Episode 02 - How Capitalism Commodifies Time

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink,

Ellie: 0:12

the podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Today we'll be talking about how we experience time under late capitalism.

Ellie: 0:26

Not sure what late capitalism is, or even what capitalism is?

David: 0:29

Well, you will by the end of this episode.

Ellie: 0:31

We'll also discuss the way that capitalism alienates us from our experience of time, replacing lived time with clock time.

David: 0:39

By way of conclusion, we'll talk about some of the ways the current pandemic has altered our experience of time and has enabled some new possibilities.

Ellie: 0:47

There could be a silver lining to all of this bullshit. So David, when I think about how I experience time, I'm thinking about my calendar. I think about a day as a blank page with different chunks of time, different colors, maybe.

10:30 to 11: 1:06

30 I've got a meeting, 11:30 to 12:30 I'm checking emails

and responding to them, 12:30 to 1: 1:11

30 is lunch, and so on and so forth. What about you?

David: 1:17

Well, I also think about the cyclical aspect of time. So I think in terms of the week, the thing that I have to look forward to-- Fridays-- or the thing that I don't look forward to-- Mondays. Because I am an academic, I think about the academic cycle. So I also think in terms of these larger blocks of time, like what I have to do every week and what I have to do every month.

Ellie: 1:36

I almost think about a wheel chopped up into quarters, depending on the season, when I picture a year.

David: 1:42

Yeah. And like the clock that is on the wall, it sort of moves at regular intervals. It just spins on its axis. So there is this cyclicality to time, but there are also these units that mark the movement of time that are always the same length or the same chunk.

Ellie: 1:57

Yeah, and we need that in order to be able to connect with each other.

If I say, "Let's meet at 10: 2:00

30," I need to know that your 10:30 is my

10: 2:04

30 so we don't run into any issues.

David: 2:06

Yes, and the thing about this seemingly natural, obvious experience of time is that it does seem to be a historically novel creation, one that is associated with the rise of capitalism since the 17th and 18th centuries. And so what we'll do today is think about the ways in which our experience of time that we typically don't really think much about, is shaped, and molded, and conditioned by capitalism itself.

Ellie: 2:33

So, one thing I think we often take for granted is the very presence of clocks and other objective markers of time in the way that you were talking about. In fact, the rise of standard clocks is relatively recent, and does coincide with the rise of capitalism. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, a lot of folks in Europe had access to personal watches and that was sort of a status symbol. The historian Edward Thompson talks about the rise of personal timekeeping pieces in relation to the sort of universal, objective standards that we need from a large-scale, capitalist society. And if personal timekeeping pieces are on the rise in the Industrial Revolution-- so that sort of early to mid nineteenth century-- the turn of the 20th century brings about an even more radical revolution in our concept of time. And this is through the rise of the telegraph and the way that the telegraph helped establish railway time. Suddenly across an entire country, you get a standard time. You get the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time, which establishes a standard clock time around the entire world. So suddenly-- I mean, you're in Paris right now, David I'm in Los Angeles-- we're nine hours apart. We were able to arrange a meeting together because we share this sense of objective time.

David: 3:57

And it's interesting that you mentioned Greenwich Time because especially in relation to us, it seems like time under capitalism really usurps the time previously played by space. So in the old days, we might say we are so many hundreds of kilometers away from one another, but now when I think about you, I think of Ellie as nine hours before me. And so there was that sense in which our understanding of distance, of geography, of territory, is all thoroughly temporal, because time has become the defining characteristic of experience under capitalism.

Ellie: 4:34

And there's also a shift here from qualitative ways of experiencing time to quantitative ones. Thompson talks about the shift from task oriented time to labor time. We'll say a little bit more in a bit about what labor time looks like and what that means, but one thing that he notes is examples of non-capitalist cultures that use measurements of time, such as how long it takes to cook an egg

David: 4:59

or how long it takes to say an Ave Maria in Latin America. He talks about how in the 17th century, for example, people measure time and talk about time in terms of, "Oh, I'll see you in seven Ave Marias," which are prayer units.

Ellie: 5:14

And that is just so different from the way that we think about time today, which is completely devoid of those qualitative markers of content-- it's empty time.

