Ouphilpo

At this point, not only have the material lives of the worker-commodities been sold out to the spectacular cultural monopoly, but we see time itself as subject to the spectacle, rendering what was once solely the sensory data of passage into a purely quantitative series of entities. Surely this follows suit with the lives of the worker-commodity, because as both life and time are subject to the spectacle, they both lose all quality and become purely quantitative, reducing the worker’s life to time or time left to spend. Debord denotes this notion of time-commodity as ‘pseudo-cyclical time,’ in which “the modern economic survival–of that augmented survival in which daily lived experience embodies no free choices and is subject, no longer to the natural order, but to a pseudo-nature constructed by means of alienated labor” (Debord 110-11). The cycle in which the days wax and wane, those natural vestiges, have come to mirror the waxing and waning of the work day–”the time founded on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity” (Debord 111). Within the spectacular society of modern production, time is money, life is time, and life is money. “Modern society’s obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered soup, has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours daily watching television” (Debord 112).