--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: null library_document_id: "d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2" source_sha256: "ca674046d698b37a0c75292bfa8731177b0833ea8d5b601a22a61a19592a551d" pdf_physical_page_count: 178 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 130 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2?start=130&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2.md?start=130&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2.md?start=120&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2.md?start=140&limit=10" --- # Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=130 | PRINTED_PAGE=130 For all the stubbornness of time, however, which cannot yet be fully substituted by money, in which something is still left of the natural currency of time for time, and which is subordinated to a norm of reciprocity based on this, a process of structural alignment still takes place between the two patterns of optimizing and flexibilization: the approximation to economic calculation. Of course, it is the mixed forms which will make the way there a long and complex one. The time of professional helpers is valuable, and a considerable portion remains of contributions to be made by oneself. The user-friendly omnipresence of communication technologies invites a more efficient shaping and more efficient mixing of the time of both. Partial solutions dominate any total solution. But the final exchange relation is dictated by the market, is fixed by the universal medium of exchange, money. The natural currency of time for time remains an endearing form of archaic convention, a residual ritual of social existence. It is not to be wholly ruled out, but is destined to be an exception. It already belongs to the other, 'sacred' time which is withdrawn from economically structured processes for a brief period. It retains a value which cannot be precisely specified in economic terms, but for this very reason it becomes more valuable, because it is rarer. Thus the law of economics – scarcity – is confirmed even where it is deprived of its phenomenon. Because a few moments of human time are able to escape the money nexus, they receive a significance which makes them unmistakable. Thus time receives its temporarily valid individuality. Paradoxically, as a Western obsession, it can be realized precisely when Western rationality and rationalization subject all time to the anonymity of market relations and their mutual capacity for substitution. At this very moment there arises a new claim precisely to this time: the claim to proper time. Is this claim also just an illusion? 130 Politics of Time ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=131 | PRINTED_PAGE=131 Politics of Time 131 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=132 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The Longing for the Moment Im ein ani li, mi li? Ouk'she ani, lei atsmi, ma ani? Weim lo ashar, ei ma tai? If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am for myself, what am I? If not now, then when? Mishnah, Sayings of the Fathers Probably never before have so many people simultaneously experimented with time as they are doing today. For many, the experiment is involuntary. With the wristwatch, made in Hong Kong, from where 590 million of them are exported each year, a further piece of Western rationality enters people's minds and social structures which previously lived their own local time and were attached to other structures of time. In Western industrialized countries, escape attempts are being tested, where the pressure of time is intensifying, and uchronias invented which are intended to lead out of Western time. In the different cultural quality of Eastern mysticism and its sense of time, people consciously search for other experiences of time, for an escape from everyday stress, through meditation and relaxation, through rebirth or stopping the moment. It is not just that the West has pervaded other cultures with its economy of time; the gods there have also become mobile, and the Buddhaof the three times drops in wherever he is invoked. But most experiments are less exotic. They take place in the area of conflict between, on the one hand, the individual endeavour to be able to realize a fraction of proper time, to structure the time available into meaningful units and to be able to optimize 5 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=133 | PRINTED_PAGE=133 it towards one's own everyday needs, and on the other hand the necessity of coping, at a social level, with the limitations contained in the extended present. Meaningfully appropriating proper time is dependent on the - unequal – initial social position, on the social hierarchies of power and income, in which people find themselves. Comprehending the limitations of the extended present, and managing to deal with them, awaits individual and collective solutions; it seeks answers which a scientific and technological culture gives to the problems it has created itself. This, reduced to a bare common denominator, is what is concealed by the slogan about the 'quality' of time, which goes beyond the demand for quantity. ‘Time as such is not scarce. The impression of the scarcity of time arises only from the overtaxing of experience by expectations. Experiences and actions need time and can therefore be accommodated in a given span of time only in a limited fashion. The horizon of time and the structure of expectation must therefore be brought into line', so runs the sociologist's prescription.1 For the economists, on the other hand, the rise of the 'hurried leisure class’ of grafting managers who have almost everything, only no time, automatically and axiomatically follows from the rising standard of living. I work so hard that I am killing myself and ruining my family. But I am earning so much that I can afford it', so runs one of the concise summaries.