One of these, the temporal condition, is the increase in the urgency of the problem in conjunction with the cyclicality imputed to innovative events. The regular production of waste is foreseeable. The postulate holds good here, too, of 'being able to comprehend' the prerequisite for the uniqueness of one's own surprise', in order to be prepared for it. In an age obsessed with innovation, the ageing of products, technologies and abilities, the formation of waste, is no surprise any more. But what follows this comprehension? One solution consists in the attempt to control the ageing process in temporal terms. 'Successful ageing' is the appropriate motto coined for the human ageing process. Through an artificial acceleration or deceleration of particular functions and processes, negative effects can be outweighed; through knowledge of the different proper times of systems or sub-systems, better temporal coordinations can be achieved. But the underlying problem, which was long concealed by the linearity of the machine age, is of a more general nature. In comparison with organisms or organic components, the machine could feign indefatigability and immortality. In a different sphere of production, the symbolic one, this could never happen in the same way. Artistic production has never gone along with the linearity of the machine. Works of art, or rather their elements, can be arranged in the form of sequences, as art historian George Kubler suggests in an interesting analysis, which represent in their turn stylistic directions which supersede one another. Every stylistic direction, every sequence, from the revolutionary new beginning, via mature development to final decay, is composed of connected phenomena which represent the attempt to find answers and provide solutions to quite specific problems of form or content. Cyclical succession is highly sophisticated, since for every sequence which determines a stylistic direction it is also necessary to find an answer to the following problem:
From the Future to the Extended Present
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