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# Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

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It is easy to see that even the culturally innovative uchronic time-strategies, which in their fine structure may be coordinated with the latest findings on the biological rhythms of human beings, their social preferences and their desires for social justice or sociability, cannot escape the danger of manipulation, indeed of perversion. Thus the third knife is also sticking deep in the back of this society. Is time pressing to remove the knives? Who are the victims, and whose victims are they?

However different the three current uchronias, the economic, the political and the cultural one, may be in their initial position, however differently they may judge the causes and describe the solutions to be adopted, however collective or individual the prescribed strategies of action may look – they have one thing in common: time is mainly experienced as an externalized constraint, influencing people from outside, which it is necessary to counteract. The constraint can be impersonal or personalized, can appear in the form of employers, of society or as an -ism, but it confronts people as something given, something made by others. Time here appears in the mask, the most neutral image of which is the clock. It is a mask which threatens, denies wishes, suppresses and expropriates them. It is the mask of time which causes suffering and which has inevitable death in store in the end. For even in the boldest uchronias, one liberation is not conceivable: the liberation from the temporal limitations of the existence of every individual human life.

Sartre related the following about his friend Paul Nizan and his disappointed expectations on a trip to the Soviet Union: 'he went to Russia because he wanted to find out whether people were now no longer afraid of death after the revolution, whether death had become something of secondary importance for them.'Then Nizan had gone there and had seen that the Russians thought of death in the same way as we do, and as a result had come back disappointed. He had said at the time – in an unmistakable tone of resignation – to Sartre: 'On this point, no, there's nothing to be done, they haven't changed.'19

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In view of the final truth, that of one's own death, all human beings are victims of time. The mask of the constraint which seems to emanate from time is nothing other than protection from this truth. In this respect, we cannot take it off completely, but it ought to be possible to look behind it a bit more. For the victims merrily carry on acting in the meantime.

Time is made by human beings and has to do with power which they exercise over one another with the aid of strategies of time. Time unites and separates – combatants as well as lovers. As with every form of power, there is a counter-power; every strategy finds its counter-strategy. Time is in everything, as Shinmen Musashi, a famous Japanese warrior, sums up the strategies of his art of war (Go Rin No Sho) in 1645: time is important in dancing and in music, since rhythms exist only when the time is right. But there is also time in all skills, and equally in the void. Time determines the life of the warrior, his rise and decline, his harmonies and discords. In order to be able to think and act strategically, one has to know which time is to be used, and when it is not to be used . . . from the small to the big, from the fast to the slow, from the time of the distance to the time of the background. Without knowing the time of the background, every strategy becomes uncertain in its outcome. It is a book, incidentally, which became almost compulsory reading for American managers in view of the challenge of Japanese economic power.20

The strategic use of time as a central aspect in the emergence of power, and for the purpose of maintaining it, runs throughout the whole of social life, from interpersonal relations to the big institutions and their built-in tendencies to persist. It begins with the child, who always places the state of consciousness he or she has just experienced at the centre of the perception of time, and in whom immediacy follows immediacy. From the periodicity of the body, he or she develops the first ideas of time, but also the first strategies in dealing with time. In the rhythm of breathing, eating and sleeping, the child experiences his or her earliest gratifications and privations. With the control of the sphincter muscles, the child develops a little later the most important instrument for implementing its independent consciousness of time, with the aid of which it becomes possible to make adults, all-powerful up to that time, dependent on its own will in a way. But society and outside determination already intervene here. The pleasure contained in the independent scanning of its bodily functions makes it terribly hard for the child, under the pressure of its surroundings, to give up its original perception of time. Alienness abstracts from all pleasure.21 In a fine essay, Caroline Neubaur has studied the experiences and theoretical insights of the English psychiatrist Donald W. Winnicott. Precisely in the early mother-child relationship, a situation is produced which is characterized by alienation. There are illusions which thwart one another and which consist in the fact that two ‘interior' systems confront one another which have usurped the other's ‘exterior' in each case, but which cannot perceive one another as illusory. So that the alienation can be removed, something has to be added which is perceptible to both sides, which has an element of estrangement for both, and yet is capable of removing estrangement. According to Winnicott, this third element is the transitional object which can be accepted by both sides as something alien. For this it is necessary that an effort has to be made on the part of the child as well as on the part of the mother: namely to accept a bit of alienness in order to be able to overcome alienness.22

