If in the life of society, however, the impression prevails that linearity takes precedence over the cyclical conception of time, and if society is furnished with the adjective 'metronomic', there are understandable reasons for this. The contrast between the two fundamental conceptions of time arose with industrialization and the importance given to linear quantification during this period. The clock, although it is itself a measuring instrument geared to periodic recurrence, became the metronome for a changed rhythm of social time.19 The machines in the factory buildings, although they too were constructed with a periodic recurrence of their mechanical sequences in mind, were rightly regarded as the embodiment of the linearity which was built into the capitalist process of accumulation. It was based on another quantifiable medium, the universal medium of exchange per se, into which time could be transformed from now on: money. Time became money, and more or less money could be made from time. Time could be rationalized'from now on, i.e. by the appropriate organization of capital and work, ‘saved', ‘gained’ and ‘increased', in order to produce more. Counting hours or minutes, and measuring time, was given an additional instrumental importance with industrialization, which it has not lost to this day.
The measurement of time itself is an ancient cultural phenomenon. Having as biological beings the internal clock within them and the regularly recurring motions of the sun and stars around them, human beings produced a system of measuring time as a cultural achievement early on, which served to orient and coordinate their activities. In agrarian societies, it seemed obvious also to orient oneself in the measurement of time by the course of the cyclically recurring seasons. Over and above the practical functions of coordination, the measurement of time was always also used to project one's own social order and its periods of time into the cosmos and into nature, in order then to elevate the heavenly and natural order to the normative yardstick for the social system of structuring time. The power of the priests resulted from their knowledge and their function as time-givers. The measurement of time consequently serves as a setting of temporal standards and standardizations, from fixing the 'right' moment in the harmony between cosmos and human beings and separating sacred' times from profane ones, to the setting of records in sporting competition or the ascertaining of only just perceptible spans of attention for the purposes of conveying information. What has changed is the scales of measurement and instruments. The measurement itself is made by bringing into relation mobile continua which can be of many different kinds, one of which serves as a reference point for the other.20 In other cultures there was an astonishing abundance of different scales of measurement which served as a reference point, and accordingly many kinds of temporal dimension were measured. Only the scientific measurement of time brought the reduction to a single dimension, the homogenized, linear time of physics.
From the Future to the Extended Present
55