Cyclical Time Under Contemporary Capitalism, an Analysis of Guy Debord

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Guy Debord starts out this specific analysis by showing that market structures and the production of commodities lays the base for how time operates on a global level. Long gone are the days where certain nations base the calendar off of their religion, and others off of the time of the monarch, we have entered an age where capital has invaded all structures of time in all parts of the world, where every calendar is based off of market production. “The time of production - commodified time - is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract, in which each segment need only demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all the others. It has no reality apart from its exchangeability. Under the social reign of commodified time, ‘time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time.’” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle) This has created what Debord calls “pseudo-cyclical” time which we will dive into here. In this global capitalist market, the very structures of time that were created based off of these market structures have become consumable commodities themselves. “This pseudo-cyclical time is in fact merely a consumable disguise of the production system's commodified time.” (Debord) It’s function is to mask the absolute absurdity of how time is the master to the slave of the worker. The worker sells the free time he is born with to the capitalist class, in which he produces commodities just in time for the weekend, which Debord calls an example of pseudo-cyclical time. For what is the week except the amount of time structured for the absolute maximum amount of production, and what is the end of this except a time away from economy? But in contemporary capitalism, this “time away” has become a commodity itself. “In the expanding economy of ‘services’ and leisure activities, the payment for these blocks of time is equally unified: ‘everything's included,’ whether it is a matter of spectacular living environments, touristic pseudo-travel, subscriptions to cultural consumption, or even the sale of sociability itself in the form of ‘exciting conversations’ and ‘meetings with celebrities.’ Spectacular commodities of this type, which would obviously never sell were it not for the increasing impoverishment of the realities they parody, just as obviously reflect the modernization of sales techniques by being payable on credit.” (Debord) Although this is implied, it is important to note how normal this very structure is. A structure of time where a certain allocated period of liberation from wage-slavery is allocated to get away from said alienating position, only to be turned into a commodity that reinforces that very system that caused this mess in the first place! The realization that Debord, and most neoleftists come to, is that all mental parts of life, the feeling of “escape,” the feeling of “liberation from the job” all become commodified to the point where if you want to take part in such liberating escapes such as vacations or cultural activity, you must reinforce the very system that causes you to feel such alienation in the first place… capital invades all. To Hegel, time was necessary alienation, where the subject acknowledges its existence and loses himself in the acknowledgement, which is at once a necessary alienation. To Debord, time is the structure that can either be used as master or servant. It is a form of alienation that can either cause the subject to become dead inside and give up or become a free individual. In this contemporary form of consumer capitalism, time is used as a false-conscious for the average consumer of spectacle. It is implied as the master of production, it is told to be ignored when consuming, and is used against you when you want to escape the alienating work structure that being a producer for the spectacle brings you. In the end, “The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an all-embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social measurement of time in favour of a federation of independent times - a federation of playful individual and collective forms of irreversible time that are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization of authentic communism, which ‘abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals.’”

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