[lbo-talk] occupation and situationists was Re: enemy's turf

[Carrol Cox]

Several of these k inds of time touch on the kind of time Postone 
discusses but none is exactly the same. Postone focuses on the 
measurement of human life in hours worked per day, the measurement of 
that time, and its expression in commodity exchange. But he also has a 
historical chapter. Prior to the modern age, all over the world, time 
did not measure a ctivity: activity measured time. One result was that 
the medieval hour coincided with the modern t0 minute hour ONLY at the 
fall & spring solstices. There were always 12 hours of darkness and 
twelve hours of light, the hour being measured by the events of the 
church day. Modern abstract time was first introduced in Venice in the 
late 14th-c, as there were workshops there where the workers were paid 
by the hour. But it was not until Newton that modern abstract space and 
time appeared, and Newton was conscious that he was _inventing_ a new 
time for his purposes. Does any of the material you speak of relate to this?

Carrol

On 10/27/2011 6:44 PM, Charles Turner wrote:
> On Oct 27, 2011, at 6:15 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>> I've been meaning to ask, if anyone is reading, if any of the
>> situationists - peole familiar with their material - can explain or
>> help me understand what they are talking about when they talk about
>> the occupation of time and space?
>
> Well, from Mackenzie Wark's new book _Beach Beneath the Street_:
>
> "Two kinds of time meet and mingle in the everyday. One is a linear time, the time of credit and investment. The other is a cyclical time, of wages paid and bills due. This is how class makes itself felt in everyday life. Linear temporality is ruling-class time; cyclical temporality is working class time."
>
> "The everyday also has a third kind of temporality, the time of adventure, which is perhaps a remnant of aristocratic time. A notable characteristic of the Letterist International, which persists in the Situationist International, is a longing for the time of adventure."
>
> "Adventure is nothing if not the practical refutation of boredom."
>
> "What could the everyday become? 'Could it be some sort of grand game without any precise objective?' The colonization of everyday life by the commodity form diminishes the role of collective experience, yet groups persist."
>
> pp. 98–9
>
> Debord has 2 chapters in _Society of the Spectacle_ on time: "Time and History" and "Spectacular Time."
>
> There also the Lefebvre of the period, volumes 2 of _Critique of Everyday Life_ and _Introduction to Modernity_.
>
> My favorite, though is Lefebvre's _Rhythmanalysis_ whihc was originally published in French in 1992.
>
>
> I don't have any idea how OWS is using this stuff, but I'd imagine a few of Wark's students are down there...
>
> HTH, Charles
>
>
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