Time Interrupted

This category is a collections of ruptures of temporality and discontinuation, and displays more theoretical texts on the interruption of linear progressive time.

The Coming Insurrection – The Invisible Committee (2009)

1990-2010, Capitalism, Date, Defining the Enemy, History/Theory, Subjectives of Refusal, The Police, Theory, Time Interrupted, Workers

Now classic text by French collective – The Invisible Committee describing the present impasse through seven circles of hell and the way out through the insurrectionary commune

The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible.
It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated
both authority and the need for authority, property
and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the
desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary
process carries within itself the form of its victory, or
that of its defeat. Destruction has never been enough
to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s
done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly
provoke the return of what has been crushed.
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Radical Feminism as Social Arrest: A Kinetic Analysis – Audrey Love (2016)

History, History/Theory, Time Interrupted

Thesis examining U.S. radical feminism as the arrest of patriarchal order, gaze, and time

Radical feminists were adamant about their overarching anti-establishment ethos and they believed that the liberal quest for concessions from the United States’ hierarchically, bureaucratically organized political system merely confirmed the legitimacy and dominance of a political order comprised by men and sustained by male values.

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The Kinetics of Our Discontent – Mehmet Dosemeci (2020)

History, History/Theory, Theory, Time Interrupted, Uncategorized

Mehmet Dosemeci questions why we have come to understand the history of social struggle through the category of movement and discusses the complicity of movements with the social order they are struggling against. Offers an alternate history of social struggle as the arrest or interruption of the existing order.

Why do we think of social struggles as movements? What is in motion and where is it going? Has struggle been thought and practiced otherwise? Not as movement but as disruption, arrest, stasis? If so, what are struggles trying to stop? Asking these questions pushes us to think about struggle kinetically: to analyze social struggle through the register of motion and its interruption.
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Simulations and Simulacra by Jean Baudrillard (1981)

1946-1989, Disruptive Spaces, Time Interrupted
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This treatise written by Jean Baudrillard introduces the idea that reality and a constructed form of reality are unable to be distinguished from each other. He introduces the idea of the “hyperreal” which is a creation of a new real that is not based on reality. He explains the ways images, culture and media work to define simulacra.

This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.

Radical America: The Guardian: From Old to New Left (1968)

1946-1989, Date, Disruptive Spaces, Institutions, Students, Subjectives of Refusal, Time Interrupted

Started by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the late 1960s, Radical America was a magazine publication which focused on the many goals and updates of the specifically campus-based New Left. “The Guardian: From Old to New Left” edition of Radical America, published in April of 1968, had an emphasis on the evolution from the “old left” to the “new left”, with a focus on the differences in tactics and targets between the Old and New Left.

Radical America: “The Guardian: From Old to New Left”Download

Lets Spit on Hegel – Carla Lonzi (1970)

Defining the Enemy, Patriarchy, Time Interrupted, Women

Carla Lonzi, leading member of the Italian feminist collective Rivolta Femminile, 1970 pamphlet against patriarchal thought, history, and time. In this text Lonzi attacks Hegel (and Marx’s) notions of antagonism, progress, and historical development and calls for a subaltern history of women through the recovery of her perishable traces.

We consider incomplete any history which is based on nonperishable traces.

The future of the world does not lie in moving continually forwards along a path mapped out by man’s desire for overcoming difficulties.

Not being trapped within the master-slave dialectic, we become conscious of ourselves; we are the Unexpected Subject.

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Theses on the Philosophy of History – Walter Benjamin (1940)

Time Interrupted
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Classic text by Walter Benjamin, Marxist Jewish-German philosopher loosely affiliated with the Frankfurt School. Written in 1940 shortly before Benjamin committed suicide at the Franco-Spanish border fleeing Nazi invasion.

In the text, Benjamin critiques the idea social progress and lays forth a revolutionary temporality that connects past and present struggles allowing for their mutual recognition and redemption.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

[He] grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one…blasting open the continuum of history…Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

The Calendar – Report (1793)

1700-1830s, Time Interrupted

This report, submitted in 1793, describes the arguments for replacing the Gregorian Calendar with the Republican Calendar. The change of the conceptualization of time was a disruption of society and everyday life.

The prejudices and lies of both the throne and the church sullied each page of the calendar we were using.

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Ten-Point Program (1966)

Defining the Enemy, Disruptive Spaces, Time Interrupted, White Supremacy

Published in 1966 by the Black Panther Party, written by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, “The Ten Point Program” was a statement of their goals and organization. Intended to be ten points which would guide the everyday actions of Black Panther Party members, the program was inspired by Marxist thought

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