"Frozen societies" are those which slowed down their historical
activity to the limit and maintained in constant equilibrium their opposition
to the natural and human environment as well as their internal oppositions.
If the extreme diversity of institutions established for this purpose demonstrates
the flexibility of the self-creation of human nature, this demonstration becomes
obvious only for the external observer, for the anthropologist who returns
from historical time. In each of these societies a definitive structuring
excluded change. Absolute conformism in existing social practices. with which
all human possibilities are identified for all time, has no external limit
other than the fear of falling back into formless animality. Here, in order
to
remain
human, men must remain the same.
The
social appropriation of time, the production of man by human labor, develops
within asocietydividedintoclasses. The power which constituted itself above
the penury of the society of cyclical time,the class which organizes the social
labor and appropriates the limited surplus value,
simultaneously
appropriates the temporal surplus value of its organization of social time:
it possesses for itself alone the irreversible time of the living. The wealth
that can be concentrated in the realm of power and materially used up in sumptuous
feasts is also used up as a squandering of historical time at the surface
of society. The owners of historical surplus value possess the knowledge and
the enjoyment of lived events. Separated from the collective organization
of time which predominates with the repetitive production at