“History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

We are trapped in a time machine and it is speeding out of control.

Clocks replace life with measure. Wading through the ever-present, we unfold between before and after, encountering time as the dance of quality, presence and absence oscillating through experience. In this unfolding our activity is poetic, an embodied doing flowing through consciousness. To walk is not to run, to run is not to eat, to eat is not to paint, to paint is not to dance, to dance is not to sing, to sing is not to sleep. In experience, all remains incommensurate. To do one thing today and another tomorrow, with neither being reduced to the other.

At the birth of exchange, this poetry is eclipsed by value, quality becoming quantity and experience becoming sequence. Our lived activity becomes commensurate, quantifiable, measurable, trackable, able to be bought and sold. Accumulation erupts from sameness, the crushing of difference through comparison. Abstraction blurs the flow of life, fragmenting it into an infinite circle of commodities growing through consumption, through devouring anything that lies outside the circle. History emerges through this devouring, the Leviathan roaring out from the marketplace, patriarchs replacing communities, kings replacing comrades, and businessmen replacing friendships.

The past and future are inventions, ways of quantifying actuality and possibility, transforming them into collections of data, matrices of this and that giving rise to explanations and justifications – ontologies, cosmologies, cosmogonies, ways of life, and systems of power. History is machinic and libidinal, an ever-growing circuit whose internal energy is possessive and consumptive, a being of demonic speed. Through the past we justify the actual and through the future we limit the possible. All time spirals around its center – capital, the measure of value in motion, the junk pile of pasts consuming potential futures. With experience eclipsed by exchange, Leviathan suffocates possibility.

The Four Horsemen stumble through empty streets. War begins from patriarchs clamoring over property, turning bodies into weapons and crushing life underneath hooves of nickel. Pestilience vapors up from city sewers, plebeians stepping over the unhoused to move through the nothingness between work and home. Famine molds from full granaries, the drive for profit transforming into unbreakable locks on communal refrigerators, prosperity doubling as starvation. In the end, the Leviathan reveals itself as death, the drive to annihilation, capital accumulating faster and faster until apocalypse, the shattering of life through climate catastrophe. The night-mare rides into view, the haunting of history, ghosts of infinite futures mourning eternity. Reform is revealed as a failing brake, snapped reigns slowing nothing.

Our only hope is to crash the time machine.

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History“

Image: The Horse Rider, Marc Chagall (1949-1953)