“History, however, is certainly not a game, and if it smiles, it tends to do so with grim irony.”

The previous article in this series, “A Schema For Time”, was concerned with showing how — within both philosophy and the everyday life with which philosophy maintains its ambiguous but intense relationship — the real of time is not only absent, but systematically avoided. The key proposition was that a schema which divided a complex totality of Time into four domains (Physical Time, Biological Temporality, Historical Temporality, Metaphysical Time) would allow different disciplines to develop research programs which would intersect in ways which could fruitfully indicate the rational kernel of this real, even while the real itself escapes “final capture”.

Here we can see this elementary schema. We are not looking at separate forms or substances of Time, we are looking for orders of relative complexity which progressively transcribe the inclusion of subjective time within objective time and vice versa.

One thing which was missing was an adequate discussion of mortality — “Time, the Assassin”, as Rimbaud put it. One proposal might be to posit the consciousness of mortality as largely coeval to temporal consciousness, and to envision this consciousness on the border region between the biological and the historical, which could serve as dialectical drivers of subjectivity per se. The temptation would be to thereby transform death into the determining horizon of life, which risks turning the truths encountered and engaged in life into Death’s marionettes, cut off forever from their eternal life in Reason.

The question, in other words, is whether the incorporation of death and finitude results in handing Time back to an existentialist project? Not at all, it would instead be a matter of thoroughly historicizing temporal experience, while at the same time being tested for consistency with the chronobiology of the body and the brain. Knowledge production in history and in chronobiology can no longer be separated: the sleep crisis is evidence of this, and a very rich terrain for articulating the ways in which, under contemporary capitalism, there is a crisis of temporality. Jonathon Crary’s “Capitalism and the End of Sleep” is an excellent introduction to this topic.

We all find ourselves in an individual relationship to time as well as a historical one. Which is to say, we all experience the history of our times, in some sense, for ourselves. I, personally, often find time to largely be a dimension of intermittent torture and languor, a special domain of the superego, the domain in which all my plans are most at risk of self-sabotage, as I overestimate my ability to complete tasks within a given period, and overestimate the amount of time I should spend on “nothing in particular”/rituals of preparation/abysses. There is little point, when extending out from whatever the psychoanalytic particularities of my case may be {there is clearly a connivance between my Superego (in guise of the demands of time management) and my Id (in the guise of the fantasy of time as somehow irrelevant/always able to bent to fit in enjoyment) which produce the more excruciating pleasure of my ultimate failure to relate to time and order time “properly”, which I take as the excremental, shameful, but also immensely gratifying, proof of my unique being, at once below/above these petty concerns}… As I was saying, there is little point in searching here for substantial, mythicised narratives of a universal human subject — although, generalities must abound for particularities to be disclosable — when there are richer questions that will appeal to sociological and biological imaginations alike.

For an individuated temporality to exist, there must be a difference (whether or not at the pitch of antagonism) in the social and the biological rhythms that play out on a particular body. Arguably, this is why dance is so special, why it is such a vital gateway to the ecstatic treasures of both ceremonial and popular cultures. It is the moment when the individual can experience the social and the biological rhythms as unified in their own body, when the body can be social/biological at once. Sex, or sex performed with sufficient mutuality of grace and prowess, can be a means to a similar moment of reconciliation. As we might expect from our psychoanalytic detour, where social demands for time discipline are gathered under the superego, and the biological desire to be at rest becomes a contesting Id, there will always be individual pathologies that will play into the explanation of why someone “failed” to coordinate their life according to certain schemas. Along with, and subtending these individualised patterns, there will be general social pathologies which explain the individual ones at a statistical level. In other words, we can’t confine the historical to the history of an individual, but can only hope to help individuals find an image of themselves that they can be reconciled with, and empowered by, within the pressures of their historical moment.

The historical moment I was born into would be dubbed, according to its own ideology, the End of History, and despite the apparent absurdity of this phrase today, when History has seemingly returned, wearing the most dreadful and absurd of its masks — neither tragedy nor farce, but both at once and high on bad acid. There was nonetheless a certain, temporary, truth to this triumphalist rhetoric, which was better captured by Rage Against the Machine than Francis Fukuyama when Zach snarled a whisper that “history is caught and frozen still”. If we forget that, we forget the full reach of Capital into social life, and we forget that time, the transformation of time and labour, as concrete sensual realities, into abstract labour-time, is at the nexus of this.