William Paris, Undisciplining Time?: Critique, Utopia, and the Prospects of Life beyond Capital

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Undisciplining Time?: Critique, Utopia, and the Prospects of Life beyond Capital
No doubt capital/capitalism organizes and disciplines social time. How long people work, how well they save for retirement, how much they are "worth" over the course of their lives are just a sample of the facets of social life in the longue durée of capital accumulation. Our time, in the final analysis, is not really our own. The domination of time is one of the most crucial sources of power for the reproduction of capitalist forms of life. How capital organizes time has shown itself to be increasingly irrational and destructive for social, political, and economic life. In this seminar, I will offer the hypothesis that a critical theory of utopia, for our time, must center how capital's mechanism of time-discipline reproduce unfreedom. Doing so will clarify why struggles for a viable life beyond capital must undo its capacity to uproot and transform social time in the process of accumulation. Drawing on the work of James Boggs, E.P. Thompson, Rahel Jaeggi, and Martin Hägglund I will argue that utopia, as a critical concept, introduces a new and as yet undisciplined form of time as the horizon of freedom.
William Paris
Assistant Professor
Philosophy
University of Toronto