Promises, on the other hand, extend the interval for a certain or uncertain time. Promises presuppose trust, and trust saves time, but promises are conditionally open to the demand that they are kept and are consequently also subject to the strategy of the interval. Fixing a deadline, on the other hand, sets limits; the interval is given a time-limit and sanctioned; it is tested as an instrument of power, but even deadlines are negotiable.
The interval structures interhuman relations, by the flow of time being indicated, interrupted, slowed down, accelerated, restricted or given a time-limit. From this it becomes clear that it is part of the peculiarity of the concept of time to be not just a symbol of a widespread synthesis, of an abstraction at a high level, but a symbol of the changing relations between individuals.24 It also becomes understandable that certain social conditions are required in which decisions in a temporal context become possible in the first place. In situations in which time is socially negated, because the situation is not one oriented towards continuation or termination in which the socially expected duration is negated, there is no interval and no decision.“Choice"would indeed have no meaning if it did not constitute a discontinuity or a non-determined selection, but it would be equally meaningless if this selection had no consequences, i.e. did not result in a sequel or constituted a sequence.'25 The strategic game with the interval, the fixing of time as a structuring of relations, is based on the search for the right moment. Everybody thinks they know it, or longs for it. It holds good equally for individuals and for organizations, indeed even for nations. Firms have to decide whether and when they should expand or diversify; when they should buy or sell on the market; political parties have to decide on the right moment to call new elections or not. These are the moments which make history or which can at least be reconstructed in retrospect as turning points in history. The losers, asserts Koselleck, have been the better historians over thousands of years because their primary experience, unlike that of the victors, is above all that everything has turned out differently from what was planned or hoped for. They have, if they reflect methodically, to produce more evidence to explain why something has turned out differently.26But if the right moment proves to be such only in retrospect, it is the interval which makes it possible in the first place.
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The Longing for the Moment