"Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is spectacular time, both as the time of consumption of images in the narrow sense and as the image of consumption of time in the broad sense. The time of image-consumption, the medium of all commodities, is inseparably the field where the instruments of the spectacle exert themselves fully, and also their goal, the location and main form of all consumption: it is known that the time-saving constantly sought by modern society, whether in the speed of vehicles or in the use of dried soups, is concretely translated for the population of the United in the fact that the mere contemplation of television occupies it for an average of three to six hours a day. The social image of the consumption of time, in turn, is exclusively dominated by moments of leisure and vacation, moments presented at a distance and desirable by definition, like every spectacular commodity".

-- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle¹

The great philosophical problem of time is now an effect of the continuous paroxysm of time consumed and the time of consumption, time exchanged and the time of exchange. Modern political-economy offers itself images of time while its own time retreats into the vanishing image of society's contradictions. It is not that the future of time itself, the being of time, the dream of philosophy, is vanquished in consumer society which proliferates the uncertainty of its own time, but rather the time of consumption, the market of time, where time is bought and sold, conceals the ever increasing complexity by which the contradictions of time, production, and consumption multiply. Hence is it possible to undertake a study by which the three dimensions of time live and die before and after they live and die in consumer society? What contradictions belie modern consumer's society's relation to time, its accumulation, circulation and waste? How does time appear and disappear for the consumer, a phenomenological advertisement, which shrouds the laws by which time is made to appear consumable and non-consumable?

Likewise what is the time of consumer society when it purports to absorb time into the fractured cyclicality of reproduction and return: the reproduction of the end of history and the return of history of the 'end' both of which inflect themselves within the still time of eternal consumption? The end has arrived in so far as its image is postponed continually within the consumption of every image: consumer society as the highest realization of the Absolute Spirit of History in so far the presence of the deferral of the end of society terminates itself, while deferring the end of the end - the end of time is infinite, the infinite reprise of the finite. The present is never itself present in consumer society, only the anticipated future which arrives before anticipation. Hence an imaginary future takes the place of the future imagined as the future of a present, a continual return of futures which is substituted for the eclipsed present lost among circulated futures that are consumed; consumer society is its future, which means that it is always already there even before it attempts to arrive at itself. That being the case, the strange creature that it is, what it the time of consumption and the consumption of time?

On the one hand, time is desired as a commodity that should not be consumed, a reserve, which, paradoxically, will be used as the most consumable commodity within the time of consumption. For with ideological time accumulated as a surplus interval in which the time of labor appears to shrink, fetishized time is deferred to an ever closer future where time can be consumed, thus concealing the simultaneous expansion of production time required for time to appear reserved in the present. Every present divides itself into the necessary time by which consumption is deferred only to promise the consumption of what appears to be empty, unnecessary time. However, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary time is already the effect of consumer time and the cause of consumer society which perpetrates the distinction with respect to production and consumption. But what happens when the distinction confuses itself precisely when consumer society crosses both necessary and unnecessary time in the image of consumption and the shadow of production (and vice-versa) to determine the necessary font by which its regulations can be normalized and its ends realized? If indeed time is desired as a non-consumable necessity within the present deferral of the desired time of unnecessary consumption which is anticipated, then the structure of desire in consumer society is a time between present and future, necessity and contingency, production and consumption. Desired time is an interval, a pocket, a void of time betwixt between the future event of consuming unnecessary time and the present event of desiring non-consumable necessary time; the presupposition of 'desired time' before and after it is consumed.

Modern consumer society is the contradiction of time lost and time regained within the image of consumption by which the question of time's value is presupposed. But if consumption itself is the image of time's devaluation, then what is the time of the condition by which time is consumed in its necessary and unnecessary forms, which in turn occludes the necessary expenditure of time within the productive cycles that make consumer society possible? What is the distinction between the time of consumption - that is the image of time, circulated within consumption as such and such (work or leisure) - and the consumption of time by which consumption can furnish an image of itself, which when in circulation fails to differentiate itself from the other deficit images of time? Time's return appears impossible in consumer society in so far as its image is continually recycled in the eternal return of consumption. Likewise the imminent dissolution of any novel image is the concealed work of consumer time by which society measures its virtual diachronic progress, a fetishization of time in the imagined completion of a cycle of consumption. Time moves on in consumer society when consumption repeats the destruction of its origin. Consuming the origin of consumption itself guarantees the eternal presence of the consumption of time against the potential vicissitudes of a time of society without consumption. No time for time in consumer society and too much time for its gluttonous anticipation. If a non-consumable theory of historical time is both the hope and impossibility for consumer society to measure a time before and after consumption, then it is a theory based on the contradiction not between past and present, but between consumptive and non-consumptive time in relation to the mutable laws of the contradictions of consumer society. Baudrillard states,

"The entire discourse on consumption aims to transform the consumer into the Universal Being, the general, ideal, and final incarnation of the human species. It attempts also to make of consumption the premise of 'human liberation', to be attained in lieu of, and despite the failures of , social and political liberation. The consumer is in no way a universal being, but rather a social and political being, and a productive force. As such, the consumer revives historical problems"².

