Abstract
The Introduction asserts that realtime is the temporality of today’s digital capitalism and that as such, the status of the ancient Greek concept of kairos, which has served as a central basis for revolutionary thought from Walter Benjamin through Antonio Negri, is increasingly thrown into question. It explains the etymology of Cairo in Arabic and kairos in Greek, suggesting how between the two, one might arrive at a specifically post-Arab Spring and post-Occupy concept of “kairopolitics”. The argument does not call for a simple reversal or return to a transcendental kronos over an immanent kairos (valorizing chronology over moments of opportunity), but rather of infusing kairos with a more radical approach to both memory and imagination, past and future, than that cultivated by today’s digital capitalism.
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Notes
; Perhaps the spatial focus is not so surprising for those retrospectives that use the language of “antiglobalization” as opposed to altermondialisation: the former implies a spatial politics of relocalization while the latter suggests a temporal politics of self-determination. See A. Starr, Global Revolt: A Guide to the Movements against Globalization (London: Zed Books, 2005);
N. Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (London: Picador, 2002);
T. Mertes, A Movement of Movements: Is another World Really Possible? (London: Verso, 2004).
“Presentism” is the term used in D. Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Current, 2013). “Immediatism” derives from
H. Bey, Immediatism (San Francisco: AK Press, 2001). As for realtime, as one writer observed at the eve of the millennium, “very soon, real time will be the price of entry for business.” J. Sweat, “Real-Time Reality: Businesses Are Finding That Pretty Fast Is Not Fast Enough” InformationWeek Online, December 6, 1999. Available at http://www.informationweek.com/764/realtime.htm
I derive this term from popular movement-based usage, but it also appears in the title to T. Mertes, Ed. A Movement of Movements: Is another World Really Possible? (London: Verso, 2004).
As explained below, here we diverge from definitions of capitalism (and thus, “anticapitalism”) as an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production in which profit accumulation is prioritized above other considerations. Rather, we understand capitalist economics in the terms Karl Marx used in the Grundrisse: “economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself” (173). Here then, capitalism is understood as an economic system based upon a continuously accelerating temporality of efficiency, in which the assumption of scarcity rationalizes whatever is necessary for the most expedient accumulation of disposable time. In this process is produced the hierarchy of the temporally rich over the temporally poor, defined as those subjected to disposed time, time which is ordered for them rather than by them. Profit, wealth and money are meaningful signifiers in this definition only in that they are objectified representations of physical processes that enable the accumulation and distribution of time in a hierarchical fashion. Similarly, commodities are not autonomous, free-floating objects, but materializations of congealed time, just as surplus value is really only the result of the extraction of “surplus time,” that time which exceeds the necessary time to cover operating costs, including the constant capital of the means of production and the variable capital of the laborer as wage-laborer. See, for instance, K. Marx, Grundrisse: Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1993);
A. Negri, Time for Revolution (London: Continuum, 2005);
E. Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
S. Glezos, The Politics of Speed: Capitalism, the State and War in an Accelerating World (London: Routledge, 2011);
F. Berardi, After the Future (San Francisco: AK Press, 2011); F Berardi, “Time, Acceleration and Violence” e-ftux (2011). Available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/time-acceleration-and-violence/. Anticapitalism in our use is not only concerned with bringing to an end the private ownership of the means of production or the refusal of the logic of profit, wealth or money in the second-order, representational sense, but first of all with the refusal of this first-order temporal hierarchy.
This is the term used by Giorgio Agamben, following Renalto Solmi’s translation of “jetzeit” from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Agamben argues that Solmi’s translation is apt, since it carries forward the meaning of“ho nyn kairos” (“the of-now-time”) in the same essay. G. Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143.
The term is introduced as “time-space compression” in D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Blackwell, 1991).
See thesis XVII in W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” W. Benjamin, Ed. Illuminations (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968);
G. Debord, In drum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (Film), 1978 and “Notes on Poker.” Available at http://www.notbored.org/notes-on-poker.html; A. Negri, “Kairos: Prolegomena,” in A. Negri, Ed. Time for Revolution, 149;
G. Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143.