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Paradoxically, it could be continued, proper time is made possible only through the time of others. Only when a common time is created as a frame of reference, which neither belongs completely to the one or completely to the other nor is occupied by him or her, can the constraint of time at least be loosened, even if it cannot be totally removed. Between two individuals, this presupposes a process of constant development, of negotiation and argument by means of their continued temporal strategies. Many sets of strategies are at the disposal of strategic action in time and through time: accelerating or slowing down; fixing a deadline; promising; waiting and keeping the other waiting; acting at the right moment, deciding or biding one's time. What links these social situations with one another, which recur in countless variants and in which people fix time symbolically, but with real consequences, is the interval. Just like Winnicott's transitional object, the teddy bear or the corner of a cushion which slips between mother and child and becomes a powerful means of symbolizing experience and gaining reality that becomes fundamental to human creativity per se, the interval of time is the basic element for structuring interhuman relations. Waiting and keeping the other waiting, promising, deciding, fixing a deadline – in countless variations and combinations, fighting or loving relationships can be shaped by these. Abolishing the interval would mean abolishing strategy.23 The interval can be consciously and intentionally used; it can result from situations of social inequality or be the expression of power and consolidate the latter. The brilliantly strategic approach to time manifests itself in the interval.

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But the interval is never fixed once and for all, it flows with time and remains, like power and status, renegotiable. In the case of keeping someone waiting, to cite the example of one of the most ordinary and most banal situations, the time of others is disposed of by their time remaining unoccupied. Language has no expression for the person who keeps someone waiting, but only for the person waiting. Yet even the obvious powerlessness of the person waiting, in which differentials of power and status are expressed, is limited and open to counter-strategies.

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Promises, on the other hand, extend the interval for a certain or uncertain time. Promises presuppose trust, and trust saves time, but promises are conditionally open to the demand that they are kept and are consequently also subject to the strategy of the interval. Fixing a deadline, on the other hand, sets limits; the interval is given a time-limit and sanctioned; it is tested as an instrument of power, but even deadlines are negotiable.

The interval structures interhuman relations, by the flow of time being indicated, interrupted, slowed down, accelerated, restricted or given a time-limit. From this it becomes clear that it is part of the peculiarity of the concept of time to be not just a symbol of a widespread synthesis, of an abstraction at a high level, but a symbol of the changing relations between individuals.24 It also becomes understandable that certain social conditions are required in which decisions in a temporal context become possible in the first place. In situations in which time is socially negated, because the situation is not one oriented towards continuation or termination in which the socially expected duration is negated, there is no interval and no decision.“Choice"would indeed have no meaning if it did not constitute a discontinuity or a non-determined selection, but it would be equally meaningless if this selection had no consequences, i.e. did not result in a sequel or constituted a sequence.'25 The strategic game with the interval, the fixing of time as a structuring of relations, is based on the search for the right moment. Everybody thinks they know it, or longs for it. It holds good equally for individuals and for organizations, indeed even for nations. Firms have to decide whether and when they should expand or diversify; when they should buy or sell on the market; political parties have to decide on the right moment to call new elections or not. These are the moments which make history or which can at least be reconstructed in retrospect as turning points in history. The losers, asserts Koselleck, have been the better historians over thousands of years because their primary experience, unlike that of the victors, is above all that everything has turned out differently from what was planned or hoped for. They have, if they reflect methodically, to produce more evidence to explain why something has turned out differently.26But if the right moment proves to be such only in retrospect, it is the interval which makes it possible in the first place.

