At this point, it is vital to outline three deeply intertwined (and admittedly jargonistic) concepts which receive their fullest philosophical exposition in Chapter 2, but which guide this thesis as a whole. The first of these is what, in the existential-phenomenological tradition, is usually referred to as ‘temporalisation’. Broadly speaking, temporalisation means the active production of a dynamic difference and relation between the past, the present, and the future. In this regard, if ‘temporality’ signifies a dynamic relation between the past, the present, and the future, temporalisation is the active production of temporality. This is the sense in which, after Martin Heidegger, the movement of existence ‘temporalises itself’ – it is the creation of the three primary coordinates of human time. The concept of temporalisation is quite crucial, because it is the philosophical basis upon which the possibility of a temporal reading depends. Insofar as a ‘temporal reading’ of anything – a concept, a practice, a phenomenon, etc. – is sustainable, it must provide an account of temporalisation in order to ground its reading. This dovetails with the previously stated aim of destabilising the dominant temporality of Historical Materialism (the linear, progressive time of historicism). The concept of temporalisation is inherently critical: it upends how we (to use a Heideggerian expression) ‘initially and for the most part’ comprehend action, activity, and the act themselves.<sup>15</sup> Temporally speaking, the sense in which Marx’s concept of ‘the economic’ is an inherently critical concept – the sense in which ‘the social production of the means of life’ is an inherently critical way of configuring history – comes to light through the concept of temporalisation.
The second concept which guides this thesis is a concept without which history cannot be thought, and is therefore a concept without which we cannot develop a concept of historical time in Marx. This concept is totalisation. The problem of totalisation is at the heart of every modern, post-Enlightenment philosophical conception of history (this includes the materialist concept of history). This is because – as Chapter 2 contends – every modern concept of history is, whether it registers it or not, a concept of history structured by the idea that history is the ongoing totalisation of the time of all human lives. That is, totalisation is what gives the notion of ‘history’ as a collective singular – as a whole – its intelligibility. As we will see, coming to grips with the concept of totalisation – and this comes out of our analysis of Heidegger and Sartre in Chapter 2 – is predicated on dissociating ourselves from the ordinary understanding of totalisation. Broadly speaking, totalisation is not, as it is often understood to be, a process of unification that is subsequent to an existing state of difference. Totalisation is not the adding up of innumerable multiplicities into a single whole. Rather, totalisation is the production of difference, a unification whose unity is the process of its differentiation. In this way, a ‘whole has unity precisely because this unity is the process of its differentiation. Totalisation must be conceived at multiple levels – at the level of the individual, at the level of the social, and at the level of history itself. It is therefore not only necessary to speak of ‘individual totalisation (this is the sense in which an individual act totalises the material field of which it is a part), as opposed to ‘social totalisation’ and ‘historical totalisation’, but equally to address the relation between these different levels. Whereas, as we will see, Heidegger’s work does not adequately address this relation, Sartre’s work does. Specifically, Sartre provides a framework through which ‘historical totalisation’ might be understood as the ongoing totalisation of all individual and social totalisations. To put this within the terms of The German Ideology, we might state then that ‘history’ is the ongoing totalisation of each and every ‘first historical act’ (considered from the standpoint of both its individual actors as well as the sociality of the act itself). It is also necessary to state here that there is an indissociable relationship between totalisation and temporalisation. In short, the very intelligibility of temporalisation proceeds from totalisation. Totalisation is the material basis from which temporalisation is itselfa unification whose unity is the process of its differentiation (in this case the differentiation between the past, the present, and the future). Thus if history is the ongoing totalisation of each and every first historical act, it is likewise the ongoing temporalisation of each and every first historical act. As we will see, the first historical act – the social production of the means of life – provides us with a possible model of historical time, but only inasmuch as all first historical acts are themselves totalised and temporalised.
<sup>15</sup> On rare occasions, ‘temporalisation’ will be employed to denote a temporal reading itself, such that one might ‘temporalise a concept of history’, such that ‘temporalisation’ renders explicit the concept’s implicit temporality, renders explicit the implicit temporalities of the practices and phenomena that this concept registers. However, the vast majority of the use of ‘temporalisation’ in this thesis is faithful to the existential-phenomenological tradition: it denotes the production of temporality by the act itself.
6