David: 5:25

One of the things that Thompson argues that is particularly important for our episode in thinking about the temporality of late capitalism, is that the temporality of capitalism in general really replaced a pre-capitalist temporality that we find in the 16th and 15th century, and even before, in the Medieval period, that was defined first and foremost by a rootedness in nature. So if you think about how people before the rise of capitalism organize their lives, it really was around the day-night cycle, it was around the natural flow of the seasons, it was around agricultural tasks. When do you plant, when do you harvest. . And starting in the 17th century, you have this transformation to an abstract time. We can call it a Newtonian time because all the units are interchangeable in a mechanical way, and that's really what opens up a new horizon, which is the horizon that we find ourselves in.

Ellie: 6:23

In non-capitalist and or pre-capitalist societies, the ways of marking time are just so different from what we take for granted today. So for instance, in medieval Europe, the main demarcation of time for a community was the ringing of the bells in the church. But then there are also these other markers that you mentioned-- the markers of the seasons, the sort of lived subjective feel of when the weather is starting to get cooler-- that are much more important than the over-determination by the calendar that we have today. So of course, calendars existed in medieval Europe, but they had less of an impact on the sort of lived subjective experience of individuals simply by virtue of the fact that individuals did not have as much access to external markers of time. They couldn't check their phone at any particular moment. If they had a calendar at home, hopefully it would correspond with the calendars that other folks had, and they'd be on the same page about the same date, but with a phone, I can literally check absolutely immediately and I can communicate that to others. I can say, "Hey David, I think my phone is messing up. It says that it's September 15th, but it's actually October, right?" And you're able to verify that for me. There were fewer modes of external verification.

David: 7:41

Well, and what we have to think about here, and this is sort of an insight from the history of science, is that today, we are used to thinking about calendar time and clock time as unproblematic and entirely reliable, but that was not always the case. So when we think about the time before the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, there really was a problem in Europe about the reliability of the calendar, because we didn't have all the data about the place of the Earth in the solar system and the relationship between the solar cycle and the lunar cycle. And so, the calendars that were created were always in an increasing state of crisis where slowly and slowly, they were sort of getting out of joint with reality. And so, whereas today we think of time as something that we've mastered, at least from an abstract point of view, in the 15th, 16th century, and before, calendar time was actually much less reliable than the natural indicators of time. You know, the, the rooster, for example, uh, cock-a-doodle-doo-ing at six in the morning is a much more reliable and consistent indicator than a calendar that is, again, always in a state of crisis.

Ellie: 8:52

Yeah. It's almost as if calendar time is no longer a problem for us. So we are out of joint with natural rhythms, but completely in line with calendar time, and it sounds like what you're describing David is maybe that it was the inverse in previous periods-

David: 9:06

Yes, I think that's right. I think it's fair to say that, before the rise of mercantilism and then capitalism, as we understand it today, people found natural rhythms of time, the same ones that Thompson talks about, unproblematic, and they found the abstractions that we today take for granted, as things that are attached to a question mark and whose reliability really has to be subjected to a lot of criticisms. And it's in the 17th century with the rise of Newtonian mechanics and the geocentric view of the world that we then enact this transition. But interestingly, again from a historical point of view, one of the reasons that there was an explosion of scientific research in the 17th century, it was practical and political. People needed not only better navigational tools for the imperial project of Europe, but also for controlling the problem that was the calendar.

Ellie: 10:03

That was awesome! I just learned a lot from what you just said. Okay, so the word capitalism obviously gets thrown around all the time. In some peer groups that we share, David, especially among millennials, it's almost taken for granted that capitalism is like, shit, right? There's a stereotype of the liberal coastal elites who hate capitalism, but here we go dancing around in our designer clothes. And indeed recent studies have shown that millennials are much, much more likely to be critical of capitalism than their boomer parents, which I think like, we sort of already know in a sense, but it's interesting that research is really proving that to be true,

David: 10:43

But maybe less than Gen Z-ers! I don't know how you think about the people for whom we are the boomers.

Ellie: 10:49

I know, right? The study I'm thinking of didn't, didn't talk about Gen Z specifically. So very curious, I would guess that they're even more anti-capitalist than millennials and in fact, Gen X-ers are less anti-capitalist than millennials. So there's this increasing cascade in American generations of positive views toward socialism and negative views towards capitalism. That said, I think a lot of us go around not really understanding exactly what capitalism is. And so I think it would be helpful for us, David, to just talk a little bit about capitalism, what that means, and this sort of phase that we currently find ourselves in with respect to capitalism.

