508
PARTISAN REVIEW
The fate of time within capitalism has by no means been a
unitary one at any stage of its history, but has moved in two opposed
directions which in themselves define one of the innumerable points
of contradiction within bourgeois society. From the standpoint of
production the entire development of capital is dependent upon
controlling the temporal input of the worker, both to convert it into
a quantifiable commodity and to ensure increasing productivity.
Thus production comes to seem autonomous in capitalist society.
From this angle, a large portion of everyday life which had been
relatively undifferentiated in precapitalist society is turned into units
of productive activity-i.e., becomes
bound.
These units, and the
portion of social existence which they subtend, are drawn into the
fitful, yet inexorable development of rationality during the modern
era. It should not go without saying at this point that the sphere of
rationality so engendered is shadowed from the beginning by domi–
nation and unfreedom.
The social time split off as a result of the emergence of a distinct
sphere of productive rationality is not without an important histori–
cal fate of its own. As the province of personal life, and mainly
conducted within the worlds of the family and childhood, this
portion is characterized by possibilities for intimacy and instinctual
gratification, and consequently by an unbound temporality distinct
from that of production. Unbound time becomes the location of
desire as bound time is that of rationality. And its purest distillation
is found in the unconscious.
The distinction between these two spheres, in some measure
characteristic of all social groups, takes on a qualitati vely different
aspect in bourgeois society because of its radical alteration of work
time, the general alienation characteristic of work in capitalism and
the split between work and domesticity. As a result, personal life
within individual families becomes greatly intensified and the
realms of bound and unbound time come to seem sharpl y opposed to
one another. Indeed, a rough sort of coefficient of bound versus
unbound time can be defined for different phases in the development
of modern society.
Within this relationship the proportion of unbound time rises
as a result of the increasing productivity of labor-mediated largely
by technology-and the increasing priority given to the consump–
tion of commodities in advanced capitalist societies. A major mani–
festation of this shift has been the decline in child labor and its
replacement by an increasingly protracted and complex phase of
childhood marked by the needs of consumption and not production.