² From this viewpoint, it is the so-called opportunity costs'which arouse the hunger for time. With the increase in productivity, it becomes more costly not to work, and time is calculated according to what could have been earned if a person had worked - considerations which admittedly presuppose that work and earnings are there. In order to cope with the shortage of time' or the 'hunger for time', there are very different strategies. The problem is different for organizations and for managers, and different again for working mothers, who are all dependent on time in varying and unequal ways. The Longing for the Moment 133 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=134 | PRINTED_PAGE=134 Under pressure of time, as Luhmann shows, shifts of preference occur in the long term within organizations, in favour of what is scheduled and restricted, i.e. the selection of factual arrangements and value judgements ultimately changes in accordance with the establishment of temporal priorities. The pressure of time facilitates the 'institutionalization of opportunist pursuit of values'. This means that, in a social system which has attained a high degree of complexity and variability in the achievement of values, it becomes useful to break up conflicts of values - say between such different values as life, hygiene, entertainment, peace, culture, freedom or provision for old age - into a temporal succession. This robs them of something of the antagonistic harshness of a struggle for survival. A decision is then needed only about immediate priorities; the adherents of other values are not discredited, they just have to – wait. Time can also be saved through trust and routine, and through artificially set deadlines otherwise impeded tasks can be raised into the protective zone of the urgent and restricted.3 Managers who work in organizations which set deadlines for them, and who are expected to set deadlines for others, attempt for their part to cope with the chronic lack of time. Every hour in the appointments diary is organized by secretaries or assistants, whose task it is to negotiate, buy and sell their boss's time. All agreements reached are ultimately - finely coordinated with the hierarchy of the status system – only tentative. If new priorities arise, the appointments have to be altered, postponed, rescheduled. It is as if time would do anything to escape the straitjacket which is to be put on it.⁴ The higher the status hierarchy, the more tentative the commitments become, for only the time of subordinates can be firmly determined in advance and assigned. The managers themselves suffer from chronic lack of time and constantly try to do too much. By means of all sorts of tricks, they intensify and delegate, they use even faster means of communication and attend to even more jobs at the same time, in order to gain time in this way. But ultimately even their – long – working day remains limited. The abundance of what still remains to be done, and the possibilities which cannot be realized, far exceed what can be fitted in, however well their time is organized. 134 The Longing for the Moment ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=135 | PRINTED_PAGE=135 Christiane Müller-Wichmann has rightly complained, in irritation and anger, that it is always also a question of taking into account the chance of disposing of remaining residues of time, in order not to lose sight of the 'unequal access to time'. For managers and other favoured groups of people, despite their quantitative burden, are nevertheless capable of largely structuring their time themselves. Because they are able, as it were, both to increase time and to make free time in the first place from empty remnants, they are presented with possibilities which women above all do not have, the organization of whose time is either strictly laid down or extremely fragmented, so that the available remnants of time cannot be assembled into meaningful free time.⁵ The problem of the unequal availability of proper time arises again here. But despite these striking differences, the feeling of the lack of time in the face of the wealth of alternative possibilities – of consuming, of working, of living – is spreading in general. Every decision which is made is a destroyed possibility. Above all through modern means of communication, people have become more aware how else they might spend their days or hours. They therefore experience the lack of time more clearly. Whenever they concentrate on a piece of information, they deny themselves the possibility of fully concentrating on another one. 'They are more aware of other places in the world where they might be, with other men, or other women, at other meetings, at other conferences, at other exhibitions, on other trails, reading other books, on other moonlit nights." The Longing for the Moment 135 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=136 | PRINTED_PAGE=136 In view of these findings, and many more could be cited, it is not surprising that people have been seized by the longing for a differently lived time. The desire to 'work differently', which also resonates in the public debate about a reduction in working hours, is at the same time a vehicle of the longing for a time which can be structured differently, and which promises an escape from everyday routine and the realization of at least a fraction of those possibilities which is thwarted by the actual expenditure of time. A new departure – but where to and how? Here the paths to Uchronia begin to fork. Both have long since ceased to exist, the remote places, and the fictitious, distant future, created despite temporal discontinuities, in which the ideal society can be outlined, and which cün be dreamed about as a compensation for the present misery, in social, political, moral, and literary terms, whatever the sensitive heart or enlightened reason may desire'.7 Uchronia is now, and it too seeks realization in the extended present. The first path leads straight into the Cockaigne of full time. If sausages once dropped from the sky in this imaginary land for people racked with famine to eat their fill, then the modern dream of the temporal paradise is full of the magic formula ‘if only I had time for . . .'. The imagination can then run riot, since only two conditions are to be met for the fulfilment of all the wishes it produces: to have more time and, if possible, money too. The poor wish for the means of transport of the rich, and all their luxury in the way of time and money; the fans of free time want to make their pleasures, in which they are led to believe by a uchronically well-versed advertising industry, instantaneously and simultaneously realizable, and contemplative people want a bit of ecologically clean eternity. All want to appease their hunger for time, without ever becoming thirsty again; they want to live faster, more fully, without therefore arriving earlier or empty. More free time: less work; more consumption: more fun; more in the way of life: living differently; so the short formula might run with variations. 