http://eces.org/index.php/329snip:
We have gone along with the substantiation of time so that it seems a fact of nature, a power existing in its own right. The growth of a sense of time - the acceptance of time - is a process of adaptation to an ever more reified world. It is a constructed dimension, the most elemental aspect of culture. Time's inexorable nature provides the ultimate model of domination.
The further we go in time the worse it gets. We inhabit an age of the disintegration of experience, according to Adorno. The pressure of time, like that of its essential progenitor, division of labor, fragments and disperses all before it. Uniformity, equivalence, separation are byproducts of time's harsh force. The intrinsic beauty and meaning of that fragment of the world that is not-yet-culture moves steadily toward annihilation under a single cultures-wide clock. Paul Ricoeur's assertion (1985) that "we are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual," fails to notice how they are converging.
Concerning this "fiction" that upholds and accompanies all the forms of imprisonment, "the world is filled with propaganda alleging its existence," as Bernard Aaronson (1972) put it so well. "All awareness," wrote the poet Denise Levertov (1974), "is an awareness of time," showing just how deeply alienated we are in time. We have become regimented under its empire, as time and alienation continue to deepen their intrusion, their debasement of everyday life. "Does this mean," as David Carr (1988) asks, "that the 'struggle' of existence is to overcome time itself?" It may be that exactly this is the last enemy to be overcome.
snip