David: 11:31

Yeah, and so if we ask a very general question, like what defines capitalism? How should we begin to think about that question? What are the defining features or the signature marks of the capitalist mode of production, either, how Karl Marx understood them in the 19th century, or as it's theorized today?

Ellie: 11:51

So capitalism first arose among European trading economies in the 16th century, and eventually replaced the previous economic system in Europe, which was feudalism, but it really gets going in the way we currently understand it through the Industrial Revolution. So by the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was putting in place the capitalist system, as we know it.

David: 12:16

And one of the ways in which the transition from a feudal system to a capitalist system of production was enacted was through the overthrow of the Guild system. Uh, so in very brief terms, it's the idea that you are not rooted to any specific labor through bloodline, and in fact, you can just simply sell your labor time, on a market in which other people are bidding for it. So, whereas in the feudal system, it's sort of expected that, if you're born to a woodworker, you yourself will be a woodworker, so the profession is passed down through the bloodline. Under capitalism, you are a container of labor time, right. That's what you are as an economic subject. You are somebody who has labor time to sell and you sell it. And it's whoever's buying your time that determines the kind of work that you're going to do. So if my employer wants me to be a waiter, I will be a waiter; if my employer wants me to do construction work, I will do construction work. And that means that the nature of work is a lot more flexible and less static. And that's how you get that transition out of the Guild system, into what we now call the capitalist system in which people are buying and selling time.

Ellie: 13:34

This is such an important point, David, because in the first volume of Capital, Marx talks about how the rise of capitalism is dependent on the free worker. And he means free in a double sense. He says, "First off, the free worker is somebody who is able to freely dispose of their own labor power." So I'm able to say, "Hey, like I'm a young, strong person, I can wash dishes for you and/or I can do construction for you and/or I can do cognitive labor for you by selling my ideas." So that's one sense in which I'm free. I'm free to dispose of my labor power, but I'm also free in a second sense, which is that I have no other commodity for sale. I am free of all objects that I need in order to realize my labor power. What does this mean? It means that I need to depend on somebody else who owns the means of production in order to realize my labor power. So if I'm washing dishes, I need to be hired at a restaurant that has dishes for me to wash.

David: 14:38

Yes. And I think this freedom in the double sense is important to- to think about it in more detail, because it introduces both the positive and the negative element of capitalism in relation to the feudal system, which is that it brings with it a certain liberation of the worker, um, because of course, it's a positive that if I am the son of a woodworker, I no longer am fated to that profession. But of course, it also means that I am dependent on a class that-- the capitalists-- who own the means of production. And according to Marx, this division between the proletarians and the capitalist, which is the fundamental, THE fundamental, definition of capitalism, is what then introduces a dialectic or- or a rule of development that creates the increasingly asymmetrical distribution of wealth. And that is because I don't own the means of production, I don't own really anything as an economic subject. Those who do are accumulating more and more and more wealth, which is how you get the division between what today we call it the one and the 99%.

Ellie: 15:50

I think that's really helpful for thinking about the accumulation of wealth as being a fundamental feature of capitalism. So, obviously capitalism is an economic system, and it's an economic system with the end goal of the accumulation of wealth or capital. You might wonder, "Well, who's accumulating the wealth?" As you said, it is capitalists, the owners of the means of production, rather than workers who are accumulating wealth. And second off, how are these folks accumulating wealth? Well, they're accumulating wealth by making profit through the circulation of commodities-- things they sell on the market. So another crucial marker of capitalism is the notion of profit or surplus value. The raw materials of a t-shirt--so the cotton, the thread, et cetera, and my labor power-- let's say it all adds up to five bucks. If that is not sold for a profit, then we're not living in a capitalist society. The surplus value is what goes beyond the value of the actual materials.

David: 17:01

Yeah, the materials plus the time of the labor, right? What Marx calls necessary labor time. So if it takes you, let's say two hours to make that t-shirt, the value of those two hours plus the value of the material: that's the cost of production. And it has to be sold at a higher price point in order to create that surplus value. And so this highlights, I think, two additional features of capitalism that are important to mention. One is that the means of production are always owned by the capitalists.

Ellie: 17:32

So, capitalism has a distinction between the owners of the means of production, which it calls the capitalists, and the workers, the laborers, which are called the proletarians in a sort of traditional Marxian framework.

David: 17:46

And that means that the people who produce things don't own either say the tools and the factory equipment that they actually use to carry out their work. And more importantly, they don't own the final product that they produce, and this is where Marx introduces the notion of alienation, because the workers, under a system of capitalism, by the very rules and by the very logic of capitalism, are alienated.

