Even though the form of organization described here comes closer to a high-performance flexibilization and cannot be regarded as typical of the whole area of production, it is the temporal principles of organization which clearly predominate: thus capital, raw materials or partmanufactured products and work are organized according to the financial, market and order situation, on the principle of short-term, and the most economical, temporal availability. Time is money, but money time is no longer to be found in the machine alone, but in a widely ramified, multi-layered, complex machinery of organization. It must be such that flexible'disposition and redisposition is possible at any time. Temporal disposability extends from venture capital via marketing to sales; the temporal network organizes the spatial one.
Production alone on the principle of optimal flexibilization is not yet enough. The products thus manufactured, above all the rapidly growing proportion of electronic devices, computers, fax and audiovisual technologies along with the relevant infrastructure, bring a part of the scientific laboratory time which has led to their development, as well as the temporal logic of industrial manufacture to which they owe their production, into working and everyday time. For their operation, their constant use and sale, similar temporal disposabilities are required to those which they already embody. The logic of temporal availability does not stop at industrial manufacture but spills over into other jobs and into so-called free time. A production process based on availability at any time of the necessary inputs as an optimizing principle demands as a correlate (free) time structures in which the time needed for consumption also manifests similar qualities to those built into technological products. Presupposing a class of buyers and users with a high income, consumption time must be such that things are usable in accordance with the built-in intention. But not just things - the proportion of consumption time reserved for individual production, for the do-it-yourself approach to products and individual services (if one thinks of those, for instance, which tend body and soul through therapy, massage and body-building), is also of the quality geared to availability at any time. In extreme cases this results, from a negative perspective, in a switch-on-and-off culture, in which temporal sequences follow one another arbitrarily, or temporal coincidences are correspondingly manipulable: the economic rationality which manifests itself precisely in the temporal sequence and synchronization of the production process is travestied, but not therefore abolished.
Politics of Time
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