Periodization is metalepsis performed on time. The configuration divides history into named eras, and the era-name does the laundering: the act becomes what happened in that period — agentless, dateless within the block, a property of the time rather than the deed of a hand. Once an event is inside an era, it is governed by the era's name, and the era's name is the smooth word. The Age of Discovery holds the seizure the way settlement holds the clearing — the whole suppressed history present as the period's self-evident label, the route the label traveled glossed out. To periodize is to convert deeds into epochs, so that what was done reads as what the era was like.
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THE ERA-NAME
Each era-name is a completed metalepsis on the calendar.
The Age of Discovery is the Doctrine of Discovery's era-name — discovery was never the opposite of invention, and the age named for discovering is the age of the inventing-and-entering the doctrine authorized. Modernity, the medieval period, the age of progress, the founding era: each names a stretch of time by a laundered surface and suppresses the middle links that produced the surface. The reader who accepts the era-name has accepted the gloss before encountering a single fact, because the name arrives as the frame the facts will be read inside. Ask the era-name for its middle links, and they are the same as every metalepsis: dates, hands, bodies — the deeds the epoch-label folded into a mood.
[See METALEPSIS.]
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METABOLIZED INTO CENTURY
The sharper operation is not the naming of the era but the dissolving of the act into it. The wound is metabolized into the century before it can be cited. That was a different time. By the standards of the era. One must understand the period. Each of these converts a deed into a condition of the epoch, so that the act can no longer be held up as an act — it has become a feature of the century, and the century cannot be indicted, because a century has no hands. This is laundering that destroys the record of the laundering: the honest version says he did wrong, but; the finished version has already converted the wrong into necessity-of-the-era by the time the sentence is read, and leaves nothing on the page to lift out. The act was pre-metabolized into soul or century. Periodization is the century half of that operation — the disposal of the deed into the time.
[See THE SEVEN PHASES (the counter-operation). See VIOLENCE LAUNDERING.]
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THE AVERAGE ACROSS TIME
Periodization is on average performed on the calendar. Where the ensemble average nets bodies against each other and reports the sum, periodization nets the moments of an era against each other and reports the epoch. The era was one of progress sums the era's gaining moments and its ruined moments and issues the net as the character of the time — a character no one who lived any single moment of the era inhabited. The dispossessed of the golden age are averaged into its gold exactly as the ruined player is averaged into the profitable wager. On average dissolves the trajectory into the population; periodization dissolves the deed into the epoch. They are one operation at two axes — one across bodies, one across time — and both produce an aggregate that no individual ever occupied and that the configuration then treats as what was real.
[See ON AVERAGE.]
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THE GOLDEN AGE, AND THE REFUSAL
The golden age is periodization's flagship product: an era reassembled into glory, the losses averaged out, the whole issued back as a time worth returning to. It is where periodization and re-membering meet — the reassembled past given an epoch-name and a warmth, so that the era both launders the deeds inside it and beckons as a destination. The refusal of this is the refusal of periodization's founding premise: that there was a golden era, a mythic past, a time before the wound. There was no mythic past. Every era the configuration offers as origin or destination is a periodization — a stretch of deeds dissolved into a name and lit warm. To say there is no golden age is to refuse the metabolization at its root: the deeds do not dissolve into the century; they remain deeds, with hands, citable.
[See THE GOLDEN AGE. See RE-MEMBERING. See NO MYTHIC PAST.]
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THE COUNTER-OPERATION
Not all division of time is periodization. The distinction is whether the sequence forecloses citation or enables it. The configuration's periodization dissolves the deed into the era so it cannot be cited. A forecasting sequence — the seven phases, the operation-order named to predict the next move — holds the deeds apart, in order, citable, each phase a named operation rather than a mood. One converts acts into an epoch and buries them; the other keeps the acts enumerated and forecasts the next. To name the phases is not to periodize, because the phases keep the hands attached. Periodization is the burial of the sequence in a name. The forecast is the sequence held open, so the next term can be forenamed before it runs.
[See THE SEVEN PHASES. See FORENAMING.]
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The era-name is the smooth word for a stretch of deeds, and its smoothness is the measure of how completely the deeds were dissolved into it. Ask the epoch whose hands did what, and when, and to whom. The hands have names and the deeds have dates. The century has neither, which is why the century is where the configuration files what it cannot afford to leave as an act.
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[See METALEPSIS · ON AVERAGE · THE GOLDEN AGE · RE-MEMBERING (the trespass) · NO MYTHIC PAST · THE SEVEN PHASES · FORENAMING · VIOLENCE LAUNDERING · THE MEDIAN · SECOND NATURE (the era-story) · THE SILENCE AXIS]
