Spectacular Time and Comfort Thesis

For todays session on Guy Deboards 'The Spectacle' I read chapter 6- 'Spectacular Time'. Upon reading over it for the first time, my reaction was a mental image of a cartoon question mark, and a very confused facial expression. Reading it over for the second time in more detail, I began to understand that he was discussing different 'categories' of time and their relation to human existence. From the second reading I extracted the impression that he was discusssing time as being a commodified, non human entity, and that humans are divided into workers and producers. The producers control the time of the workers, and rather than paying them with money for labour, they are rewarded with recreational time when they are not working. He talks about holidays and annual events as being false, periods of time that mark nothing other than human publicity of them. This ties in with his idea that only the present exists, and the past cannot live on in our memories, therefore memories do not exist in time.

Moving on to the class discussion, and gaining an understanding of the essence of the text as a whole, I still do not feel able to analyze the chapter in definite detail, however I did extract a better grasp of the meaning of the chapter I read, and began to interpret what Deboard is saying as the following:

Time is something that both exists and doesn't exist at the same time. It is a natural passage that cannot be denied, yet it is not human, and the 'boundries' that humans apply to define it are false. By boundries I refer to dates, monthes, years and public holidays. I think what he is saying is that these are all just names that humans apply to the concept of time as a way of trying to define, as it is something so vast and undefineable that humans cannot fully comprehend it.

From what Deboard says, time is an ever changing and developing 'present', and I have gained a better understanding of this by relating it to theories I have been reading about Guthries comfort thesis and familiarity thesis. Roughly summerized- both terms refer to anthropomorphism as the act of humans applying humanized mental models of the world to interpret unfamiliar concepts / objects / events. Comfort thesis suggests that the reason for this is that it's a way to make humans feel better about themselves, and more secure in our environment. It helps stoke our egos as a species. Familiarity thesis suggests the reason for this is to comprehend and control things we don't understand, or fear, to try and find some sense in them and make outrselves feel more secure in our existance.

I think these ideas can be used to interpret what Deboard is saying as the idea that the word time is a label which refers to a humanized understanding of something undefinable. This label is an attempt to understand the concept of time better, from a humanized perspective. The reason he refers to it as a 'spectacle', is because we as humans have no real control over it, and though we make a show of measuring it, using it, labelling it and talking about it, we can never fully control it.

In conclusion..... the text was very heavy in terms of comprehendability, and though I did extract some ideas from it as described above. I'm completely willing to admit my interpretation does not fully address everything he says, and may even miss the point he was trying to make entirely. Never the less, it was my interpretation, and I think the idea that humans try to define time in order to control it is an interesting one. Perhaps it stems from fear of death.