Ellie: 18:12

Exactly. So if I am sewing a t-shirt , I alienate myself from that t-shirt by giving it over for somebody else to buy. And giving it over for somebody else to buy only makes sense if somebody is making a profit from that sale. The rise of capitalism is also linked with the rise in trade among city-states and with the rise of money that goes along with that. So let's say that you and I, David, are from very different parts of the world and we value different things. In order for me to be able to sell you a commodity that I have a lot of, in return for something that you have a lot of, it helps for us to have a third thing that can serve as an equivalent of both of those commodities. And that is money. So money presents a universal measuring device for different commodities.

David: 19:11

The capitalist model begins and ends with money, and that means that money is the be all and end all of the economy. It's the ultimate good; it's that which starts things and that which we strive for. But whereas that's the case in a capitalist framework, in a pre-capitalist framework, it's the good that really matters. And Marx really captures this distinction in his comparison between antiquity and modernity in Capital. So he looks back to the Classical Age of Greece and he says, you do have economic exchange, but the point is always to satisfy your needs by having the commodities that you need. And once you satisfy your needs, that's it. That's the point of the economy. It's the satisfaction of human needs for the sake of the development of the person. In capitalism, that's no longer the case.

Ellie: 20:05

Yeah, now it's the accumulation of wealth.

David: 20:08

Yes. It's the accumulation of surplus value that drives the economy, and that drives the psychology of those who get tangled up in this economic system. And you see this tension in terms of the different treatments of leisure time in pre-capitalist and capitalist economies. And this is Marx's interpretation of the ancient Greeks: he says, "In ancient Greek society, people wanted to exchange things so that they would liberate leisure time. The point of living is to have time to do the things that matter to you, the things that are valuable." What are those? I don't know, pursuing your friendships, being a good citizen, developing your virtue, walking around like Socrates being a philosopher in the Agora and the public.

Ellie: 20:54

Hell yeah.

David: 20:55

And with the rise of capitalism, you have this transfiguration in what matters. And now, even if you succeed, let's say, at developing a technology that cuts the time that you have to work, and you suddenly have more leisure time, you suddenly start using your leisure time, your free time, no longer to develop yourself, but just to produce more wealth.

Both: 21:22

*Money money money money, MONEY!*

Ellie: 21:27

So all the things that we've been talking about David have to do with capitalism in its traditional modes, the sort of Industrial Revolution model that Marx is working with. Maybe we can say a little bit about how that develops in the present day, which is a period that some folks will refer to as late capitalism or late-stage capitalism. How do you see late capitalism?

David: 21:49

Well, one of the ways in which a lot of people talk about late-stage capitalism is simply as a continuation and an intensification of the process of economic production and exchange that Marx already described in Capital. So there might be, let's say, new technologies, new industries, new markets, but by and large, the core of capitalism remains the same; it's just that it has reached a higher level of crisis that according to people who use the term late-stage capitalism means that the end of capitalism, that moment when capitalism meets its internal limit and collapses is historically closer than it may have been in the 19th century.

Ellie: 22:33

Yeah. And I think with the rise of late capitalism, you get the rise of the service sector. So forms of labor that are not manual, but that are cognitive, emotional, et cetera, as well as the blurred lines between work life and leisure time. I'm out to dinner with a friend and they're checking their phone and they get an email from work and they need to make a call really quickly. Or this rise of the managerial style that brings the whole person to work. Do you know about

David: 23:01

the Google- The salary, the salaried position?

Ellie: 23:04

Yes! So salary, as opposed to hourly wage, I think is a crucial component of this. And you know about the Google campus?

David: 23:10

Well, I live in San Francisco, so I have friends who live and breathe Google.

Ellie: 23:18

Oh my God. The Google campus is such an exemplar of late capitalism because it illuminates the notion of living at work and of bringing your whole self to work. So the Google campus gives you the options of choosing from all sorts of delicious meals in the dining hall, you can use fancy products in the bathroom. They have an onsite massage therapist. This is blurring the lines between work and play, and it's also blurring your identity as a worker versus your identity as a private individual.

David: 23:47

And, you know, I never really understood the term late stage capitalism until one of my friends said to me that they do your laundry for you. So you basically show up to work with a dirty pile of laundry. And then by the end of the work day, before you go back home, your laundry is washed and folded. And that means that a lot of the things that are typically considered as belonging to the domestic and private sphere are suddenly part of your work life and it's something that your employer provides for you in exchange for this assumption that you're bringing your whole person into the workspace.

