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>As the expression of power's irreversible time, chronicles were a means of maintaining the voluntaristic forward progression of this time on the basis of the recording of its past; "voluntaristic," because such an orientation is bound to collapse, along with the particular power to which it corresponds, and sink once more into the indifferent oblivion of a solely cyclical time, a time known to the peasant masses who - no matter that empires may crumble along with their chronologies - never change. Those who possessed history gave it an orientation - a direction, and also a meaning. But their history unfolded and perished apart, as a sphere leaving the underlying society unaffected precisely because it was a sphere separate from common reality. This is why, from our point of view, the history of Oriental societies may be reduced to a history of religions: all we can reconstruct from their ruins is the seemingly independent history of the illusions that once enveloped them.
Is Debord's point in Time and History to show how the proletariat has not only been alienated from his work through division of labor, but separated from his history as the bourgeoisie impose cyclical time onto them while simultaneously writing their own history apart from reality?
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I think the cyclical vs. linear time is one of the most important philosophical questions. Could you expand a little on how you see the bourgeoisie "imposing" cyclical time? I'm genuinely interested.
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woke
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>>9412829
> bourgeoisie impose cyclical time onto them
He's arguing it's the other way around.
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>>9412978
Perhaps I'm misreading, but it seems like he is framing time as a discourse of the bourgeoisie wherein proletarians have only the vestige of irreversible time
>By abolishing all social privilege, and by recognizing no value unrelated to the exploitation of labor, the bourgeoisie effectively conflated its own value qua ruling class with labor, and made the progress of labor the only measure of its own progress.
>So long as agriculture was the chief type of labor, cyclical time retained its deep-down hold over society
Why should we acknowledge something like agricultural cycles and not business cycles? Instead of germination, fertilization, yield, and drought we live in terms of the discourse of the bourgeoisie - profit, loss, economies of scale, constant returns to scale, boom, depression.
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>>9412995
can you elaborate on this a bit?
The proletariat imposes cyclical time onto the bourgeoisie?
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>>9412998
This seems right.
The bourgeoisie have linear time, the idea of progress, of things progressing and great events being important; the "peasants", more simple and close to reality, see the fall of empires (something that would be a great event in linear time) as just another inevitable happening, another blip in the cycles of history.
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proletariat and bourgeoisie are words that no longer have any meaning in the present day
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>>9413013
this is a historical question
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>>9413009
>The bourgeoisie have linear time, the idea of progress, of things progressing and great events being important
Also important to note how the vestige of irreversible time was made available through monotheism:
>A measure of irreversible time now became available to everyone individually, in the form of the successive stages of life, in the form of life apprehended as a voyage, a one-way passage through a world whose meaning was elsewhere. Thus the pilgrim was the man who emerged from cyclical time to become in actuality the traveler that each individual was qua sign.
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He doesn't seem to imply any imposition, only that those who possess history give it an orientation separate from cyclical time, but it is bound to collapse back into the realistic cyclical time which the peasant masses know, probably because -- my speculation -- all they know is there are always people above them in power.
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>>9413059
An imposition on the proletariat I mean. The teleological orientation is imposed on reality.
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>>9412829
no, bourgeois time is linear, progressive, upwards—the utopian teleologies of science and industry. peasant time is cyclical, bound to the motions of the sun, the moon, the seasons and the earth—a literallly revolutionary time that witnesses history from the disinterested distance only concrete attachment to the earthen products of one's manual labor can provide.
power wants to introduce and disseminate linear time, but crumbling material factors ensure its destabilization and collapse back into the naive cyclical time of the countryside: that's how i read this passage. debord is taking a long view of the history of ideologies of time.
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>>9413077
this doesn't seem consistent with his narrative, why can't linear time become spectacular time
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>>9413077
>peasant time is cyclical, bound to the motions of the sun, the moon, the seasons and the earth
Good point.
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