The previous history of the Western linear system of time is closely connected with industrialization and the brutal adaptation of human labour and life to the machine. The exploitation of the resources of time which had been made scarce led first to painful wear and tear – in the hope of a better future. Today the future has caught up with the present, but time, individually and collectively, has remained limited. New resources of time are in demand. They are opening up through the extension of time in the present and through the availability at all times which technologies make possible. But the latter in their turn demand a temporal availability of human beings. So where is the time to be found?
There thus arises the longing for the moment. In strategic terms, it has to be the right' moment. In playful creative terms, it is the moment which – for a short time - makes everything possible, and from which history flows.
Seeking the moment and finding it ultimately means acknowledging one's own temporality.
For the genesis of this essay, many temporal prerequisites were necessary. Two of them can also be designated in spatial and institutional terms. I would like to thank Clemens Heller, who invited me to the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris in February 1987, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as whose guest at the conference centre in Bellagio I was able to complete this text.
Helga Nowotny
Bellagio, August 1988
Introduction
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