See, for instance, G. Burchell, C. Gordor and P. Miller, Eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Consider, for example, P. Tillich, History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968): here, kairos is defined in a section entitled “The Preparation for Christianity.” Paul, he argues, did not present the appearance of Jesus Christ on earth as something that could occur at just any moment, but only at the opportune, or rather, proper moment. Similarly, “we all experience moments in our lives when we feel that now is the right time to do something, now we are mature enough, now we can make the decision. This is the kairos” (1).
I shorten the full term “ektos ton kairon” henceforward for rhetorical purposes, to indicate the distinction between the “right time” and the “wrong time.” 636d-e, Plato, Laws, in J. Cooper, Ed. Plato: The Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). See also the usage in
M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 87
P. Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 70.
Deleuze (and Guattari) argue that “philosophy’s sole aim is to become worthy of the event.” G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 159. For them, events always appear to us as less than they actually are. What appears to us as “the” event is just a representation of it that in the act of representing it contributes to its production in a particular direction or manner. Thus, what we attempt is a counter-effectuation of events, seeking out what is left unstated or unattributed, in order to bring forth their remaining potential, which is a potential for future events to actualize differently, beyond their already-existent actualization in a particular state of affairs.
Virilio uses this phrase to indicate his Merleau-Pontian refusal of distinction between not only mind and body, but also body and world (“our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism”). See M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2005), 235. For Virilio, in turn, the perceptual field is always already interconnected with the world, in all of its political, economic, technological, cultural and other dimensions.
P. Virilio, The Overexposed City (Semiotext(e): Brooklyn, 1991), 124.
“If architects today want to prove themselves equal to the new technologies, like Paolo Uccello or Piero della Francesca, they would make the software themselves, they would get back inside the machine. Whereas now they are sold the equipment, and they work with it. That’s what I can’t accept. This doesn’t mean I am some Luddite eager to destroy machines, not at all. I have always said: penetrate the machine, explode it from the inside, dismantle the system to appropriate it.” S. Lotringer and P. Virilio, The Accident of Art (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), 74.
Deleuze distinguishes between the actual/possible nexus on the one hand—that between the possibilities inherent to an entity at a specific moment, or that which remains the same across multiple moments—and the actual/virtual nexus on the other—that between the potentialities of an entity that is not static but that exists in a state of continuous, material becoming that transforms that entity continuously. See, for instance, G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 148.
P. Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000), 28.
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 159. “The event is actualized or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from states of affairs so as to isolate its concept.”
Both Virilio and Deleuze make this argument: presumably, given their continuous citation of his work, the origin is the 1955 work of H. Michaux, Miserable Miracle: Mescaline (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002). In his description of mescaline experience, Michaux recounts the “phenomenal speed” with which new ideas develop, but notes that “instead of being constructive, [the intelligence] is above all interested in covering ground… never resting, non-contemplative” (64). As he continues, under the effects of mescaline, “the system of brakes controlling this speed has stopped functioning” (80). Thus, “all drugs are modifiers—usually accelerators—of the mind’s speed (of images, thoughts, impulses). Mental health, on the contrary, would consist in remaining the master of its speed, of their speed” (154). Michaux then goes on to talk about the importance of sleep, of taking a break from being at the “instrument panel”: “of all animals man is the one that controls the greatest number of roadblocks and open roads, of ‘Yes’s’ and ‘No’s’, of what is permitted and what is forbidden. A mammal with brakes. The animal that can manage the most complicated instrument panel” (154). Critiquing reliance on reflex, Michaux argues that one must, for instance, sleep, in order to reflect, in order to process the events of the day: “not to let themselves be carried away, to remain master of their speed seems to be the underlying, the constant and secret preoccupation of all men… below the man who thinks, and much deeper down, there is the man who controls, who controls himself” (155).
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© 2014 Jason M. Adams
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Adams, J.M. (2014). Introduction: Kairopolitics: The Politics of Realtime. In: Occupy Time: Technoculture, Immediacy, and Resistance after Occupy Wall Street. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275592_1
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