Ellie: 24:25

And like, that sounds pretty awesome, right? But the issue there is uncovered when we think about in whose best interest it is that your laundry be done for you at the workplace. Ultimately, it is in your employer's best interest because you are working more for them. And another feature of late capitalism that I think the Google campus exemplifies is the blurring of the distinction between production and consumption . It's no longer so clear when you are consuming things, like consuming leisure through going to see a film, consuming products by buying clothes, and when you are working because in the Google campus, you are both producing and consuming at the same time, through eating your fancy meal that they're providing for you while doing the cognitive labor that they're requesting.

David: 25:12

Yeah. And it means that from a phenomenological perspective, in terms of your lived experience, being at work starts feeling a lot like leisure, especially when there are bean bags everywhere, and there's a massage therapist or somebody doing your nails in- in the corner office. And because you're supposed to bring your whole person, there is no distinction between when you're on or off at work, and that means that your home in turn starts looking a lot like an office. And so you move between two buildings, your house building and your work building, but that's just a physical change; it's not actually a change in the content of your activity.

Ellie: 25:53

And how much more are we seeing this nowadays with COVID where the physical demarcation between your workspace and your home space is for many people completely obliterated.

David: 26:05

Yeah. Except right now there are no massage therapists. Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 26:18

Let's talk temporality. So, what do these features of capitalism that we've just discussed produce as their effects on our very experience of time? How do they imprint us or shape us?

David: 26:32

So the first thing that comes to mind is one of the central insights of social theorists who devote themselves to the study of capitalism is this notion that under capitalism, we have an acceleration of experience. So because capitalism is oriented to the production of surplus value to the production of wealth, it sort of creates this race to the bottom-- this rat race-- where everybody is constantly moving toward this end point that is never reached because you never have enough wealth. And so there's an acceleration of time that is expressed primarily in terms of a directive to work at all times. But secondly, as a sense of despair about the fact that there is no end point, there's never that moment that you reach where you can say, "I have accumulated enough wealth and thus I can be done working."

Ellie: 27:29

Yeah, I think that's so interesting to think about here. The sociologist and political theorist Hartmut Rosa famously delineates three different kinds of acceleration in modern life. He talks about one, technological acceleration. So the way that, for instance, I can now have my laundry done within an hour, rather than within three hours, because I have a machine for that. Two, the acceleration of social change. So the idea that forms of life are rapidly able to shift because of our access to each other on a broader scale than human civilizations have ever seen before. And third, the acceleration of the pace of life. And I think it's a third type of acceleration of the pace of life that we're really interested in getting at in this episode, right David? Cause we're talking about the experience of time under late capitalism. Why is it that time feels so fast under capitalism?

David: 28:19

Yeah. And I think the way Rosa talks about this that is particularly powerful is the sense that under capitalism we're- we're not just living in time, but we're constantly out of time. Like it's always too late. Um, it's too late to begin new things. It's too late to embark on new projects. It's too late to meet the deadlines that we're supposed to meet. So we always have this experience of time as depleted or as running and getting away from us so that we can never fully inhabit it. And so that phenomenological lived component, I think it's essential for thinking about the temporality of late-stage capitalism.

Ellie: 29:00

And I love your way of putting that David, because it makes me think about how under capitalism we're alienated from time itself. I have to already be separate, alienated, from time in order to feel like I can kill time, waste time, spend time, save time. All of those ways that we commonly describe our experience of time actually depend on our treating time as an external raw material or resource and natural resource from which we are separate.

David: 29:33

Well, and the point here is that because under capitalism time has become money. There's always a sense in which if you're simply inhabiting time or spending time without producing wealth, you're wasting time. And that is part of what produces this experience of time getting away from you, because we tend to evaluate our experience of time in terms of the amount of wealth that we've accrued during the passage of whatever time we're talking about. And so, it seems as if the things that we should value the most: time to relax, time to see friends, time to just lay back and watch the clouds go by in the sky--it's that time that, in fact, we feel that we're losing and we try to avoid. We don't want time that is not productive, time that is not generative of surplus value.

Ellie: 30:27

Yeah. Because the labor process implies breaking time up into chunks. So I'm paid in a traditional capitalist framework by the hour. So my labor is worth, X amount of dollars per hour. I can't change how long an hour takes. What I can change is how much labor I can squeeze out within that hour. So the acceleration of the labor process is a crucial feature of the profit making system of capitalism, but it also ultimately results in the acceleration of time itself.

