Date: 12/31/99
User: Greta [Administrator]
Room: Dr. Hubbur Discussion
AND WITH STRANGE AEONS
An Introduction to Aeonic Materialism
8:36:54:: Tragically and joyously, Dr. Jonathan Hubbur has passed away today. He was 72. In his honor, I’d like to introduce you to the broad thrust of his philosophical and occult investigations, as they’ve been the basis of our work here at Shadowside BBS for several years, ever since I launched it in 1987 and until its closure to the public in 1996. This will be the last post on this BBS and the ensuing discussion will be the swansong of our efforts. Make it count.
The most important aspect of Dr. Hubbur’s work, yet also the most neglected, is his theory of time which he outlines in his very last published work, Postscripts on a Theory of Aeonic Materialism, which had a rather limited and troublesome run with the MIT Press, mostly due to his reputation. In this pithy work, he elaborates further on the concept of Aeon found in The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze. Dr. Hubbur first demarcates, Aeon, non-linear time, distinguished by the experience of duration, can be likened to a gravity well which our subjective experiences swarm towards. Next to this is Chronos, linear, chronological time which is documented by calenders and constructed by time-keeping devices with their own histories of development and innovations.
[1.] His basic contention is that subjects experience time as both linear, through the persistent tumbling of clockworks and quartz crystals, and non-linear, through the fuzzy reconstructions of memory.
Past. Present. Future. According to Dr. Hubbur, they all have to be constructed, and the tools which build them are both material and ideological. He continues, The history of time-devices itself has rather fascinating developments, from the water clocks of antiquity, the mechanical clocks of our beloved Early Modern period, and most recently, remarkable innovations found within my very own Casio watch. It’d be a disturbing mistake to ignore the ideological functions of all of these, or to ignore time-keeping’s inherent relationship with the modes of production within which these systems are first constructed. What is a king, a pharaoh, an emperor, or a boss, if not a Lord of Time?
[2.] It’s exactly this recognition of the necessity of ideological domination over the construction of time itself that Dr. Hubbur calls aeonic materialism, which can be described as an attempt to clarify the construction of Aeons.
But, this construction is always an endlessly recurring competition between not only antagonistic civilizations, or within divided and combusting modes of production, but a battlefield of unfolding Aeons that always culminate into another. Thus, the Aeon of the Commune as the Long March out of the Aeon of Capital. It’s exactly in the construction of Aeons that we can locate the major thrust of Dr. Hubbur’s political thinking. Thus, he goes on to elaborate, “The Aeon of the Commune must always posit itself as...
Continue reading? [Y/N]