ABSTRACT
The general purpose of this essay is to inquire into the relationship between the city, capital and chronotope, which refers to the specific relationships between time and space in specific historical moments. I am particularly concerned with the question of time and the process of temporalization that produced theorizations of history and its political and cultural forms. This entails a strategy capable of situating historical practice not inside or outside an alleged unity called the “West” (an insupportable totalization), since the “unity” it was made to represent can no longer be thought of as merely a geographical concept privileged to designate an absent other and define it in its negativity as it is made to inhabit a time different from ours i.e., the “non-West.” This perspective would recognize that there is no inevitable identity between capitalism and its claims of universalism. It would also mean acknowledging a fusion of the force of its homogenizing dynamic with a universal narrative, to actually efface the production of unevenness and the figure of contemporaneous non-contemporaneity, as if we had realized the achievement of a totalizing, final conquest of the commodity relation on a global scale, but rather allow different social practices to remain partially outside this abstract measure to signal locally derived ways of evading capital’s continuing desire to “unify” history yet co-eval with those temporal forms produced in Euro-America.