The consumer is the beginning and end of historical time in the age of consumption; he reverses the order by which the 'history' of historical time itself is understood. For the origin of the consumer himself is embroiled in a dreamed up history, a concoction of an unformed beginning of capital inscribed forever in its final end within the history of 'endings', which 'coincidentally' corresponds to the dominant image of the 'end of history' at the so-called end of History: the consumer is the end of history, and the ends of history, the target of history, who consumes the image of history's end. Hence to speak of the history of consumption in some senses deletes the possibility of speaking about a theory of history in which consumption appears as a non-consumable 'historical being', a reserve of pure historicity, rather than a manufactured sense of anachronistic historical time. Is it possible that the consumer, if considered the end and ends of history, is the threshold of a theory of historical time whose image consists of the polymorphous intersection of the three dimensions of time in its very consumption and not the asymmetrical prioritization of one dimension in its imagined and dissolved presence: the present that inherits the past to deliver the future? How is historical time consumed in 'age' when historical time is no longer one of the succession of ages, the successive consumption of ages? Or is the notion 'end' an alienated concept, which only indicates the origin of a great return of time, a revitalized form of virtual history, of which the Consumer marks the first epoch in the grand market of consumable things? The consumer is the site of the question of history in so far as he "revives" the historicity of how history is produced and consumed.

The time of consumption appears to be a time lost within the possibility of measuring finitude in terms of continuous, linear historical time; the consumptive time of finitude leaves behind the remains of the concepts of origin and death after the event of their consumption. What remains after the consumption of death is not oblivion; historical time for the consumer creates the void of a present (consumes the present) first and then fills it with a non-consumable past (previous deferral of wasted time which returns and remains as non-consumable) instead of consuming the past in creating an absence which is then represented in the present, i.e. the consumable commodity of historical knowledge. Hence historical time is reversed in consumer society in so far as the present is already past in being consumed, while the past was never present in being non-consumable. To speak of transformation in history is to speak of the conditions by which the transformative process of consumption reconstitutes differing intervals of historicity within what appears a synchronic domain of consumer society: here change is impossible precisely because its possibility is recycled endlessly.

The paradox of consumer society as synchronic is not based on the fact that the eternity of the universal gem of liberated, endless desire has been uncovered beneath the dross of Man's search for his essence of history. Rather, the contradiction of consumer time is the 'historical' coincidence of the concept of the end of history and the continuous possibility of the proliferation of the image of the end within a 'historically' finite structure: consumer society presents itself as its very history within every instant of its apparent synchrony. Hence to think the relation between history and consumer society is to think again the question of time and history when history is forced to account for the conditions of its appearance, which means the conditions of its productions, from an indeterminate origin that is never a consumable present within historical time. Consumer society liberates the possibility of thinking again how history happens as such precisely because the object by which history is localized - the past - can be mistaken for the referent from where it is received - the present. Concomitantly, pasts are invented thus liquidating the ground of a present within history. As a result, if the past happens in the present, and the present passes but not into the past, then history is the logic of transferable regimes of temporality whose dominion is consumer society. Likewise, consumer society is the origin of the image of history happening in the profusion of a non-contemporaneity of all three dimensions of time: no longer a present which attempts to find itself in the past, but the past itself happening in the present, which becomes History, paradoxically, in the future.

The historical time of consumption, time in consumer society, and the process of consuming time reveal deep problems within the theoretical question of time in general and historical time. If indeed more complex dimensions of the problem are revealed, then may be it is consumer society, itself, which reveals itself 'temporally' and 'historically' as the great mutation by which time has, is, and will be thought. Consumer society may be the 'historic' revelation of the mystery of time in so far as the secret irrelevancy of the 'revelation' of History is revealed. If not, then the structures by which consumer society defers the possibility of its end in so far as it thinks it has ended history summon the ends of thinking to approach the 'history' of consumer society prior to the consumption of history, which has been produced as such. Either way what remains is the future and what becomes is the past: consumer society's involuted theory of historical time.

[ Manuscript ]

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