Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

years old, a hundred years old. This is the time of existenceseparated-from-constitution,
the time of things, for which one
day is the same as the last, or the next. The chair does not create,
it does not fall in love, it does not rage and scream. Chair-time is
clock-time, thing-time, object-time. Thing-time is the negation of
person-time, object-time is the denial of subject-time. Clock time
is the time of our helplessness, of our subordination to things.
[t is the time not of living, but of survival, of plodding on from
day to day, the time of dullness.
Clock-time is the time-in-which we live. We live and act
within time: 'From the tick to the tock, clock time measures
human activity regardless of specific contents. In clock time, the
expenditure of labour does not occur in time. It occurs within
time' (Bonefeld 2010). Time contains our lives, a framework over
which we have no control. With luck, we will live for eighty or
even ninety years: that is the measured span within which we
live. This is the time of identity. Time, separated from doing, is
made up of identical units, units of identity: self-contained units
separate from one another, units in which we are contained.6
Clock-time is the time of institutionalisation. Institutionalisation
is an extension of the separation of existence from
constitution. We create something and it acquires an existence
independent from us, a 'life' of its own. We constitute a political
party and the party goes on existing, claiming that it represents
us, that it still has the same relation to us as in the moment of its
creation. We create a state and the state exists independent of us,
with its own time, history, commemorations. We get married and
our relationship of love acquires its own existence separate from
the feelings of the moment, acquires a temporality measured
by anniversaries and no longer by seconds of infinite fragility.
Prison is the supreme expression of the separation of time from
meaning: prisoners simply 'do time'. The time they 'do' is totally
outside their control.
Clock-time is the time of a world we do not control, a world
that does not respond to our passions and intensities. It is
time-outside-us. It is historical time, but the time of a historyoutside-us,
the history of a world that is alien to us. This is real
history, the real history of a world we really do not control: a
history measured in years, a history of successive structures, a
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