The second path to Uchronia is far more sophisticated. It is the path richest in tradition, burdened and laden with the toil of the oppressed in a world ruled by lords and masters. What has shifted is the temporal emphases. The suffering from time, from which uchronia promises liberation, is no longer the twelve- or sixteen-hour day, but the increasing labour intensity, the negative time stress, and above all the lacking temporal autonomy of one's own availability. Attempts to attain a reduced intensification, to counter the economy of time with its ecology', to bring work 'to life' – all this struggling in words for the 'reappropriation of time', of which people were collectively and individually robbed by industrialization, has the contemporary familiar ring of a discourse in which only the utopias are real’(Oskar Negt) and which has now also discovered time.8 Autonomy and self-determination, temporal flexibilization in the interests of employees, new forms of distribution of working time and living time, are recurring themes which seek to oppose the constraint of time, to remove it and replace it with the dream of self-determination.
The third uchronia seeks to 'liquefy frozen time again', to make time die again in order to approach other ideas of time in the shadow of a catastrophic end of time'.9 It feeds on ideas which start from a change in temporal rhythms and strive for a new balance between the linearity of mechanized and homogenized time and the unexpected element, the spontaneity of the vicissitudes of life'. The argument is directed towards a resumption of natural rhythms; the hundred-year-old battle against nature is to be brought to an end and homeostasis replaced by homeorhythmics.1º Linearity is not to be totally abolished, but human routine is to be broken, and shaped in a less regular fashion. The force of habit which gives stability to social life and represents the preservative and conservative aspect of society – since ‘hardly anything is more conservative than the habitualized behaviour with which one inhabits everyday life'11 – is to blend with what is new and unexpected, the breaking of routine, which also stands for linearity. The reintroduction of cycles is intended to signal not just repetition, but also the impetus of a new line. The third uchronia has concrete proposals in store, chronobiologically and chronosociologically underpinned, which range from the structuring of shift-work to the reduction of jet lag; it seeks to be able to give practical advice, in order to establish a new complementarity between change and continuity. It argues for the creation of new periods of time in which vicissitudes can occur,
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