"But we are not just witnessing a relativisation of time according to social contexts or alternatively the return to time reversibility as if reality could become entirely captured in cyclical myths. The transformation is more profound: it is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present. I argue that this is happening now not only because capitalism strives to free itself from all constraints, since this has been the capitalist system’s tendency all along, without being able fully to materialize it. Neither is it sufficient to refer to the cultural and social revolts against clock time, since they have characterized the history of the last century without actually reversing its domination, indeed furthering its logic by including clock time distribution of life in the social contract. Capital’s freedom from time and culture’s escape from the clock are decisively facilitated by new information technologies, and embedded in the structure of the network society. The transformation of time as surveyed in this chapter does not concern all processes, social groupings, and territories in our societies, although it does affect the entire planet. What I call timeless time is only the emerging, dominant form of social time in the network society, as the space of flows does not negate the existence of places. It is precisely my argument that social domination is exercised through the selective inclusion and exclusion of functions and people in different temporal and spatial frames."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesSociologists from the United StatesPeople from SpainUniversity of California, Berkeley faculty
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 433–434 as quoted in: Wayne Hope (2006) Global Capitalism and the Critique of Real Time. Sage publications. p. 289
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Manuel_Castells
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Manuel Castells
62 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Manuel Castells →
Related Quotes
""The city" is not a framework but a social practice in constant flux the more it becomes an issue, the more it is a s…"
"By social movements we mean a certain type of organisation of social practices, the logic of whose development contra…"
"We must conceive of opposition to decisions relating to urban planning as something more than "consumer-reaction" and…"
"The urban renewal programme is one of the most spectacular urban programmes to have been undertaken in Paris; it is c…"
":1) It concerns an already structured social space, of which it changes the form, the social content and/or function."
":2) It is based on public initiative, whatever the legal or financial form of the renewal agency, where private enter…"
"This book was born out of astonishment. At a time when the waves of the anti-imperialist struggle are sweeping across…"
"To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary…"
"It is a question of going beyond the description of mechanisms of interaction between locations and activities, in or…"
""Urban problems" are increasingly becoming a political issue as the socialization of the means of production is accom…"