In historical terms, the establishment of the scientific conception of time, which for its part bears the stamp of a particular epoch of the history of science and of the social forces of its time, and its incorporation into what became the dominant social conception of time, had succeeded. Once the linear system of time was set in the form of a chronology going back to the newly fixed beginnings, acceleration could start in the form of motion making everything dynamic, which seemed to stop at nothing. In the tourbillon social which broke out with the industrial revolution and wrenched people out of their countless 'small worlds', out of the small towns and villages with self-contained social structures and forms of existence, and kindled in them the insatiable desire for growth, when everything, as Marx wrote, 'was pregnant with its own contradiction', acceleration became the experience of modernization overshadowing and shaping everything else. The pace becomes more important than the destination: anyone who stands firm stands still; everything, above all time, becomes frantic motion: the new myth was speed.
In view of this wildly spreading acceleration, it is not surprising that many people reacted to it with a kind of culture 'shock', and the phenomenon of 'shock' itself was derived from the medical diagnosis of the physical and mental state of victims injured in railway accidents.9 But our subject here is not to be the collisions of the psyche and of countless existences with the locomotive of time, nor the countless metaphors with which people sought to put into words what they experienced as a gigantic torrent of motion, but the iconography of time. Artists have left behind images which are capable of expressing feelings more clearly than words.
84
Cronos's Fear of the New Age