Inheritance and Finitude: Toward a Literary Phenomenology of Time

I shall explore here why lived time, which is a time of a life and thus a time with a foreseeable end that is not (or at the very least is feared will not be) a beginning, is different from the physicist's working conception of time. In particular, I am interested in the experience of time for subaltern and minority groups. I shall begin with a rapid overview of the Marxist analysis of the work hour, but I want to move beyond it to a time of ends and explore the quest for immortality once again, especially in forms relevant for oppressed groups. Because I am interested less in the sociology than in the phenomenology of time, I shall focus on experiences of hurry, anxiety, hope, longing, waiting, enduring, planning, promising, joyful expectation, grief, and most of all the fear of our death-pervaded lives.¹ Like Justice Potter Stewart on pornography, St. Augustine could not define time; unlike Stewart, he knew it not when he saw it but when he experienced it flowing through him as a self-aware subject.² E. P. Thompson laid bare how time has come to be altogether something less subjective and more mechanical.³ Instead of hours being divided as days and nights, or subject to seasonal variation, the modern hour becomes in his account an abstract, homogenous, standardized unit of a mechanical device.⁴ One is like another, no matter how differently it is experienced. Experience is sacrificed to mechanism. Time is what the clock measures. From a Romantic rather than Marxist perspective, Henri Bergson fought against this conflation, though without strictly opposing the subjective to the mechanical. After all, even Bergson recognizes that the new technology of cinema, with its ability to vary frame speed so as to protract and speed up time, and to do jump cuts and edits, not only expresses the subjective experience of time, but possibly also deepens it.⁵ It has proven a mistake to oppose the time of technology to the time of life; they are interpenetrated in ways that we will always struggle to understand. Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze were right to caution against any such romantic polar opposition.⁶

Thompson's historical materialist sociology of time tracks the revolutionary devices of clocks and watches, though it is quaint to have him follow the two centuries it took for the revolutionary clock and watch to diffuse through society knowing that smart phones today have reached billions of users in a decade, more or less. In all practical terms, time does speed up. As Benjamin Noys has argued, accelerationism is arguably the signature of our times, rooted in what Karl Marx discovered and called turnover time.⁷ That is, the faster capital moves through its moments of money, input commodities, production process, output commodities, and sale, the more value is accumulated over the year. Rest of any kind is a delay, an arresting of turnover time. The world opens up to a 24/7 temporality, as Jonathan Crary has brilliantly argued.⁸ Aristotle called the use of money to make money chrematistics; Marx specified what for Aristotle was an unnatural use of money as the circuit of capital. Aristotle worried what would happen to the good life if the method of acquiring goods becomes but a moment in the making of money, endlessly.⁹ Crary gives us the annihilation of the good life in our 24/7 dystopia, where one is available every waking minute, whether on the job or not, to work on call. Always being on call is a neoliberal conception of time. Leisure time then closes each circuit of capital by becoming a time for consumption, enabled at any moment of the night with one quick click. The process can begin anew without delay; the pursuit of value not only knows no quantitative limit, it also proceeds without delay. Time becomes continuous, not discrete; analog, not digital. Military experiments with sleepless soldiers presage a future where physical and biological limits to capital give way under the pressure of unyielding time. Capital will even penetrate whatever...