{"id":16967,"date":"2013-09-19T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16967"},"modified":"2018-10-08T22:17:13","modified_gmt":"2018-10-09T02:17:13","slug":"timeisvalue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/09\/19\/timeisvalue\/","title":{"rendered":"Time Is’t Money, It’s Value"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span> _____<\/p>\n

___Danny Howard, a DJ on BBC Radio 1, has a weekly feature called \u201cPush The Tempo.\u201d Here, he takes several remixes of the same song and puts them in order of increasing tempo (BPM). It sounds like you\u2019re listening to one song or mix that gradually speeds up. Or rather, the song \u201cdevelops\u201d (in the traditional musicological sense of elaborating a basic theme and becoming more complex) by progressing toward a temporal telos\u00a0<\/em>(ancient Greek for goal\/end)–instead of dialectically achieving \u201cAbsolute Spirit,\u201d these mixes sound like they\u2019re ratcheting up to something like absolute speed. In this way, the mix\u2019s aesthetic is a bit too literally \u201caccelerationist\u201d (the actual speeding up of the songs performs, aesthetically, the moves that accelerationist ideology idealizes, politically). Effectively, the mix is also a tour of various subgenres of EDM, house, & techno. Insofar as each of these subgenres has a rather narrowly-drawn range of standard tempi, the only way to dramatically increase the tempo of the overall mix is to begin with a relatively slower genre (sometimes even sub-120 BPM) \u00a0and work up to something jungle-y or gabber-y that conventionally approaches 200+ BPM.<\/p>\n

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\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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These mixes are really fascinating on a lot of levels, but what I want to focus on here is what they tell us about how people listen<\/em> to these mixes, or what people listen for<\/em> in listening to them. It\u2019s pretty obvious that the primary aesthetic feature in these mixes is tempo, speed, or pace. And it\u2019s not just tempo per se, but increasingly accelerating tempo. That\u2019s what people are listening for. And we listen for tempo because that\u2019s what the mixes\u2019 formal structure foregrounds. Traditionally, pop songs use a dualist harmonic logic (consonance\/dissonance) to build and resolve tension. These mixes, however, are monological<\/em>–tempo is a continuum, not a fast\/slow binary–and they can\u2019t use traditional same\/other dynamics to elaborate or develop the song\u2019s main theme. So, instead, they develop the song by putting it through its paces. Each mix traces a measured trajectory through the whole range of the continuum (i.e., the set of mixes available for Howard to string together).<\/p>\n

People used to be tuned in to conflict and dissonance–from the late 17th c through the 20th, harmonic dissonance was the main source of musical development and pleasure in both European art music and blues-based pop musics like jazz and rock. But now people are attuned to tempo. And by \u201cpeople\u201d I mean the general mainstream aesthetic norms in Anglo-American pop\/dance music. DJs have long used the \u201cpush the tempo\u201d strategy, but now it\u2019s become part of the mainstream musical consciousness, a hegemonic \u201cattunement\u201d or, to use Sara Ahmed\u2019s term, \u201corientation.\u201d \u201cPush The Tempo\u201d is, after all, a BBC Radio 1 weekly segment, and that\u2019s what makes it so interesting. If it\u2019s featured that prominently and regularly on British national radio, then this attunement to speed, pace, and tempo must be an important aspect dominant aesthetic and epistemic norms. What does this attunement say about, well, how we\u2019re tuned? About what sorts of values and epistemologies orient us to the world?<\/p>\n

Contemporary capitalism requires knowledge-workers (and, if we use the internet, we\u2019re knowledge\/information workers, even if we aren\u2019t paid) to monitor, assess, and optimize their rate of production. Tempo and pacing is everything.<\/p>\n

As Adorno & Horkheimer noted in their famous \u201cCulture Industry<\/a>\u201d chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the logic of work comes to dominate the organization and experience of leisure. Leisure itself becomes productive, the site of surplus-value extraction.<\/p>\n

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work…mechanization has such power over a man\u2019s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations (DE 137).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neoliberalism has upgrade the mechanized production of commodities and commodified labor(ers) that Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed in their text. Nowadays, we don\u2019t produce commodities, but capital itself, usually in the form of our own human or social capital. So, to paraphrase Adorno & Horkheimer, self-capitalization has such a power over one\u2019s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the production of amusement goods, that one\u2019s experiences are inevitably afterimages of the self-capitalization process itself…what sinks in is the logic of investment.<\/em> This logic of investment is what ties the means of economic production (e.g., finance) to the means of aesthetic production and social reproduction. In other words, we\u2019re tuned into musical tempo because amusement–here, Saturday night dance radio–is the prolongation of \u201cwork.\u201d Capitalism trains, rewards, and requires us to pay careful attention to the rate<\/em> at which we prosume.<\/p>\n

Tempo and pacing are central to the logic of investment<\/strong>. This idea of tempo is a new, upgraded concept of time, different from traditional notions of labor-time. In commodity capitalism, time is what makes labor exchangeable. Labor-time parses out work in hourly units and assigns each unit of work a specific exchange value (qualitatively indexed to the minimum wage). Labor can\u2019t be commodified without mediation by time. To be compared to money and assigned an exchange value, labor must be parsed into quantifiable chunks. That\u2019s what time does. Commodity capital uses time to mediate labor, out of which it in turn extracts surplus value. Investment capital, however, extracts surplus value out of time. Labor collapses into time, just as production collapses into consumption. The point of leisure\/work is to make time more intensely productive. If you can\u2019t make time move faster, you can make it a better return on your investment–getting, for example, more beats out of every passing minute.<\/p>\n

