Abstract
As late as the 1940s Henri Lefebvre could still acknowledge that the uneven development of capitalism in France meant that many areas of life were not yet subjugated fully to its priorities. Family life and rural festivals preserved their own ‘cyclical’ rhythms. These stood apart from the capitalist production of an everyday life based on ‘linear time’ in the endless growth of mechanically-organised time and the accumulation of commodities. But by the 1980s even the round face of the wristwatch had given way to numbered clock faces. Today, digital technologies bear down upon cyclical time to install linear, literally ‘online’ time, as an over-riding priority. Cellular phones and handheld electronic gadgets, as Andy Merrifield put it, are swamping cyclical time and filling in ‘free time’ more completely without the promised liberation from the ‘compulsory time’ of waged work.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages | 24-26 |
| Number of pages | 3 |
| Volume | 2 |
| No. | 29 |
| Specialist publication | Variant: Cross-currents in culture |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |