Time under Western thought, specifically the time dictated by basic Western education, that is the linear unfolding of events catering to and servicing productivity and production, has become disjointed under a new order of movement. While the government-allowed sphere of movement generally has been serviced by a function divided into the variables of location, transport access, and time, the introduction of Covid-19 has caused a collapse of this order by largely decreasing the amount of legally accessible locations, and removing the option of transport in many locations. Location can be subdivided into three categories:
1. Destinations, which come from the goal of the traveler as a temporary endpoint in a larger set of movements, for example the spending of time at work after arriving by bus.
2. Accidental Placement, places arrived upon when setting out without destination (or arrived at despite initial decided destination) but serve as destinations, the key difference being lack of direct purpose in endpoint result.
3. Intermediary Points, the section between momentary endpoints.
While it can be said that any movement at all, such as that of the hand from the chest to the side, constitutes an infinite set of Destinations and Intermediary Points, the categories here are dictated by being marked dwellings at which a person spends time for an explicit purpose. The legally accessible set of Destinations available pre-Covid allowed for a wide range of consumer and social activities, places of production, physical labor, social spaces, places dedicated to cultural products, etc… Post-Covid we have an extremely limited set of legally allowed Destinations, most people being confined to the home/dwelling, the fear of disease transmission and/or direct government order acting as a limiting agent . There will always be trespassers, those who enter into Destinations that are illegal, but they make up a minority, rather than a majority of those under Covid.
With time previously divided into Capital related Destinations and Intermediary Points (for example the travel to work from home, then from work to home, with Accidental Destinations [can be purposeful] such as stopping at a coffee shop you pass to purchase a product) a new split of time, that where the Destination for production often is the home itself, has become prominent. Removing the division of Capital Time into events centering around production and productivity by way of the limiting Location, has distorted the way in which days of the general populous were previously dividing sequences of events in their life, causing the passage of time to seem distorted.
In comparison to the driving structure of Capital Time, the less goal-oriented Covid Time presents a freedom that has caused a new wave of “self-imposed Capital Timers,” with daily planners, goal-lists, and mantras surrounding the “improvement of the self.” Unable to cope with a lack of Destination and Accidental Placement, this sub-group needs to recreate the constraints of Capital Time, its regimented production focused passage, to avoid the feeling of waste. Artificial Destinations also includes the attempt to move the place of production to the home, with work itself being moved to a digital space accessible without leaving the home. Since the Destination becomes the point of origin (home), and time’s intertwining with travel becomes less immediately noticeable, the creation of goals for the self tied to bettering one's ability to produce, and the act of production from the home become ways to artificially construct Destinations. Artificial Destinations allow for the comfortable familiarity of Capital Time, with the added convenience of fitting into the structure of a quarantined world.
But the subject who moves from Artificial Destination to Artificial Destination does not often feel the same fulfillment, as the physical act of movement which once consumed time in great quantities, occurs less frequently. The failure of Artificial Destinations to fill up the average day, or to truly divide it with the strictness of required Destination, means that lack of forced Capital Time divisions comes to head, which has the ability to draw out the lack of Capital Time to satisfy as an interpretation of time itself.
Nothing indicates that time as a twenty-four hour productivity cycle will lose any dominant ground, but the observation of the societal attempt to reclaim and keep Capital Time in place demonstrates the resilience of Capital Time to be seen as the only currently predominant way to move through time. Common descriptions of Covid time represent it as a haze where the current calendar date holds no relevance, in essence that time has become a constant unpunctuated mesh/stream. What the person experiences is not an actual difference in the passage of time, but a difference in the way they themselves are interacting with time. Disruptions like this happen frequently on many different scales, people lose their jobs, people live in communes and farms, etc., but here a wide-spread effect relating to location and travel highlights the importance of location itself to Capital Time.
The movement from home to job, with Intermediary Travel in between, should not in of itself be confused as what creates Capital Time. Instead, these destinations act as time borders, crossable boundaries in which the subject recognizes change in time. The morning is marked by being at home, the mid-day being time spent at work just as work marks the mid-day, and finally night brings the return of home. Weekends serve as a breakdown of Capital Time in of themselves, but bookended by the reinforcement of the Capital Time schedule they fail to truly allow for the freedom necessary to weaken Capital Time’s hold. Covid-Time's reduction of the home to the one essential Destination, means the clear-cut borders of time demarcation are blurred. The blurring of the divisions of Capital Time created by Covid-Time do not break Capital Time, but disconnect the person moving through this blurred division from it. In essence, Capital Time does not rely on Destinations but those who operate under it rely on Destinations to stay locked into Capital Time.
When the demarcation given by destinations disappear, Capital Time begins to become de-stratified from the person previously operating under it, allowing for a new strata of time to begin clamping on. The term that has been used repeatedly, Covid Time, does not stand like Capital Time as a mode of moving through time, but instead marks the beginning of a new stratification of a human-time interactivity. While the possibilities are multiplicities, the duplicity of Covid Time resulting in a new “Time” or Capital Time re-stratifying allows for the clearest overall picturing of Covid Time’s results.
In a scenario where Covid remains a looming threat to the population (at least in the eyes of the state or general populous) the re-stratification of Capital Time by developing Artificial Destination, or by normalizing Artificial Destination could easily occur. Artificial Destinations are still suffering from impermanence, since they lack the sureness of the old Destination, for the Destination was a sure thing, a part of daily routine, while at any point it seems to the subject as if their old Destination could come back and their Artificial Destination immaterialized. If working from home became permanent, the Artificial Destination would graduate to the Destination, and the extra time allowed to the person working from home could be sublimated with giving them extra work.
A true destratification of Capital Time would have to see the banishing of production Destination. Even the digital Artificial Destination (eventually becoming Destination) would have to be erased. These tasks are beyond the focus of the destratification of Capital Time due to Covid discussed, as they would involve the upheaval of Capital itself. Covid Time’s brief destratification of Capital Time allows for a window into the Destination time boundary blur in which individuals (mostly unknowingly) have briefly experienced new ways to move through time itself.
P.S., A Brief Note in the Subjective:
A destratification of Capital Time may be a frequent micro-occurrence, but when it becomes a macro-occurrence there is no denying its beauty: a beauty of displacement from time itself, of human power over time in the weakest and mightiest form.