This is what economist and cultural theorist Jacques Attali argued in his 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music<\/em><\/a>. He argues that records (i.e., musical recordings, which, at that time, were generally vinyl or tape) are not commodities but stockpiles of use-time. Commodities are vehicles for \u201cexchange-time,\u201d that is, labor-time expressed in monetary terms.* Records, however, aren\u2019t primarily valued as commodities. When we buy a record, we \u201cbuy recordings of other people\u2019s time\u201d (101)–not the labor-time it took to transform some chemicals into a vinyl record with a song scratched into it, or even the labor-time it took to record the song scratched into the vinyl. We are buying time itself–\u201deventually,\u201d we tell ourselves, \u201cI will have time to listen to this record\u201d (or, perhaps more familiar to academics, \u201ceventually I will have time to read this book or article that for now will continue to sit on my shelf like it has for the last six months\u201d). \u00a0Recordings are vehicles for \u201cuse-time\u201d–the time it takes to \u201clisten\u201d to the record, to \u201cuse other people\u2019s time\u201d (101). Records are stockpiles of time; record collections are massive stockpiles of other people\u2019s time. As Attali explains,<\/p>\n

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Just as money constitutes a stockpile of exchange-time by registering the relative value of things, repetition constitutes a stockpile of use-time by registering their absolute values (Noise 125).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When we buy a record, we are buying the time we<\/em> hope to invest in ourselves by listening to\/using the record. Time isn\u2019t a measure of value, it is value as such<\/em>. In other words, time isn\u2019t money, it\u2019s human capital. We\u2019re using money to buy more time, which we then invest in ourselves: what better expression of one\u2019s social capital than the hipness of one\u2019s record collection\/iTunes library? Use-time expresses the intensity of labor invested, or potentially invest-able, in an object, service, or practice. We intensify our stockpile of time by buying more of it, in the form of, for example, musical recordings.**<\/p>\n

Human capital isn\u2019t a commodity, it\u2019s an investment. That is, you extract surplus value from it in the same way you extract value from a stock or a mutual fund or whatever other financial instrument bankers use to make money from money. Instead of exchanging time for money (whereupon someone else extracts even more money from that time by exchanging our alienated labor for even more money), we invest more time in ourselves (e.g., through education) so that our time itself becomes more intensely, powerfully productive. Surplus value is generated from investment rather than exchange. To do this, we have to optimize the pace at which we use things, to get a \u201cflow\u201d going. (Rob Horning has been talking to the people behind Slots Baby Casino<\/a> about this in his recent tumblr posts<\/a> on gambling as a structure of subjectivity\/capital production.) To maximize their value-output, prosumption processes need to be both efficient and sustainable. We have to watch out so that we don\u2019t produce a disabling amount of waste (inefficiency), or overdrive the production process itself. We have to hit the right balance between production and consumption. Or, as Attali puts it, \u201cCrisis is no longer a breakdown, a rupture, as in representation, but a decrease in the efficiency of the production of demand, an excess of repetition. Metaphorically, it is like cancer\u201d (Noise 127; emphasis mine). The problem with cancer isn\u2019t growth, but the rate of growth–it doesn\u2019t know when to stop or slow down.<\/p>\n

If our leisure time is the site of capitalist surplus value production, and that value production is regulated as a dynamic flow, then tempo and pace are key indices of our relationship to value<\/em>. Tempo and pace are primary features of the logic of investment. \u201cWork\u201d trains us to pay special attention to tempo, and this habit follows us into our leisure time.<\/p>\n

This habit isn\u2019t limited to our listening practices. \u201cHow much time will I have to put into this?\u201d is an increasingly explicit criterion we use to choose among leisure activities. For example, as Nathan Jurgenson and Nick Seaver were discussing the other day on Twitter, the popular blog\/content site Medium<\/a> includes approximate read-times in the headers to its articles. What matters about the article isn\u2019t so much what it says, or the perspective from which it was written (which is what the header or byline usually indicates), but how big of an investment it is on your part. We don\u2019t want to know what it\u2019s about as much as we want to know how much use-time we\u2019ll have to put into it. To decide whether it\u2019s a good investment, you need to know how long it will take you to read–are you getting a good return on your use-time investment?<\/p>\n

\u201cPush The Tempo\u201d and Medium are two examples of how the logic of investment manifests as an attunement to tempo or pace. If you can think of others, I\u2019d love to hear about them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* Money is what made irreducibly different things comparable–they could all be reduced, in their various ways, to exchange-value. But, as Attali argues, the means of production have advanced so far that we can actually make things identical and compatible: \u201crepetition goes much further, when reproduction becomes possible for an object and no longer only for the standard [ie money]\u201d (Noise 101). We don\u2019t need money to serve as a common standard because everything is always-already standardized. For example, everything on the internet is, at some point, reducible to binary code.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

** One significant advantage of Attali\u2019s account is that it helps us explain the \u201cvalue\u201d of musical recordings now that, in 2013, a whole lot of musical consumption bypasses commodification entirely (unpurchased downloads, freemium streaming services, YouTube, etc.). Attali\u2019s treatment of recordings as stockpiles of use-time is one way to theorize the economic and social function of records as something other or more than fetishized commodities.<\/p>\n

You can fire off appropriately-paced comments to Robin on twitter: @doctaj.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

_____ ___Danny Howard, a DJ on BBC Radio 1, has a weekly feature called \u201cPush The Tempo.\u201d Here, he takes several remixes of the same song and puts them in order of increasing tempo (BPM). It sounds like you\u2019re listening to one song or mix that gradually speeds up. Or rather, the song \u201cdevelops\u201d (in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[23023,98,18492,115,23021,957,23022,10750],"class_list":["post-16967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-attali","tag-capitalism","tag-medium","tag-music","tag-push-the-tempo","tag-time","tag-use-time","tag-value"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16967"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23524,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16967\/revisions\/23524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}