Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

Time

The Modern and Postmodern Experience

Helga Nowotny

Translated by Neville Plaice

Polity Press

An Embarrassment of Proper Times:

A Foreword

J. T. Fraser

Great changes in scientific understanding tend to reverberate across the cultural fabric of their epochs. The Copernican revolution inspired rich literary and artistic expressions, as did Newton's formulation of the law of gravitation. In this century Albert Einstein placed the laws of motion, force and electricity into a mathematically unified framework called space-time. One of the new concepts introduced in his Relativity Theory, that of 'the fourth dimension', entered the vocabulary of daily discourse and of the media. Through the alchemy of the collective and individual creation of ideas, the term worked its way into public awareness as a metaphor for the scientific understanding of the nature of time.

In Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience, Helga Nowotny, a distinguished Austrian sociologist of science and President of the International Society for the Study of Time (1992–5), analyses the social changes of our age in terms of the idea and experience of time. She makes imaginative and fruitful use of ‘proper time', a concept which originated in Relativity Theory, as did 'the fourth dimension'.

The German word for proper time is Eigenzeit. This is also the title of Professor Nowotny's book, of which the

present volume is a translation. Eigen means ‘belonging to the self'. Verbatim, Eigenzeit means 'self-time'; Eigenliebe, ‘self-love'. To those who read German, the meaning of eigen in its many combinations is obvious. Because of this obviousness the word Eigenzeit is well suited to imply, in German, a formal linkage between designating temporalities appropriate for the Theory of Relativity (where its precise meaning needs extended explanation) and those appropriate for social science (where its meaning is almost, though not totally, self-evident).

Early in the history of Relativity Theory Eigenzeit was translated into English as Eigen-time, together with such related technical terms as Eigen-function and Eigen-value. Later, the word Eigen was replaced by proper' to yield the names proper time, proper function and proper value. ‘Proper' is a cognate in English of Eigen, as in 'property' (Eigentum) or in the proper days of the saints in the Roman calendar. But while the translation is accurate, the selfevidence of the word and, with it, the hint of some formal kinship between certain physical and social aspects of time are absent. Had Professor Nowotny's book Eigenzeit appeared under the title Proper Time, it would have suggested a work on etiquette for British high tea rather than a treatise on the sociology of time.

What does proper time mean in physics and in this book?

In Relativity Theory it is the time span between two events in the life of a clock as measured by that clock. So far this is only a definition, and not even a very interesting one. It becomes more interesting when one considers two clocks in relative motion, and outright intriguing when the clocks are the biological cycles of living organisms. It is under such conditions that the distinction between time and proper time may be illustrated. Here is an example.

Consider an Indian elephant with its gestation period of 645 days and a house mouse with her 19 days. Let each female mate with her respective male on 1 January. Then, let the mouse go on an extended round trip at very large velocities, with her itinerary designed by a competent relativist. Let her return on 7 October of the next year, just in time to celebrate the simultaneous delivery of the two offsprings. The temporal separation between the twin events (the begetting and delivering of the infants) was 15,480 hours in the elephant's proper time, 456 hours in the proper time of the mouse.

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Foreword

With current transportation technology such a trip would be impossible, but the principles are valid. Each of the two time measurements must be regarded as real and correct. And each is an invariant quantity. Here invariance means that anyone who knows Einstein's instructions on how to calculate time at a distance - no matter where the measurer is or how she or he moves – will obtain the figures of 15,480 and 456 hours, respectively, for the proper times of the two animals. These numbers, correlated through certain equations, cohere in seamless unity upon a higher level of generalization than is possible to attain through Newtonian theory. All this holds even though there is nothing in Relativity Theory that could tell us what is to be meant by the now, the future, the past or the flow of time. The physicist has to know what time is before he or she can begin experimenting with travelling elephants and mice.

During the trip, the flow of time will retain its hallmarks for each animal. Their days will pass through instants of changing presents, with respect to which future and past acquire meaning. And a three-minute egg will need three minutes of boiling.