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The interval, once it is transported from the level of interhuman relations into the time-structure of institutions, changes its quality there. Of course, as a strategic instrument of power it remains effective there too. The priority of the fixed deadline within bureaucratic organizations is an example which has already been cited; establishing temporal priorities is a means of reducing complexity. But while people, who confront others as beings who confer meaning, symbolically interact, and communicate with one another, even though antagonistically, fix time by inventing intervals, playing with them, and 'making' time themselves in the succession of interhuman actions, in ritual gestures and customs, in skilful delaying tactics, in promising or running up debts, the time of institutions faces them as something more viscous, already made, if not even frozen. The frequent use of the term 'time', as if time possessed an independent existence, is connected not least with the fact that timè in social facilities and institutions becomes relatively independent of individuals. Just as the means of determining time, whether created by human beings or not, have a motion of their own, since it is a question of socially standardized motions which have a certain degree of independence from other motions and from other human and non-human changes, the individual person has to coordinate his or her own behaviour with the established time of the group to which he or she belongs, and with the organizations which surround him or her.

It is this alienation of time, occurring through its concentration within institutions, which then reacts as something external, is felt to be a constraint, and can be used as an instrument of power. Where the interval in the interhuman sphere is relatively open and can be shaped, it becomes rigid where it is a question of legally regulated deadlines on which sanctions are imposed; where the credit apparatus sets deadlines and makes money work; where it is a matter of waiting periods which are fixed, tolerated and dictated by organizations and within them. A broad field of activity presents itself here for intercultural and interorganizational comparison: who has to wait, how long, what for and how, can serve as an indicator of the value which time – whose time? – is given within an organization. But in this way the original conditions for the slow consolidation of the interval, its embedding in power structures, can also be understood.

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Power, exercised by central authorities, establishes itself over space and over time. Territorially established rule was followed by the temporal kind. The early big empires used both forms to consolidate their rule, but first it was more urgent to control the space, the territory. There were spatial strategies for this – the exercise of physical force, and taxation – and incipient temporal ones, which particularly included the introduction of writing and written documents by the bureaucracies.27 For now it could be established what was and ought to be the case. The temporal aspect of the exercise of power is openly revealed in dictatorships even today. Regimes founded on terror also use temporal strategies. Terror is exercised through the unforeseeability, the temporal arbitrariness, with which victims are taken away and turned into victims. In military dictatorships, moreover, Montesquieu's separation of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary is abolished by denying their temporal connections. For jurisdiction stands for what happened in the past. The past is judged, and decisions are made about right and wrong in retrospect. The legislature, however, points to the future. Laws are made in order to establish norms of behaviour and situations which are only those set. The executive, however, executes sheer present; it establishes and determines what is, and has to prevail, now. In military dictatorships, past and future are simultaneously denied with the abolition of an independent jurisdiction and an independent parliament. All power is granted to the executive, which alone has to determine what has to prevail in the present that rules over the other times.28

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In the development of societies, the territorial rule which was exercised by means of the spatial concept of order'is followed by that which has devoted itself to the dynamized concept of motion, progress', progress through acceleration. Acceleration uses time as motion for strategic goals. Deadly in battle, quickness, i.e. being quicker than the others, has been preserved in competition and is being cultivated in increasingly sophisticated form. Economic competition, now spread throughout the world and functioning as a driving force of world economic events, remains ultimately rooted in that development which uses the acceleration of the machine to increase productivity. Laboratory time, which is inherent in the new communication technologies, is employed to economic advantage to transfer information to other areas of production and of services, to create additional infrastructures, and for the purpose of continued accelerated scientific and technological innovation. Acceleration facilitates mobility, and mobility promises further mobilization. Even sport, the institutionalized competition of bodies in aggressive conflicts, prepared in a way suited to the media, between nations and regions, towns and districts, ultimately appears as an appendage to the extra-somatically accelerated body-machine. In the struggle for, and the cult surrounding, the proverbial tenths of a second, scientifically based training methods are used which are able to take into account the bodily functions of athletes dependent on their biorhythms, as well as the smallest advantages which technological equipment has to offer. A gigantic machinery of innovation has been set in motion here, which leads to a powerfully growing branch of industry ranging from the solitary sport of body-building to the frenzied stages of experimentation by industry in motor racing. In view of this collective cult of speed, from which no nation is exempt, the strategies of slowing down look really pathetic and defensive: cycleways are set up in the towns, speed limits introduced on the motorways, and for his novel The Discovery of Slowness the author Sten Nadolny needed a historical figure who, in his strange habits of thought and perception, seemed eerie even to his contemporaries. The braking experiments will undoubtedly be continued and in part even institutionalized - but is not a well-functioning braking device part of every decently constructed machine? Must not everyone who operates a machine know in what circumstances it is to be accelerated and in what circumstances it is to be slowed down? Thus slowness is ultimately cancelled out in the continued acceleration; the latter relativizes itself through the former. Social development does not proceed totally in conformity with machines, of course, but the interdependences are irreversibly aimed at acceleration. The Stone Age reflex of quickness in flight and in battle has developed throughout social evolution into a scientific and technological civilization which is continuing to accelerate. This is the time of the background which it is of central importance for every other temporal strategy to recognize.

