Pseudo-Cyclical Time

Essay on Postmodernism

Pseudo-Cyclical Time

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle brings forth the notion that we live in a pseudo-cyclical temporality.  Cyclical time was organized by a society that was true to its immediate relation to nature.  After cyclical time, there was irreversible time.  With irreversible time, history was shared history’s sake.  Now, our time is now a commodity and history is told for spectacle.  Pseudo-cyclical time has alienated ourselves from our own history by commodifying our time and has reinforced consumption through our leisure time. 

Debord believes that we live in a pseudo-cyclical temporality.  He says, “[p]seudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry.  The time founded on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity” (Debord, 111).  With this, Debord is saying that in pseudo-cyclical time, time is viewed as a commodity.  For example, I when I go to work at Red Robin, I am getting paid for my hours working and the product I am selling is my own labor.  My work time is my commodity that I sell to my employers, not the physical product I am producing.    Debord says, “[t]his time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its exchangeability.  It is under the rule of time-as-commodity,” (Debord, 110).  Clearly we are stuck using time as a commodity, but it is not quite cyclical.  To make it cyclical, we consume in our “free time.”  Debord says, “[c]onsumable pseudo-cyclical time is the time of the spectacle: in the narrow sense, as the time appropriate to the consumption of images, and, in the broadest sense, as the image of the consumption of time,” (Debord, 112).  With this, he is saying that in our leisure time we consume images and time.  For example, when I stop selling my time at Red Robin, I either go home and consume videogames, television and its ads, or go out with friends and either consume films or products like a hamburger.  This is what makes pseudo-cyclical time cyclical.  We go to work to sell our time in order to consume in our leisure time.  We are in a pseudo-cyclical temporality because all we do is sell and consume on our time.  This is problematic, because it alienates us from our own lived histories.

Because our time is spent selling and consuming, we are lost in history.  Debord says, “[t]he spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time,” (Debord, 114).  He is saying that because we have turned history into a spectacle, we have a false consciousness of moving time.  We have turned history into a spectacle by turning it into a commodity.  Instead of telling history for history’s sake like in irreversible time, we tell it as spectacle.  For example, instead of watching Disney’s Pocahontas for educational reasons, we watch it for its entertainment value.  History has become profitable through means of spectacle.  Because we view everything as spectacle, we have have a false consciousness of time.  We think we are moving forward but we are stuck.  This is particularly extreme from a sense of death in modern societies.  Debord says, “[t]he spectator's consciousness, immobilized in the falsified center of the movement of its world, no longer experiences its life as a passage toward self-realization and toward death. One who has renounced using his life can no longer admit his death,” (Debord, 115).  Here he is saying that because we cannot move forward in time, we can’t view life as a path towards self-realization or death.  Because we have abandoned our lives in history, we don’t understand the concept of death, or the idea that we will eventually die.  We are stuck cycling between work time and leisure time, and have abandoned the idea of our own deaths.

Pseudo-cyclical time has completely reshaped and reinforced consumption in our society.  Because we have commodified history, we have commodified our own history.  We consume the spectacle of history, therefore we consume our own history, or our own time.  Although we may not like to admit to it, but the time you are not selling is mostly used consuming.  This has made consumption desirable.  For example, if I am not working, I want to do something entertaining, or apply myself or attention to a spectacle.  This is time that I look forward to.  If the consumer is looking forward to the moments they consume, then this makes consumerism easy.  If people want to consume, then they will.  This creates the pseudo-cyclical time dilemma.  If we look forward to consuming periods, and have to sell our time to consume, then we create a cycle of consumption.  

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle shows us issues with pseudo-cyclical time.  Because we have turned history into a spectacle, we have turned our own history into a spectacle.  With this, our time is commodified, creating a pseudo-cyclical temporality where we sell our time to consume with our time.  This has alienated us from our own histories because we have a false consciousness of time by turning time into a commodity.  This reinforces our desire for consumption because we look forward to the times we are consuming because we are entertained by its spectacle.  Because of this, we are stuck in a cycle where we sell commodities in order to consume more commodities.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 110-115. Print.