The need for thinking in terms of proper times arises only when one wishes to make comparisons between time measurements performed in two or more systems in relative motion. The whole conceptual scheme becomes necessary only if the elephant wanted to know how long, in her proper time, did the mouse take to make her threeminute egg? Time, so to say, is the set; proper times are the members of the set.

Foreword

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Let us now map these ideas about time, proper time and their relationships into the study of social processes.

Unlike in physics, proper times in Professor Nowotny's book differ qualitatively, not by the quantities of time units. Proper time stands for a constellation of beliefs regarding future, past and present, for opinions about change and permanence, about the inevitability of death, about philosophical, religious and aesthetic judgements, and even about identities and allegiances. It stands for the totality of a person's or group's ideas and experiences of time.

Professor Nowotny maintains that it is social organization from which people draw their fundamental thought categories, such as space and time. If so, then it is not surprising that the social whirlwind of our age becomes manifest in the appearance of a large variety of proper times. Individuals and societies no less than commercial, industrial, political and ideological interest groups have their own proper times. That is, they have differing judgements about the role and importance of their own and of other people's and groups’ times. Whether as abstract ideas or guidelines for action, all these proper times are in ceaseless conflict or, more precisely, the persons and groups maintaining those proper times are. Such differences have surely existed all through history but they have become noticeable, then interesting, and finally significant because of the time-compactness of the globe with its cultural and ethnic diversity.

This is a book of keen observations about a restless age, and one full of inspiring epigrams. In spite or perhaps because of that restlessness, writes the author, the search for an understanding of the patterns of social change remains an attractive task. It is a fascinating one, not simply because it helps us to take successful action in social life, a process still inscrutable, but, more basically, because there is a human need to be able to discover the beauty of regularities beyond the will and intention of human beings.

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Foreword

In the rich tapestry of change surveyed in the book, modernism emerges as a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century syndrome, as well as a moving force for the advancement of the artificial in the service of society. Postmodernism is a post-Second World War phenomenon. It may best be described as a reflection of changes which are so rapid as to make their integration into the recent past and onrushing future impossible. The environment created by individuals and societies thus outruns the adaptive capacities of their creators and leads to a loss of temporal horizons or, as Professor Nowotny calls it, the extended present.

It is along this path of understanding that the social interpretation of proper time proves itself to be helpful in elucidating the global problems of our age.

Foreword

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Introduction

Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken language. It can shout the truth where words lie.

E. T. Hall, The Silent Language

Everyone is a practician and theoretician of time. Time 'dwells' in us - through the biological rhythms to which we are subject, and because we are social beings who are born into a society with changing temporal structures and learn to live in its social time. But the knowledge people have about the time which flows, periodically returns, ends and begins in them – time which can produce moments of unforgettable intensity, but also of pain and emptiness - remains strangely embroiled in their own consciousness and in their personal temporal world. Although we share time with others (or complain that others do not have enough time for us or we for them), the discursive exchange about time is underdeveloped. Most metaphors concerning time reflect the experiences of earlier generations, not our own experiences. It is as if language absorbs only with delay what social experience seeks to confide to it. And it is as if time, filtered through institutions and regulated in temporal systems, conveyed through machines and means of transport, confronts us as ‘a very strange thing' (as Hofmannsthal makes the Marschallin say in Der Rosenkavalier) which is able to exert a curious compulsion over people. In his essay on time, Norbert Elias has referred to the masks which many tribal societies exhibit in their rituals. For the participants in the ceremony, the masks are endowed with social reality; they are gods or demons, even though everyone knows that behind them there are people moving them. In a similar way, the mask of the clock and the appointments diary also encourages us to think they embody time which passes without our agency and cannot be arrested. We believe we have to be governed by them, whereas they merely reproduce series of movements which are shaped as symbols in such a way that we are able to orient the coordination of our own activities by them. For it is we human beings who make time. The more complex the society, the more stratified the courses of time also become which overlap, form temporal connections with and alongside one another. Perhaps the raising of the mask, the diagnostic glance at its operation, and the effect which results from it, is the most effective challenge for a (social) scientific study of time. Time has become a fundamental issue for all sciences, since it raises problems central to the understanding of the phenomena under investigation. Coping with the problem of 'time' often opens up those boundaries of a theory which stimulate further development, as Prigogine and Stengers have recently demonstrated in relation to physics.1 But the complaint often heard that time is a neglected topic in the social sciences is not true. The libraries are full of detailed and also of general investigations. Admittedly, the longer-term social processes have been somewhat lost sight of, and in view of the tendency to label society boldly, the contribution of individuals to society is neglected. But time hardly takes account of the drawing up of disciplinary and other boundaries, just as it is hardly possible to capture and to fix it in everyday life.

