The other form of the intoxication with time consisted in the discovery of world-wide simultaneity. It feigned a sense of time according to which the individual could be in any place at the same time and participate in everything happening elsewhere. The present was everywhere, and one could communicate with people all over the place. And what was to be communicated was the fact that the thirst for knowledge about what was happening elsewhere, for information about other places, other events, other people, was not yet threatened with permanent oversatiation as it is today. In their own way, the writers of poésie simultanée, like Apollinaire and others, gave expression to what was expected of simultaneity by a generation which was not yet suffering from the shortage of time that prevails today, nor yet had to indulge in desperate efforts to find time for love as well in an overcrowded appointments diary. Even though it was an artistic avantgarde which thought it could blithely shrug off constraints of space and time, and celebrated what Western, individualized consciousness was bold enough to celebrate for the first time – namely the fundamental experience that the subjectivity of private existence was a reality – many other people shared this experience with them. The bourgeois individual, and this is what we are talking about here, who had also been repeatedly circumscribed by the prevailing social order, was suddenly confirmed in his or her very own, subjective experience through the use of pieces of technological equipment which allowed him or her to establish a link of simultaneity with other individuals in other places. Accordingly, the sum total of all private existences constituted a spatially permissible diversity of reality. What positively exploded through the discovery of simultaneity was the temporal objectivization and legitimation of the individual consciousness, of the subjectively experienced existence. From then on, there was not just one historical 'world-time', analysed and thought out further by Voltaire and other thinkers since the Enlightenment; its disintegration into something that was a kind of co-presences was comprehensible to subjective existences which were objectivized because technologically linked with one another and constituting public time. There were as many subjective times as there were thinking, feeling, knowing, communicating individuals. Thus the bourgeois individual discovered his or her own temporal subjectivity against the background of a growing international integration by means of transport systems and business relations, unwillingly represented by the artistic avant-garde. This temporal subjectivity could be interpreted as a component of public time because private time was thenceforth to be recognized as legitimate, or as a preliminary form of the resistance to those impersonally exercised constraints of time which were already inherent in the technological and economic forms of organization. In the supposed simultaneity, the objective existence of which seemed indubitable owing to its technological embodiment, there was room for one's own subjectivity, it was part of the objective spatio-temporal reality; but it could already – legitimately – be conceived as contrasting with and opposed to it.
The Illusion of Simultaneity
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