Capitalism is clearly running out of time. Some astute thinkers even argue that its time has already passed, and it is a “living dead” (Yanis Varoufakis, Richard D. Wolff, and so on). The “present” is tearing it-self away from the past life of capitalism, whether it be an emerging “techno-feudalism” or “financial oligarchy”, it is a zombie time that is cutting against all humanity. Thus, all are torn out of context and immediacy by a background of time for time’s sake, an equivalence drowning humanity in a lifeless “will” for “will”.
While Karl Marx’s stressed the relation of freedom and bondage to time best in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” [18th].
In Philosophy, famously, the point is not to conceive eternity as opposed to temporality, but eternity emerges from within our temporal experience—or, as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling conceived of it more radically: time itself is an eternal subspecies, a resolution against time’s own eternal deadlock. While Marx’s twist is that freedom is not simply a recognition of a necessity, but recognised necessity through this recognition.
In Slavoj Žižek’s Parallax View (2006 MIT) he attempts to follow Marx (not the film), an reiterates over and over that the “temporal parallax” of eternity needs to be grasped as a complex historical dialectic guiding capitalism. Since Capital completes its own circle of its reproduction by “traversing its own time fantasy”; an excess of surplus value is realised by workers buying their own produce for more than they made “it”.
The tension between production and circulation processes = parallax. A circle of M–C–M′ is sustained as a temporal parallax gap between the production of value and its actualisation; value is generated “in itself,” while only through the completed circulation process does it become “for itself” (2006; 52 p.).
The worker confronts him as consumer and possessor of exchange values, a simple temporal parallax centre of circulation allows one to enter infinitely via many centres - here the precise worker is extinguished. Events or processes encounter an actualisation that cannot occur simultaneously within the same historical moment; indeterminacy cannot be captured in the simultaneous “principle” at differential layers (2006; 32 p.).
The “shared sacrifice” of time inverts the general logic that Rene Girard famously outlines as a shared sacrifice to preserve (and create!) the community; a purpose of sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Here Instead of preserving the life of the community through sacrifice of a victim outside of it, in contrast, the whole community is called to sacrifice in order to save specific elements within it (i.e. billionaires thriving and growing under covid deaths, climate deaths, and so on).
Can the scapegoat mechanism inherent in time be overcome? And how? In Girard’s later thought he argues it is possible to break free from this violent circuit, only if the story of the scapegoat is negated via the viewpoint of the victims – as in Christianity. Girard’s solution falls short since all Christian societies did (and are doing) what he complained of. Furthermore, is this breaching the time wall a “sure-thing”? Or is it even a safe “bet”?
A contemporary time-boundary, a wall of magnitude cutting time of from the "future", is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy (French philosopher) would warn against. For him, in The Mark of the Sacred, he warns against a dystopian form of time: the "fixed point" (2013; 208 p.). For him one should be careful not to reify the zero point of collapse into a fixed point (abstract thought made into an object). Be it a fixed point of global COVID pandemic, global economic chaos, etc. The “zero” is this simulated lure beyond the time wall.
Dupuy’s thought touches upon the fixed-point of something like Climate Change “crisis”, as it is a time wall, a fixed lure towards which reality tends if it is left to itself. The only escape being that of “acts” which interrupt this catastrophic “drift”, a drifting towards the fixed-data-point grounding thought; a mode of thought at the risk of granting childbirth to some other, and potentially worse radical Otherness.
Consequently, even Climate Change is not a parallax view synthesis, but a Common epoch of time constructing a magnitude and measure to divide the world in favour of Kantian “ethical narcissism”, a utility divide against the wishes of life; or as John Lennon put it, “Before Elvis, there was nothing”.
Against Philosophy’s time circuit, even Capital fulfils its own time-debt by obfuscating the Climate Change ecological parallax view of the “Common”. Here workers become subject(s) by reaching the time wall as consumers. Thus, the position of worker-producer is irreducible, an irreconcilable symmetry, a de-centred parallax position that cannot privilege one side as more-true than the other.
Despite the unfashionability in Philosophy, the highest-definition parallax view is Communism. It synthesises constantly shifting temporal perspectives between the two levels of time with no shared space of possibility. Therefore, “Temporality” (and thus “contingency”) is irreducible in moral assessments of political-economy, precisely because one cannot account in advance for how their acts will affect the future retrospective view.
