Henceforth, nature is not just observed, but reproduced and generated in the laboratory. With the revelation of what is invisible to begin with, the social construction of the natural world begins. A still substantially artificial auto-production of phenomena'commences, as Stichweh calls it, which not only prevails in the contest to oust the old, more rigid knowledge, but forms the basis of the scientific conception of the world which has been current since then.13
Was it perhaps this vision which so frightened Cronos that he turned to the last resort and staged his suicide by devouring his children, while the new age began its triumphal march and has been incessantly disgorging its children since then? Did the world of the old skinflint Cronos, as Hogarth portrays him with bitterly ironic mockery, sink in emotionally sublime fashion into the final state of proclaimed chaos because neither the accumulated property nor the values and virtues sustaining it were still assured of their continued existence, in the face of a new age which did not just practise accumulation for the sake of hoarding, but which was preparing to invest in order to turn all tied-up funds into liquid assets? The modern age and its characteristic form of motion, acceleration, did not content itself with frightening old Cronos by producing new knowledge, but it set to work in extremely pragmatic fashion to translate it into action. What Francis Bacon had already outlined with his patterns of argumentation – the hope for a systematic improvement of the sciences, if one strives to recognize not just the benefit for tomorrow but the causes forever, if one replaces chance with planning and then guides it towards a wellcontrolled progress of inventions, while providing mutual help through the division of labour – all this now began to be realized. The sciences became the key sector in which 'progress' or progression' could be continually registered during the following period.14Scientists and technologists began, as Bowker had said of geologists, to implement the new age, by incorporating faster and coordinated series of motions into machines. Acceleration was first of all that increase in motion which emanated from the machine and which immediately embraced all other areas of life, and thus became the empirically indisputable basis for the belief in progress.
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Cronos's Fear of the New Age