Agamben's kairology

When Kris quoted Marx's line about capitalism as the 'production of regular motion', it got me thinking about the political importance of a society's conception of time. If we accept Marx's pairing of modernity with 'regular motion', this implies a certain number of oppressive qualities tied up with how one experiences time... if one thinks in terms of 'regular motion', one tends also to think in terms of a sort of monotony, or lack of faith in each moment, that subsequently makes capitalism appear immovable. After some Googling, I stumbled across Agamben's attempt to historicise time, in his early work Infancy and History.

What follows is a number of extracts from Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, by Leland de la Durantaye. It's available on Google Books and in the library. His treatment of time might be a useful addition to the theories of De Certeau, for instance, in helping to theoretically justify our intervention.

'Every conception of history,' Agamben observes, 'is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time that is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated.' Agamben even goes a step farther, claiming not only that every conception of history has a model of time proper to it but also that 'every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience.' (There are definite similarities here with the notes Kris posted on the book Faster... Contemporary society can be defined by its high-speed nature)

'Western man's inability to master time, and his consequent obsession with 'gaining' it and 'passing' it,' writes Agamben, 'have their origins in this Greek concept of time as a quantified and infinite continuum of precise fleeting instants.'

Agamben goes on to argue that 'Modern political thought has concentrated its attention on history and has not elaborated a corresponding concept of time.' Hence, Marx's failure to examine the Western conception of time on which his theory was based was 'the hidden breach through which ideology snuck into the citadel of historical materialism.' Marx, in his attempts to encourage practice over theory, still fell in to the same reductive trap of other philosophers in the Western tradition - ignoring the potential of each moment, thereby reducing the human experience. This means that even supposedly liberating, revolutionary Marxist thought renounces 'the concrete grasp of each single event and each present instant of praxis in favor of deferral to the final instance of the total social process'

Agamben...first takes on board Hiedegger's conception of the moment:
'The moment interrupts time's movement, and can do so because it is one of time's possibilities'

and then, adds Benjamin's criticism of theories of historical progress:
'There is a conception of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and thus distinguishes only the pace, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress'

...to reach what he calls a kairology (his alternative to the dominant Western conception of time, that any potential revolutionary movement will require if it wishes to overturn the current state of things) Duruyante: Kairology is 'conceived of in the most literal possible sense as a conception of time focused on the radical opportunity that every moment brings with it - or to employ the terms of Agamben's approach, on the dynamic instant rather than on the progressive and normalizing countinuum. Such a conception would grasp the present moment in and for all its revolutionary potential.' Thus, our intervention, the idea of embracing a certain ephemerality, trying to create a little 'jolt' in people's days, might also be explained in terms of our attempts to make an instant that might normally pass by undisturbed, into a moment (if only on a small scale)

Thus, in order to maximise the possibility for change... One should think not in terms of 'time's arrow', steadily accompanying us through our days as a collective species, but think in terms of the opportunities for positive change that each instant presents us with. As Agamben points out, the West's normal conception of time actually tends to eradicates possibility. A narrative of progression brings with it a sense of linearity - it makes the ways things have gone and are going appear natural, even, inevitable. What Agamben therefore argues for is 'a reconceptualisation of our place in history and our ideas on time, as well as the seizing of the possibilities open to us.

The destruction or exploding of this view, that Agamben calls for (and that any intervention will no doubt also be encouraging?) highlights the possibilities that each moment brings with it, and the way any overarching narrative of time can reduce these potentialities, ignoring the opportunities for deviation that were open to it. In short, each moment brings with it new possibilities that we ignore because of the way ideology presents time to us. In Agamben's view, time is 'dynamic' rather than 'empty and homogenous' and kairology is, ultimately, 'a mode of thinking and living that is not waiting for dialectical completion.' This is surely also what our mode of thinking should be in regard to justifying putting our posters on display:

'I am not in the slightest interested in apocalyptic prophecies, but rather in the ways in which we might respond at the present time to the catastrophe in which we live'