Swans Commentary » swans.com December 13, 2010  

 


 

Perspectives: A Review of 2010

 

Other Rhythms?
A Contrarian View

 

by Maxwell Clark

 

 

 

 

(Swans - December 13, 2010)   I do not usually concern myself with calendrical dating systems. Thus I am rather disadvantaged in discoursing on the past "year." I much prefer "everyday" signals and rhythms. Wake, sleep. Warm outside, cold outside. Short hair, longer hair. Clean, dirty. Etc., etc. The list is truly infinite.

Never doubt your sensitivity to such things, else you actually become numb. It also helps that I'm unemployable, except to myself -- the ruling temporality is ever the temporality imposed by the ruling classes upon their slaves; i.e., calendars, clocks... Not that I escape such technologies of oppression altogether, but it seems rather to a lesser intensity.

Economics, further, is indeed primarily a study of time, according to Marx in his Das Kapital (we'll exclude discussion here on his remarks in the Grundrisse, which, if I remember all right, concern the means of communication/transportation and their spatiality). Which leads me to wonder: if Marx detailed a purely capitalist temporality, what other temporalities remain for us to live in today?

I think here our inherited conceptual armature completely fails us. We simply cannot think outside of a rigid subject-object dualism; that is, we cannot meld presence (past) with absence (future). Or, all we can do with the word is indicate where the word becomes insufficient. It is our oldest, most familiar problem. Yet somehow we are ever forgetting it.

 

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About the Author

Maxwell Clark is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut. He is also a digital musician working under the moniker Smojphace (http://soundcloud.com/smojphace).   (back)

 

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Internal Resources

Years in Review

Arts & Culture

Poetry

Patterns which Connect

Activism under the Radar Screen

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Swans -- ISSN: 1554-4915
URL for this work: http://www.swans.com/library/art16/clark11.html
Published December 13, 2010



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