Ceremonial and Linear Time
Ceremonial and Linear Time
Definition
Ceremonial and linear time are the two time-forms Baudrillard distinguishes in 'The Year 2000 Will Not Take Place' (written 1984; published 1986, and again as 'The Year 2000 Has Already Happened' in The Illusion of the End), as read by Butler: the first, the ceremonial time of "primitive" societies, "where everything is completed in the beginning and where the ceremony retraces the perfection of this original event – perfect in the sense that everything is complete" ('2000', 23); the second, the linear time of Christian and modern societies, in which "events are thought to follow one another like cause and effect" and the eschatological end (Last Judgement, revolution) "is at once the time of the end and of its unlimited suspension" ('2000', 23). Butler's crucial move (in Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real, 1999) is to show that Baudrillard does not simply choose between them, and that the two are structurally inseparable: linear time's endless deferral of the end is only possible because the end is already in the beginning (as in ceremonial time), and ceremonial time's completed beginning can only be experienced as the linear succession of one moment after another. Read through Zeno's paradoxes: "The paradox of time, what is required for it, is neither simply the linear deferral of the end – too slow – nor the cyclical end already in the beginning – too fast – but both" (Butler 1999, p. 156). The essay's three hypotheses of the end of history (events too fast; history unable to reach its end; history lost in the perfection of its reproduction) map onto these two forces, which is why the essay can be titled both "The Year 2000 Will Not Take Place" and "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened": "the very impossibility of time or history… is what makes it possible" (p. 157).
Key Thinkers
- Jean Baudrillard — the two times' author: 'The Year 2000 Will Not Take Place' ('2000', 18–28; a version reprinted in The Illusion of the End); the "two contradictory forces" — building a history versus "leaping ahead to annihilate time and to short-circuit the Last Judgement" ('2000', 24); the high-fidelity analysis of music's disappearance into the perfection of stereo reproduction.
- Rex Butler — the reading that makes the essay "a brilliant analysis… of time to the now" (p. 157): the Zeno interpretation; the refusal of Canetti's nostalgia (one cannot return to the point where reality was lost, since the loss is only thinkable through simulation); the reading of the three hypotheses as the too-fast/too-slow simultaneity.
- Elias Canetti (referenced, no page) — the epigraph and foil: "beyond a certain precise moment in time, history is no longer real" (quoted '2000', 18), whose prescription to rediscover the lost point Butler, with Baudrillard, rejects.
Related Concepts
- reversibility — ceremonial time's logical form: the end already in the beginning, the cycle in which things become their contrary.
- simulation-hyperreality — the condition of the essay: history lost not "for want of" history but "in the perfection of its materiality" ('2000', 21).
- the-real — what disappears in linear perfection: "We will never know what history was before its exacerbation in the technical perfection of information" ('2000', 22–3).
- doubling — the essay's own operation: the hypotheses that double history, making its end both take place and never take place.
- precession-of-simulacra — the companion analysis of the event's precedence by its model.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
Open Questions
- Butler notes the essay's relevance "beyond any direct millennialism" (p. 148) — does the ceremonial/linear structure illuminate the wiki's architectural temporality pages (temporality, memory), e.g. the restoration that completes a building's "original event" versus the additive history that defers it?
- The essay appears in the raw book only through Butler's reading (the '2000' essay itself is not separately ingested) — the page rests on Butler's quotations of it; a direct ingest of The Illusion of the End would be the natural extension.
