After reading Postone's very difficult chapter on abstract time, I thought Castells' last chapter in vol I would suggest ways that our fundamental conceptions of time and other dynamic, revisable, and thus only quasi a priori conceptions were being shaken. So I skipped ahead immediately, plus it seemed to me that many of the topics discussed in the previous chapters had been dealt with by Chris Freeman in the same manner. MC's discussion of the rise of the informal and specifically drug economy seems fascinating. Perhaps Barkley will comment on Castells' technology centered explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union and tell us whether it is similar to his. And of course Castells seems to have been quite wrong about the Rise of the Pacific Economy.
Now as for time.
Postone deals with an eariler temporal revolution. The hiring of wage labor at time wages instead of piece wages--which means that employers had to be able to measure and compensate for hours worked and control what was being during those hours--required the use of the clock: the invention of a time metric. An economy founded on wage labor requires or perhaps itself constitutes what then then seems to be an absolute conception of time, yet Postone also shows that such a quasi Newtonian conception is inadequate in terms of commodity production itself. What counts as abstract hour of labor is being reconstitued continuously through the acceleration in the productivity of labor.
So what changes is the information age bringing?
Now in Castells we find the claim that "New Age is the classic music of our time"; it "is representative of the timeless dimension of the emerging culture, bringing together reconstructed Buddhist meditation, electornic sound-making, and sophisticated Californian composition. The electric harp of Hillary Stagss, modulating the range of elementary notes in an endless variaion of a simple melody, or the long pauses and sudden volume alternations of Ray Lynch's painful serenity, combine with the same musical text a feeling of distance and repetition with the sudden surge of restrained sentiment, as blips of life in the ocean of eternity, a feeling often underscored by background sound of ocean waves or of the desert's wind in many New Age compositions...the manipulation of time is the recurrent theme of new cultural expressions. A manipulation obsessed with the binary reference to instantaneity and eternity..."
Whatever this means, it is almost certainly wrong.
Now what seems new is the "simultaneity" enabled by information technology. Of course Newtonian forces work instantaneously. But Castells' big idea seems to be the dilineation of new conception of time at work in the space of [information] flows, aka The Matrix. The space of flows is not the space of places; indeed it is by inclusion in the former that differential power is gained.
"The multiple space of places, scatttered, fragmented, and disconnected, displays diverse temporalities, from the most primitive domination of natural rhythms to the strictest tyranny of clock time. While the emerging logic of the new social structure aims at the relentless supersession of time as an ordered sequence of events, most of society, in a globally interdependent system, reamisn on the edge of the new universe. Timelessness sails in an ocean surrounded by time bound shores, from where still can be heard the laments of time chained creatures."
Perhaps the following is an example of what Kenny was getting at: "The flexible management system of networked production relies on flexible temporality, on the ability to accelerate or slow down product profit cycles, on the time sharing of equipment and personnel, and on the control of time lags of available technology vis a v sis competition. Time is managed as a resource, not under th elinear chronological manner of mass production, but as a differential factor in reference to the temporality of other firms, networks, processes or products."
I don't get the critique of linear, chronological time here; at any rate, this reads as airport business management literature on how to use time as a strategic resource. But then that's the philosopher of Silicon Valley's main audience nowadays. Plus, his comments on entrepreneurial radicalism are better stated by George Gilder. Maybe they can squeeze Gilder in between Castells and Cardoso in their next volume on the information age.
best rakesh