An intrahistorical rejection of history

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is brought under the sway of this time's development. But this history that us everywhere simultaneously the same is as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production, time cut up into equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and this also to the global spectacle.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 111

SimAmerica

What can be seen in these quick glimpses of emergent SimAmerica is a place where conventional politics is being increasingly emptied of substance and any presumption of factuality or objectivity; where a powerfully conservative hyperreality absorbs the real-and-imagined in its own skein of simulations; where representative democracy is being rechanneled into a politics of strategic representation, dissembling reality into competitive image-bites and electronic populism; where trickle-down economics is practiced without blush or question despite all the empirical evidence of its failures; and where "political correctness" and other brilliantly devised hypersimulations are spun into ever-absorptive and appealing metafrauds.

Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis (Blackwell Publishing, 2000) p. 347

Atemporal futurism is gearing up to swamp the secular shores of general history

Global warming on the one hand, economic overheating on the other: honestly, disaster anticipation is becoming so widespread we'll soon need to set up meteopolitics in place of a geopolitics that is obviously too 'down-to-earth' now that atemporal futurism is gearing up to swamp the secular shores of general history before too long!

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 94-95

The supremacy of space over time

With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space. It is recorded solely on measuring-instruments, on clocks, that are as isolated and functionally specialized as this time itself. Lived time loses its form and its social interest — with the exception, that is, of time spent working. Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as threatening and dangerous (to power). The primacy of the economic and above all of the political implies the supremacy of space over time.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991) pp. 95-96

Reality is not mathematical

The faith in the financial balance which is imposed on the European population is based on a philosophical misunderstanding: the promoters of financial stability think that the social body and mathematics belong to the same sphere. They are wrong, as reality is not mathematical, and mathematics is not the law of reality, but a language whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 33

Var i vår omgivning finner vi en modell för den mänskliga organismens komplexitet, för levande varelsers samspel? Vad lär oss att vara människor på samma vis som havet är hav? Mänsklig förändring, mänsklig tillblivelse, söker sin analogi i knoppande träd, lövens fall vid höstningen, dagsmeja över snö, smältande is och frysande vattendrag. I frånvaro av detta ersätts växandet med tillväxt, mallen för formation av mänsklig vuxenhet blir ekonomins cancerartade expansion: ett ego i ständig utvidgning, växande inte genom förening utan genom övertagande. Barnet klarmrar sig fast vid kramdjuret, vid det uppstoppade djuret, vid husdjuret. Där han förväntar sig frändskap och ömsesidighet möter han en slät projektionsyta, en friktionsfri icke-relation att förfoga över efter eget tycke. Spegeln är krossad; mänsklighetens innebörd förblir oklar i ett kugghjulsuniversum av atomiska objekt med funktion som enda essens.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 24-25

The idea that generalized aggression can be refined into peaceful competition, profitable to all, is the great myth of liberalism, and it assumes that the hypothesis of the harmony of interests is proven – which is far from being the case – and that the search for wealth is an end in itself, unconnected with the will to power and the struggle for power – a notion which is immediately contradicted by observation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 75

Modern society, by 'inventing' economics – i.e. by creating an autonomous 'sphere' for the production, distribution and consumtion of material wealth, a sphere in which it is legitimate and necessary to allocate means as efficiently as possible – has reduced culture to the narrower preoccupations of the 'Ministries of Culture' possessed by many civilized nations. This reduction originates in Western metaphysics, which, since Plato, have been accustomed to splitting the unity of being into matter and spirit. This presumably means that culture becomes no more than the awareness (perhaps a false awareness) which a society has of its 'material' practices through religion, art and all its means of expression.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 39