David: 31:03

Well, and I think this goes to what Marx in Capital describes as the voracious appetite of capitalism, which I think is just such a- such a great image of capitalism as this monster that is insatiable and that eats everything that it encounters. And that it just digests things endlessly without considering what is good and what is bad. It just eats and transforms things into shit. And, uh, this voracious appetite of capitalism means that we always try to squeeze as much value out of whatever time we have available to us. And this creates an interesting paradox, that even though capitalism succeeds it's at producing technology that reduces the amount of time that we actually have to work, because we have machines that will do the work for us, even though it's reducing the need to work, it also increases the feeling, the need, to work. And so we technically could work less under capitalism, but we feel like we have to work more.

Ellie: 32:08

Oh my God. Yeah. I just feel like a piece of absolute crap if I'm not like putting in the hours every day, right. There was this strong affective effect that it has on us.

David: 32:23

And this psychological component for it is what becomes particularly tricky when we internalize this need to work at all times, because it means that we no longer have the ability to inhabit time in a way that develops the person like the ancient Greeks did. Because we experience any time that we spend with our friends, with our loved ones, um, looking at art, going to galleries, as time that could have been monetized, but wasn't.

Ellie: 32:53

And even if I'm going to a gallery with friends, it's like, well, what am I getting out of this? Is it increasing my value as a person?

David: 33:02

Now, Ellie, if we pause for a moment here, you know, we've talked about capitalism, and we've talked about temporality. What are ways in which one could potentially, theoretically, just in a hypothetical world, combat this temporality that has suddenly taken over our experience, which is the temporality of late capitalism as we've described it. So what are ways in which someone could, or could someone, resist this specific model of time?

Ellie: 33:36

*There are none / we're doomed.*

David: 33:39

Is that a song that I don't know?

Ellie: 33:42

I just made it up.

David: 33:43

Oh, okay. Great. For a minute, I thought you knew a song that's specifically related to this that I am not familiar with.

Ellie: 33:51

Yeah. Yeah. This malady of time which Franco Berardi, better known as Bifo, talks about as dyschronia, this idea that we are- we're sick of time and we're sick with time. I mean, for one, I'm really interested in the way that the pandemic has actually dissociated us from our capitalist mode of time as a quantifiable resource. I think a lot of folks have been thrust back on themselves through quarantine by the absence of a packed social calendar and a packed work calendar. So I'm wondering if COVID has already forced us into different ways of experiencing time that have liberatory potential. And I definitely don't want to make it seem like, "Oh, COVID is secretly great." I mean, this is like a totally shit time. 200,000 people have died. Like this is total bullshit. And is there some glimmer of a new relation of ourselves to time here.

David: 34:52

You know, I've- I've heard this argument from a couple of people from some friends and some academics, and I'm not sure about it because at least from the people in my immediate surroundings, it's almost as if COVID has only justified capitalist temporality in the sense that people can't wait to go back to the way things used to be, right? Because it was not a chosen experiment, if we want to call it-- that a social experiment. It was not something that was taken on with any sense of control or authenticity or resoluteness on our part, um, and so what I am seeing is a lot of people who, already operating under a capitalist framework and already feeling the pressure of economic survival, are thrown into this different temporality, typically middle class people that have the privilege of staying at home and not going to work. Um, but again, I wonder whether this experience of COVID, has revolutionary potential or if it's making us yearn for the regimentation of- of capitalism.

Ellie: 36:09

Yeah. I hear you on that. Definitely. I do think there is this urge to go back to the way things were, but I also think that many people have been led to reassess their previously packed schedule and start to enjoy certain features of quarantine. So for instance, in her book, Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman talks about how quality time cannot be accelerated, so it has this potential to resist the logic of capitalism. And quality time in the American, nuclear family imaginary is often figured as time spent with children or loved ones. COVID has forced much more of that, although it's also led to this sort of frenzied pace of life for parents where they're trying to balance work and their family life. And so, again, I don't want to glamorize it, but I do think that quality time has emerged more during COVID. And I know in my neighborhood, for instance, my apartment building has started doing a weekly happy hour. We blocked out, using this sort of capitalist mode of blocking out time,

5:00 to 7: 37:15

00 PM every Friday is our time to share a happy hour together. And the time that we actually spend together really does resist the accelerated time. We're just kind of shooting the shit. We don't have that much in common. We're a very multigenerational group of people, but our commitment to showing up weekly, and just kind of catching up, even though we have so little that's new going on in our lives, I think is a celebration or a festival, an event in the way that Guy Debord talks about moving away from a Society of the Spectacle and towards cyclical time. He talks about specular time versus cyclical time. I think cyclical time as figured by the weekly happy hour I shared with my neighbors really has for me resisted my drive towards productivity.