My interest focuses on the question: how does time change? It all began many years ago with my desire to know why some people have ‘more', othérs less', and many ‘no' time at all, and how these differences were connected with the culture from which they came, with their class status and the relations they established with past, present and future.² Then in the course of time many new questions and observations were added: women's time is differently structured and is used differently from men's time; the phenomenon of everyday life', in which the boundaries between private and public time are increasingly beginning to become blurred, also began to interest me. I gradually became convinced of the inexorable disappearance of the category of the future and its replacement by something I call the extended present. And always and everywhere I encountered those technologies which are changing the human perception of time most immediately and most visibly – the modern technologies of communication. Their influence is perceptible, tangible, and demonstrable at work and at home, in means of transport and in communication networks, in the finance markets of the world and in the countries of the Third World.

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Thus, over a period of years, this essay gradually took shape. It is sustained by the wish to come up with a fairly sound social scientific diagnosis of the current changes in the concept of time, but also in the experience of time and the conflicts about time, a diagnosis which is intended to open up knowledge to current everyday life. The subjective awareness of individuals about what is happening in them and with them timewise can be communicated to others only in fragmentary form. What the social sciences are able to contribute is the establishment of those fine links which reveal ‘society’ in the experience of every individual. Like a test liquid which flows through the body to detect particular substances and their courses, 'society' and social time run through a life, however individually distinctive and equipped it is. For time, this symbolic product of human coordination and ascription of significance, collectively shaped and moulded at a deep level, retains its relation to others even at moments of distinctive individual feeling. Even the time of the lonely is merely a lack of jointly spent, of shared time. And the lack of time, in turn, is proportionate to the wealth of socially moulded expectations and the standards of one's own behaviour.

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Introduction

The diagnosis made it necessary to select perspectives, to restrict observations and to use them in dependence on particular tools of thought. Many associations with the topic which readers may have will not be dealt with here. Above all the realm of individual psychology has been omitted, not because it is less worthy of attention, but because it seemed to me more urgent to demonstrate the connections with social changes. Questions of the formation of identity, of the relationship between the generations and of the process of ageing, for which the topic of time is of central importance, are likewise dealt with only marginally.³ Instead, I talk about the ageing of technologies. The fascinating area of the cultural variety of conceptions of time has also had to be left out. The confrontation with non-Western time-cultures and their wealth of distinctions is gaining urgency in view of the economic and technological processes with which a time-culture born in the West is preparing to embrace the whole earth. But my own present, however much I tried to extend it, was not sufficient to transcend the geographical space of time familiar to me.

The qualitative changes in the perception of time, in the sense of time and in the social and individual structuring of time, which are dealt with in the following chapters, are manifestly expressed in the technologies striving for a world-wide condition of simultaneity. Are not the great financial markets of London, Tokyo, New York and Singapore connected with one another right round the clock? Is it not possible at any time, from any place on the earth, to send news to someone else, to exchange information, to carry out transactions? Yet behind the high-rise offices fashioned in glass with their air-conditioning there dwells in most international cities an indescribable misery.

Introduction

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