Parallax view is a point of erection (elusive je ne sais quoi which makes it pop out of time) whereby signifiers circulate, laziness, boredom, disgust and so on, they are all secondary particular forms of this basic time disturbance where one perceives the object of time outside its phantasmatic frame; a piece of the real intruding. Firstly, time is represented as a “gestalt” whose data power pregnancy links One to the Notion of species. While secondly, as a data point of time it symbolises the divided subject’s mental permanence, an alienating terminus, a torsion of struggle against being flattened into a temporal copy.
The universal imperative for labour and exchange value emerges against the background of time, the socially necessary labour time needed to produce them. Thus, time is created by measurement to generate a surplus from itself, and it reduces all to an equivalence. Therefore, quantitative easing is simply one parasitic example of a Copy of a Copy of time undermining all.
Consequently, capitalist economics requires a market approved copying of time, an abstraction born out of temporal struggles where each objectification is projected into the future of time-itself, a time that leaves a weaker version relative to the “original”. Thus, all capitalist (surplus production) time arrangements presuppose a sacrificed rabble that must be cut off from the means of (re)production (i.e. inequality, market driven scarcity, crisis of overproduction, and the division of labour).
Consequently, Communism is not a Kantian “ethical narcissism” where even if the two sides appear as identical as they are only closely connected on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip – while the Hegelian-Marxist faith is that this gap is the ethical substance determining the paradoxical Whole unity. Thus, there is no rapport between the two levels of time, no shared space, a common as a contested common of shared Moebius strip of distance. Just as revolutionary politics and revolutionary art move in different temporalities.
The parallax view is the excess of the effect that emerges over its causes, an effect as the retroactively caused cause—this temporal loop is the minimal structure of life. This “split-subject” arrives via time’s two modes of representation; just as there are two French words for "future": futur and avenir.
As liberal comedian Steve Martin once reminded; “Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything”. While, “Futur” stands for the future as the continuation of the present, a future actualising the propensities already here, while “avenir” points more towards an eventual discontinuity with the present-avenir is what is to come (a venir), not simply what will be.
While a classic non-Communist parallax view “solution” was a shock and awe proposed by Ernst Jünger. The German writer and zealous militaristic thinker supports the necessity of poetic Whole experiments amongst a gestalt’s absence (i.e. Nation, Man, and so on). He foresaw the new-technological age (perfect technology) driven by clocktime (its calculations and automation) has arrived where the Becoming is the absolute (valid) meaning of time.
A new time epoch of capitalist death has arrived, an epoch bringing what Jünger foresaw: a covid time flatting; an essentialism blurring of home/workplace distinction; quantitative easing to handle supply change crises and periods of economic collapse; a fusing of technology and biological regulation by time as measurement (lockdowns, sick-pay and self-quarantine, and so on).
All measure of time presupposes an increasingly sacrificed class for the structural benefit of a surplus shown time and time again to be for the greater good of global clocktime. For Jünger, the possibility of a new epoch of the worker is found in Anthropocene in At the Time Wall; where: “/…/ the destruction of the layer of mythical time and historical time provides access to the earth in its geological history”. He separates astrological time and the time of the worker, so as to provide a required exit, an exit to access the hidden gestalt dimension (humanism).
Jünger argues for not a “stereoscopic” method, but via “poetic” (temporal play) experimentation. Since, the role of poetry only offers exit experiments with the time of the worker devoid of the gestalt. Thus, the “obstacle of a wall” is sustained as a deadlock, an imagined “virtual outside of the wall”, a virtual blocking off a subject from its own “more Real” data. The poet at the time wall is determined to leave historical time behind, to experiment freely with a new temporal epoch of the worker; the worker spirit seeks the spirit’s data key.
Who can say if your love grows
As your heart chose
Only time
And who can say where the road goes
Where the day flows
Only time
Who knows
Only time
Who knows
Only time
- Enya
One is always enunciating their subjective data from within the symbolic structure, even when it is always repeats as a void when the symbolic structure is articulated. What is missing is not only another human pure listener, but the "big Other" of Time itself, the alien symbolic monster of time wall cuts space into one’s words’, it carries under a “vanishing mediator” hole within the symbolic structure. An act as a progression through time is a Becoming via a “vanishing mediator”.