A reader has sent me an excerpt from his translation of Badiou’s Le Siecle.
'It is remarkable to see how today we have practically no sense of time. For almost everybody, what comes after tomorrow is abstract and what happened before yesterday is incomprehensible. We have entered an atemporal, instantaneous period, which shows to what point time, far from being an individual experience that is shared, is a construction and even, one can maintain, a political construction. Let's try for one moment to think back, for example, to the industrial five year-plans of the Stalinist Soviet Union. If the plan could be glorified in works of art, like Eisenstein's General Line, it was because beyond its economical signification (which was doubtful, as one knows), the planning signified the will to submit developments to the political will of man. The five years of a plan are something other than a number, they are a temporal material on which, day after day, the collective will is inscribed. It is an allegory, in time and by time, of the power of "we". The entire century wanted, in different ways, to be a constructivist century, which implies a mise-en-scene of a deliberate construction of time.
'There has been the immemorial time of peasantry, which was an immobile or cyclical time, a time of work and sacrifice, hardly compensated by the rhythmical return of feasts. Today we are to endure the couple of frenzy and total rest. On the one hand, the propaganda which says that everything changes every minute, that one should modernize in every aspect, that one will miss the train (of the internet and the new economy, of cell-phones-for-everybody, of innumerable shareholders and stock-options, of pension funds...). On the other hand, this racket can hardly conceal a kind of passive immobility, of indifference, of perpetuation of what is already there. This time is therefore a time on which individual or collective will has no grip. It is an inaccessible mix of agitation and sterility, it is the paradox of a stagnating hysteria."
Badiou, like a number of others, has for a while been concerned with the way that contemporary capitalism brings with it a fundamental transformation in our time-understanding. And as we know, time-understanding is not something tacked on to our experience of time but internal to it. The sentences above are, perhaps, informed by Debord's characterisation of the Spectacle as the false consciousnes of time: 'pastness', a flavour or consumable style with accompanying affects, replaces the past. 'False memory syndrome' is generalised and endemic. When people travel to a place for its history they mean little more than the odour of history - the equivalent of Barthes' 'italianicity'.
The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.
Badiou's reminder of the 'immemorial time of the peasantry' put me in mind of John Berger and his books on the peasantry of the French Alps. The Historical Afterword to Pig Earth ends with this:
Finally there is the historic role of capitalism itself, a role unforeseen by Adam Smith or Marx: its historic role is to destroy history, to sever every link with the past and to orientate all effort and imagination to that which is about to occur. Capital itself can only exist if it continually reproduces itself: its present reality is dependent on its future fulfilment. This is the metaphysic of capital. The word credit, instead of referring to a past achievement, refers only in this metaphysic, to a future expectation. How such a metaphysic eventually came to inform a world system, how it has been translated into the practice of consumerism, how it has lent its logic to the categorization of those, whom the system impoverishes, as backward (i.e., bearing the stigma and shame of the past), is beyond the scope of this essay. Henry Ford's remark that 'history is bunk' has generally been underestimated; he knew exactly what he was saying. Destroying the peasantries of the world could be a final act of historical elimination.'
Berger is remarkably candid about his reasons for moving to, and to some extent becoming part of, a peasant community in the Alps. He acknowledges an element of fantasy even ('I am not one of them, although perhaps I would like to be'). But surely one of his principle motivations was to move to a space, literally and metaphorically extraterritorial, from which capitalism and La societe de consummation could be gauged in their specificity and resisted. A breathing space. To escape the tyranny of our rhythms of life, our rhythms and habits of thought, by living in a place where different rhythms and habits still persisted, beyond the reach of the market. Here in the margins, written off or scorned by dominant narratives of progress, some resources could be rescued that might help adumbrate a possible future. Berger gained little from this move financially, but the gains in insight and were incalculable