What do such ‘time games'on the part of the natural scientists mean for people today, for their desire for proper time, and for their longings to escape the constraint of time and to be able to structure time differently? How can the complex balancing acts in the daily juxtaposition of times be better accomplished, and how will a society within the extended present cope with the current problems of accelerated innovation, increasing routine, and throwing away? Having time to play with the moment, being able to plunge into the interim period of transitions, presupposes a recognition of how this time is constituted and how it can be created. The ‘this way and no other' which scientific knowledge has to offer includes the 'now this way' and ‘now the other'as a possibility of being able to intervene and structure things, at least under certain conditions. The glance behind the mask in which time appears in social life makes it possible to stage the game differently as well, starting from a changed sense of time which, like every feeling, is itself the result of history, of experience.
Cronos's fear which caused him to consume his stock, his children, has not been able to hold back the new age with its activities spewing forth innovations. With machines, other motions and speeds entered social life and changed people's perceptive faculty. An even more accelerated, yet more diffuse quality of time, because pressing for constant availability, adheres to today's machines. Machines and people are forming new temporal combinations, just as the relations between people, mediated with one another via machines, are assuming a different shape. The social arrow of time also points forwards. The constraints which seem to emanate from time have not been broken, but the game, the team-game, may perhaps be loosening up. The longing for proper time has become publicly communicable, but proper time is made possible only by others. It is up to the children of Cronos to seize the moment which presents itself to them from so many sides. It is not a question of the unique first moment, but of the socially perceptible one. It is necessary to discover and to shape it – as a repeatable moment which fluctuates to and fro between social chaos and social order, between the self of proper time and the time of society.
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The Longing for the Moment