Corresponding to the temporal availability which provides the technological framework for the new production technologies, there is a general temporal uncertainty in everyday life. The machine age is superseded by the pressure of a universal temporal availability via goods and services which are produced in changed conditions and equally demand to be consumed in changed conditions. For temporal availability is also to be found in the use of new products. Thus new periods of time literally open up – denser, more intensive ones, striving for continuous presence - which contain the potential for immensely more stress, as well as that for a complex temporal intensification in the present.13
In the production process, the machine is on the verge of replacing human beings. Its speed has already exceeded everything which could be got out of human beings by systems of increased performance, however ingenious they may be. Hence other principles of organization, which aim at optimal performance and efficiency in conditions of electronically controllable speeds, push their way to the fore. In the use of modern technologies of manufacture, for instance, the stock manufacture of big series of standardized products is replaced by short-term manufacture to order. The cushion of stocks is reduced and new principles of organization regulate the production processes. The rhythm of production is ‘flexibly unsteadied'. Factory times and working times are uncoupled. The high capital intensity causes the management to use the factory right round the clock' as far as possible. Services and also a part of supply manufacturing, which are needed at irregular intervals to safeguard production but are to be furnished in synchronization with demand, are shifted outside. They turn into‘tertiary supply work'. With the largely automated loading of big containers, for instance, the organization of transport is such that it is possible – depending on the state of the financial transactions – to fix the place of sale and to direct the container there at the very last moment. So-called on-line systems provide that the actual act of production presupposes a skilfully planned optimizing organization, but one which is located outside in spatial terms and in manufacturing work. Production can then take place within the shortest time, but all other conditions, from financial calculations and storekeeping costs to supply operations, are located outside, but on call at any time. Flexible automation is merely the technological incarnation of flexible production methods, and the latter consist of a dense organizational network, linked by means of communication technologies, or small units and sub-units supplying work for one another. Economically valuable time is no longer lost because the worker is dawdling at the machine, but when there are costly waiting periods in an organization geared as synchronously as possible to optimizing time. Larry Hirschhorn has suggested the employment of highly specialized teams 'on call', who would have to rectify malfunctions. Apart from their highly specialized and complementary qualifications, they have to contribute nothing more than their temporal availability.14
Politics of Time
109