Under laboratory conditions, it is possible to accelerate things and slow them down; unique temporal events are possible as well as varied repetitions. Gradually, such temporal processes are also being introduced into society. Laboratory time is leaving its mark on the 'normal world'. Technological artefacts offer availability, but also demand availability of the human beings who operate them or at whose disposal they are supposed to be. The process of interdependence between machines and human beings is beginning to build up again.
In comparison with the living labour of animals or of human beings, every machine offers temporal availability which far exceeds that of the organic sphere. Technologies and technological artefacts are created by human beings and geared to particular ends. As a prerequisite and consequence of their being socially embedded, particular forms of organization of work are necessary or result from this, as well as particular knowledge, abilities, attitudes and behaviour in human beings who work on them or use them in everyday life. There is, as the sociology of industry and technology well knows, broad scope for the social shaping of technologies. These can be culturally determined, or can be shaped in economic and political terms. Of the built-in ‘social constructions', of aims and normative ideas, habits and requirements which leave their mark on artefacts and which, particularly in feedback with the social organization in which they are used, reveal a complex behaviour pattern, the built-in dimension of time is surely one of the most fundamental dimensions. Technological artefacts are standardized, but they also standardize human and social behaviour. This standardization has long since included the area of private life beyond the workplace, and the distance which is to be covered between these two poles of individual and collective existence in industrialized countries.
At the same time, an almost symbiotic, complementary relationship is to be observed between social discipline, the rules and norms needed for maintaining it, and the standardizations which are already built into technologies. Here, too, the long-term societal development increasingly passes from a regulation which to begin with is attained externally by outside constraint, to the internalization of time discipline and to the imposition of selfdiscipline.18 But this process of development occurs by including technological artefacts, which dictate temporal norms. These serve, on the one hand, to maintain and stabilize the time discipline introduced, but also lead to internalized feats of adaptation by including extra-somatic technologies. No society has done without the measurement of time and technologies, however rudimentary their structure, in the form of tools with which the structuring of space, time and social organization occurred.19But in pre-industrial societies, when not yet all time was the 'time of economics', it was neither necessary nor possible to keep people available for technological artefacts. People had to be available for the times of God' and for work. The rule of Saint Benedict, to which the first 'metronomic social system' in Europe is indebted,20 provided for eight prayers which were distributed over the day and night and were preluded by peals of mechanical bells – a relatively externally controlled time discipline of punctuality and regularity, in other words, which moreover was valid only for a minority elite. Regularity which oriented itself by the mechanics of the even rhythm of machines also determined the time discipline which regulated the life of the bourgeoisie in the period of industrialization: a kind of social mechanics developed, which dictated the daily routine. ‘The new bourgeoisie,'wrote Lewis Mumford, meals: from this period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. Waste of time became . . . one of the most heinous sins.21
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
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