerization, and the casualization of labour — resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
To summarize poorly, it means that the feeling of historical progression is not based on a calendar telling us we are moving through time. Still, instead, that time and history are contingent on our understanding of our cultural and social conditions. The self-referential logic of “late capitalism” is a hyper-modernity symptom, which dismantles the metanarrative of linear progress while simultaneously upholding it.
In the last article titled “Non-Space,” I bring up The Weird and The Eerie as conceptual tools to make sense, and in some way, pierce the veil that Capitalist Realism engulfs us in. If we can make sense of the excess waste of these liminal spaces or “non-spaces” as byproducts of Capitalist Realism, then cultural stagnation can be understood as a byproduct as well, in other words, as Non-Time.
This is what I love about Mark Fishers Spinozism. The weird and the eerie in this case would have material or extended modes, but simultaneously, these Non-spaces have modes in thought as ideas of Non-Time, Hauntology being the prime example. That’s why to me, The Weird and The Eerie was an attempt by Fisher to properly provide a Metaphysics to both Capitalist Realism and Hauntology, both of which are perfect examples of these “ontological modes of being” as Fisher defined them.
This doesn’t mean we should be left with despair; on the contrary, we must affirm a vitalism of contingent possibilities. Suppose Acid Communism is an empty signifier or a floating signifier to use CCK Philosophys term or a Semiotic Compression to use my own. In that case, it is not because this term is so vague it can mean anything. Instead, we need to understand that a change in how people think and feel, a change brought upon by the affects, can lead to the production of post-capitalist desire, and therefore radical change. This is what Acid Communism should aim at.
I’ll end this post with a quote,
“[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. … [E]emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
