“Now Is the Time for Helter Skelter”: Terror, Temporality, and the Manson Family
“Now Is the Time for Helter Skelter”: Terror, Temporality, and the Manson Family
This chapter inquires into the theory and practice of Manson Family time. Drawing especially on the extensive transcripts of the 1970-71 Tate-LaBianca trial, the chapter answers the following questions: How was time understood within the Manson Family, why was it understood the way it was, and why did this understanding have traction? How did the Family construct its regime of time, implement, and experience it? And most importantly, how was this regime related to radicalization and the race war—or rather, revolution—that was Helter Skelter? In disaggregating and analyzing the layers of time that prepared the ground for the Tate-LaBianca murders, the chapter demonstrates a strong link between terror and temporality in the Manson Family that produced a state of hyperconscious historicity animating their will to violently intervene in the present for the sake of an exalted future. Such a link is characteristic of radicalization more generally, and therefore the essay locates the Helter Skelter narrative in the long history of politico-religious voluntarism.
Keywords: Manson Family, historicity, Helter Skelter, terrorism, voluntarism
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