#time's carcass

[foxxf1nch]

An attack (character page) of Edith for @times-carcass / @paintedpawcat !

[mason-bees]

Art Fight attack of Edith Archell from @times-carcass for @paintedpawcat!

[unpoliceyourmind]

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes, ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass.’ This appears, initially, as just a conveniently catastrophic metaphor. However, we might read it in three ways. 1 In the loosest interpretation, that takes it primarily as a ramped up modifier of the preceding sentence concerning how ‘one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour,’ man is ‘time’s carcass’ insofar as man’s specificity is killed, leaving man a carcass animated by value and made to labor, simply a unit of potential activity subordinated to labor time. 2 If we recall the particularity of form and content in Marx, however, we approach a different perspective, a trajectory sketched in a single sentence. The active development, via laboring of man as labor power (the content)150 produces the material conditions for labor time (the form). However, the perversity of capital is that this form does not remain adequate to its content. It becomes divorced from it and increasingly autonomous. But this is not the story of a form that simply takes leave from its originary content and ‘becomes everything,’ simply dominant. Rather, it comes to determine the content in a constant passage back and forth, to force it to accord with the development of that form: any opposition between form and content becomes increasingly incoherent. As such, man is time’s carcass in that living labor power is valued only in accordance with its form: it is that form, fully developed into the general equivalence of value, alone which is of worth. Man, the original source of that form, is a husk dominated by an abstraction with no single inventor. Form fully reenters and occupies the content as if it were dead matter, incapable of generating further adequate forms. And when it is productive to do so, time makes those bones dance. 3 Man – or rather, the human as more than the common man of capital – is that which is born in the death of time. It is the leftover of the collapse of capital, and it is the faint prospect, in the decomposition of the dominant social relation (the representation that mediates between labor power and labor time), of an existence that outlives capital.

Evan Calder Williams, "Fire to the Commons" (in Communization and its Discontents)