Abstract
Instrumental or, as I have been calling it, ‘proleptic’ time, is one way of organizing time’s interval. We expect the future to be different from the present that appears before us now, and we regard the present as an obstacle to the realization of that second, future moment. The temporal organization of habit, as described by Bergson on the other hand, is based on a certain symmetry between the tenses. For this reason, the comparison between them can be instructive.
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Notes
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, New York: Vintage Books, 1967, p. 104.
Althusser, Louis, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, London: Verso, 1972, p. 78.
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London: Verso, 1983, p. 132.
Georg Simmel, Metropolis and Mental Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Jeffery T. Schnapps, ‘Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)’, Modernism and Modernity, 6(1), January 1999, pp. 1–49.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Random House, 2008.
Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Melancholy Angel’, in The Man without Content, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Utrecht:: Open Source Socialist Publishing, 2008, p. 10.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, p. 28.
Circulation deals only with the extremities of intervals. It does not bear on the intervals themselves. Marx says that circulation is ‘the mediation of presupposed extremes’ (i.e., the two moments of capital M and M’). Circulation presupposes some principle of self-renewal that generates the value that is circulated. But because it subsumes the interval of change in the movement of the extremities, an analysis restricted to the sphere of circulation will not be able to account for the creation of value. Circulation presupposes change but cannot posit it. Marx says that the moments of self-renewal have to be thrown into circulation ‘like fuel into a fire’. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin Books, 2005. pp. 254–55.
For a good discussion of the peculiar dialectic of involvement and distance that make up the scholarly life see Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Mediations, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
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© 2013 Stephen Crocker
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Crocker, S. (2013). Distracted and Contemplative Time. In: Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324504_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324504_7
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