David: 38:06

I have heard about people engaging in similar new projects with those around them and forging new relationships with people that perhaps typically they would not interact with at all, like their neighbors. I've also known of people who have experienced COVID as a truly alienating, um, experience of time, uh, in part, because of the additional pressures that it brings with it. So it's very hard from the standpoint of the person to separate the good from the bad when everything is thrown together. So I wonder, for example, how much quality time you can spend with your kids, even if your kids are at home all day, if you're unsure where your next paycheck is going to come from. The economic conditions, the social conditions on the ground already prevent the production of what we would call quality time. Um, but- but I do want to remain hopeful about the ways in which the experience of confinement can at least force us to question the naturalness of our typical habits surrounding time.

Ellie: 39:16

Yeah. And I think that double edged sword that you're indicating, David, is really nicely put in a article that came out in Noema Mag in June. There's an article by Venkatesh Rao about time in the pandemic that I think indicates precisely what you're talking about. So Rao first says that pandemic time is a subjectively colored time. And that makes me think, like, see, great, we're getting this subjectively colored, textured element of time back that we lost through the accelerated, quantitatively measured time of late capitalism.

But then Rao goes on to say this: 39:51

"Even within a single apartment building neighbors experience different temporalities. In one unit, we have a single extrovert experiencing the acute trauma of being forced to work alone from home. Next door, we have parents suddenly juggling childcare and work. At the end of the hall is an immigrant using WhatsApp to track the fate of family members on the other side of the globe who are suddenly physically unreachable due to travel bans. Even members of a single household experience pandemic time differently."

David: 40:22

And I think that notion of the multiplicity of the experience of time is important, and it makes me think about a tweet that I read a couple of days ago, where somebody said, you know, thinking about the pandemic from the standpoint of my five-year-old child made me realize something. And that is that I pulled my kid out of school one day. He could not quite understand why. And he's never seen his friends ever since. There is a fundamentally childlike experience of time that is untranslatable into an adult experience of time, and I think that there is a middle class experience of time under COVID that is untranslatable to a low-class or a high-class experience of time. And some people have made this argument that if you think about the temporality of COVID, it really comes in at least three layers. You have the rich people, in their vacation homes, essentially having the time of their lives because they don't have to worry about anything-

Ellie: 41:28

Or at the very least biding their time.

David: 41:30

Yes exactly. Then you have the middle class, hectic experience of time of the people who are working from home, dealing with kids from home, but who don't have quite enough money to afford the space or the care that would make things a lot easier. And then finally you have the working-class experience of time: the people for whom COVID did not even mean confinement, the people who are essential workers, and this whole time have been working. So the people who haven't even had the opportunity to experience that thing that the middle class fetishizes as the opportunity to reinvent your values during COVID.

Ellie: 42:10

I want to be really careful about this because I think the points you make with respect to class are absolutely fundamental here. But if we could find some sort of solidarity in the fact that we are experiencing this time all together, even if it is showing up for us differently, we could potentially take a broader look at the issues with capitalist time in general and seize the means of production baby!

David: 42:39

Well, hopefully that would be the way in which history is written 30 years from now that COVID happened. It was a horrible thing, and also later, the Marxist communist revolution arrived.

Ellie: 42:57

I do think if we want to say that there is promise in this at all, it is in the fact that lived time obtrudes when our clock time habits are disrupted. When suddenly, a meeting is canceled, I feel a new lease on the next hour. I can sort of do what I want with it and that might encourage me to live in the present in a way that I otherwise would not have, because the bottom line is that when we don't know how to fill time, time suddenly fills us. We are pumped with time.

David: 43:34

You're the one that said it fills us, so-

Ellie: 43:40

I know! I didn't mean it in a gross way! Okay, I gotta go.

David: 43:44

Okay.

Ellie: 43:45

Okay. Bye! We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 43:55

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 44:03

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our Production Assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 44:16

Thanks so much for joining us today!