Seriality and Time of Consumption

The essay reconstructs the emergence of temporal seriality as a new paradigm for organising perception, as well as human forms of life. In the wake of a very long period in which spatial serial forms organised cognitive and imaginative abilities, the culminating moment of the affirmation of temporal seriality is identified between the early 19th century and the 1930s. The evolution of this seriality is then outlined, up to the matrix that today shapes our very experience of time, reduced to artificial and controlled perception. The qualifying elements of this process are identified in the disappearance of the religious idea of temporal continuum and in the emergence of marginalist economic thinking, which makes consumption the planned and serialised temporal junction between desire and behaviour. Digital technologies and the informational paradigm are defined as the technostructure of this dynamic of powerful perceptual domestication.