136 The Longing for the Moment ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=137 | PRINTED_PAGE=137 The second path to Uchronia is far more sophisticated. It is the path richest in tradition, burdened and laden with the toil of the oppressed in a world ruled by lords and masters. What has shifted is the temporal emphases. The suffering from time, from which uchronia promises liberation, is no longer the twelve- or sixteen-hour day, but the increasing labour intensity, the negative time stress, and above all the lacking temporal autonomy of one's own availability. Attempts to attain a reduced intensification, to counter the economy of time with its ecology', to bring work 'to life' – all this struggling in words for the 'reappropriation of time', of which people were collectively and individually robbed by industrialization, has the contemporary familiar ring of a discourse in which only the utopias are real’(Oskar Negt) and which has now also discovered time.8 Autonomy and self-determination, temporal flexibilization in the interests of employees, new forms of distribution of working time and living time, are recurring themes which seek to oppose the constraint of time, to remove it and replace it with the dream of self-determination. The third uchronia seeks to 'liquefy frozen time again', to make time die again in order to approach other ideas of time in the shadow of a catastrophic end of time'.9 It feeds on ideas which start from a change in temporal rhythms and strive for a new balance between the linearity of mechanized and homogenized time and the unexpected element, the spontaneity of the vicissitudes of life'. The argument is directed towards a resumption of natural rhythms; the hundred-year-old battle against nature is to be brought to an end and homeostasis replaced by homeorhythmics.1º Linearity is not to be totally abolished, but human routine is to be broken, and shaped in a less regular fashion. The force of habit which gives stability to social life and represents the preservative and conservative aspect of society – since ‘hardly anything is more conservative than the habitualized behaviour with which one inhabits everyday life'11 – is to blend with what is new and unexpected, the breaking of routine, which also stands for linearity. The reintroduction of cycles is intended to signal not just repetition, but also the impetus of a new line. The third uchronia has concrete proposals in store, chronobiologically and chronosociologically underpinned, which range from the structuring of shift-work to the reduction of jet lag; it seeks to be able to give practical advice, in order to establish a new complementarity between change and continuity. It argues for the creation of new periods of time in which vicissitudes can occur, The Longing for the Moment 137 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=138 | PRINTED_PAGE=138 events which – whether desirable or not – restore to life that dimension (of occurrence) that would then allow us to perceive and accept its discontinuities, its wrinkles, curves and cracks, and to be prepared for and to celebrate its beginning and its end. 'Vicissitudes' are to be a cipher for a life released from the coordinate system of 'work' and free time', a life good for something other than keeping the great machine functioning and one's own self fit for it. For what? ... The question arises as to whether an appropriation of a more elementary kind would not have to occur before (or on, during) the politicization of a piece of 'new' time wrested from work and its correlate, free time: a conversion of work, free time, or rather freed time into living time, an opening up of the horizon of time to the unforeseen, which would be subjectively assimilable, manageable, and also: welcome.12 The third uchronia has a lot in store for women, since they bring the better prerequisites for it with them. Men are 'blind to the temporal quality of change'and hence all the more at risk ‘as far as the secret predominance of vicissitudes which have been pushed aside is concerned ... as long as they (men) are functioning, they do not notice that there is something the matter with them... until... a... vicissitude notices them'. But in case women and the women's movement should not summon up enough strength to switch off for men the conveyor belt on which they are processing their lives, perhaps the (even though only just germinating) longing for an alternative' experience of time, for a day ‘from which one cannot already tell its evening in the morning, will suffice for this'.13'All days are not equal', runs an inscription which Michael Young saw in Ghana. Did Africans realize the rediscovered Western uchronia long ago? 138 The Longing for the Moment ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=139 | PRINTED_PAGE=139 Uchronias, like utopias before them, have a central social function to fulfil: they contain proposed solutions to particular unsolved problems in a society. 'Utopias?', asks Hans Magnus Enzensberger, we cannot see them. We only feel them like a knife in our backs.'And it is strange how familiar the knives in our backs feel, as if they had been sticking there for a long time. The first knife is sharpened on the unsolved problems of an insatiable economy of time. After it has proved possible to produce more in less time, it is now a question of doing more, fitting in more work and leisure activities in potentially less time. The increase in productivity results in an increase in consumption – more consumer goods, leisure activities and journeys, more entertainment, communication and information contend for spans of attention and time to expend. Production presses for destruction, and rituals of destruction can be arranged in diverse ways, preformed by the archaic figure of the sacrifice. Consumption is a harmless form of destruction in comparison, even though the mountains of refuse are piling up. The uchronia which only demands more time does not escape the quantitative logic of money and its accumulation. Money and time remain substitutable, but the general money preference will predominate even when more time is demanded. More can also be got out of living time and more can be made of life. 'Squeeze out the 150%', they say in the USA. It will soon be more. Self-exploitation or drug? Both interpretations are permissible, but the knife turns in the back The Longing for the Moment 139 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d3ee5fbb-1124-4191-99e1-3139801e0da2.md?start=140&limit=10)