The Tyranny of the Timepiece: Herbert Marcuse ’ s Temporal Dialectic in Eros and Civilization

1. The Tyranny of the Timepiece: Herbert Marcuse’s Temporal Dialectic in Eros and Civilization Caroline Edwards| Lecturer in English | University of Lincoln cedwards@lincoln.ac.uk

2. Clock-time (“the realm of devouring Chronos”) • broken into small and precisely measured units • disembedded from meaningful social practices, from natural seasons, and from the movement of life towards death • fetishisation of the means with which to measure time (clocks, watches, timteables, calendars bells, clock-on devices, alarms etc.) • precise timetabling (and division) of work and leisure activities • understanding of time as a resource which can be saved and consumed, deployed and exhausted – and which is ultimately managed according to units of productivity • universal synchronization of a homogeneous time-discipline • permeation of a discourse around the need • for time to be saved, organized, monitored, • regulated and timetabled • (John Urry, • Sociology Beyond Societies, p. 113)

3. The performance principle Repression of sexuality = repression of time The distribution of time plays a fundamental role in this transformation. Man exists only part-time, during the working days, as an instrument of alienated performance; the rest of the time he is free for himself. […] This free time would be potentially available for pleasure. But the pleasure principle which governs the id is “timeless” also in the sense that it militates against the temporal dismemberment of pleasure, against its distribution in small separated doses (EC 47). Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure. Time has no power over the id, the original domain of the pleasure principle. But the ego, through which alone pleasure becomes real, is in its entirety subject to time (EC 231).

4. The timeless eternity of pleasure NarcissusOrpheus “the erotic reconciliation (union) of man and nature in the aesthetic attitude, where order is beauty and work is play.” (EC 176) “the view of a non-repressive order in which the subjective and objective world, man and nature, are harmonized.” (EC 194)

5. Radical memory: redemption of the hopes of the past Dionysus is a releasing god, thus his public festival has now proved to be fit for a re-functioning, for one which is by no means clerical any more; this holiday world celebrates joys for which in fact there becomes real occasion only later, i.e. liberation of the people is anticipated. Hence the easy transition from the dance around the linden tree to that around the liberty tree of the French Revolution’ (Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2, p. 909)

6. The Great Refusal: refunctioning death as a “token of freedom” Phantasy plays a most decisive function in the total mental structure: it links the deepest layers of the unconscious with the highest products of consciousness (art), the dream with the reality; it preserves the archetypes of the genus, the perpetual but repressed ideas of the collective and individual memory, the tabooed images of freedom (EC 140-1). Eros (sexuality transformed into culture-building) Thanatos (death released from its service to repressive capitalism) Recalling the dominion of the primal pleasure principle, where freedom from want was a necessity, the id carries the memory traces of this state forward into every present future: it projects the past into the future (EC 33).

7. What do metachronous times look like in contemporary British fiction? • Framework of a narratorial space outside of time – John Burnside’s Glister (2008), Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004) • Life after death, death within life – Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010) • Exploring the dialectic between being “stuck in time” (immanent) and “outside of time” (transcendent) – Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) • Arresting time, alternative futures – Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2001) • Networking historical times (transmigration) – Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000), Marina Warner’s The Leto Bundle (2001), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2005) • Apocalyptic pasts and futures – Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004), Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World (2009)