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Sociologists and anthropologists long ago referred to the symbolic, time-setting and structuring process by means of which ‘social time' is created by human beings and between them. For Norbert Elias, a glance back at Galileo's experiments shows in vivo, as it were, the departure of the concept of time in physics from the matrix of social time centred on human beings, which was linked with a corresponding change in the concept of nature.29 For him, the division into a time of physics and a social time is closely connected with the rise of physics and the natural sciences in general, which led to a conceptual dualism. In this respect, scientists have superseded priests in establishing the right' moment which signifies rise or decline and is the decisive factor for chaos and order, no matter whether it is derived from the detected correspondence with the happenings of the gods or from the scientifically based investigation ofnature and its processes. Elias gives a detailed account of the contents of the novel by an African author, Chinua Achebe, which focuses on a conflict over determining time. It concerns a first-hand report of life in an Ibo village in Eastern Nigeria during the period in which the old way of life was just beginning to change under the influence of colonial power. The focal point of the novel is the high priest who serves the god of six villages, and one of whose most important functions is to proclaim the right moment. It was indicated by the arrival of the new moon, for which the priest had to be on the look-out and which was to be greeted as a welcome guest. People's business was dependent on the arrival of the new moon, as well as the festivals and the beginning of harvest time with which the New Year was inaugurated. Achebe/Elias sympathetically describe what it meant for people to learn the right moment from an authority integrating their activities, and the way in which knowledge of the secrets of determining time represented a source of the priest's power. They give insight into an early form of the experience of time and demonstrate how important it was for people to hear the proclamation that the time for the harvest had come. For when, after a dramatic worsening of the conflict with the colonial administration, the priest falls silent and does not proclaim harvest time, people begin to starve.

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But what does the right moment stand for, and what can it be measured against? The longing for the individual moment can be strategically directed outwards, in order pragmatically to seek knowledge of the 'when'which can be translated into real advantages. It can be the planned or the chance moment, but it is always a question of relating it to human action. Knowing the right moment is useful; determining it confers power and promises control. But the search for the moment can also point inwards, to the unfolding of one's own, temporal self, to the development of an identity repeatedly reassembled from fragments. Then time is made by the flow of time momentarily stopping to let in the unexpected, to break routine, and to be open to the experience of spontaneity and to the vicissitudes' of life. Like the playfully and culturally creative transitional space in which the child discovers the transitional object and creates it himself or herself at the same time, a ‘time of transition'is discovered and created here. Through the unreal suspension, the momentary standstill of a present withdrawn from duration, the time of transition also contributes to the paradox of the real-unreal: for the real becomes real only in a process of reduction and elimination of the possible.30 In the long run, the moment is not stoppable, it flows back into the continuum of time. But this moment contains the power which can turn the transition itself into development. The poetic language of Cacciari, who follows great Hebrew, Christian and Islamic scholasticism, speaks of the nunc instantis, the dimension of a temporary interim period, which in its fullness is so temporary, but also so present, that it can hardly be noticed as an instant of time and yet for this very reason is completely transitory – a dimension of total transitoriness, in which the most temporary instant coincides with the moment that remains and that blows open the continuum. At this moment, which interrupts the flowing of instants, it is possible 'to take to heart' the sparks of hope, and 'to brush history the wrong way'; at this moment it is possible to understand how the radical imperfection of the world . . . is not mere despair on account of the ruins, but is the power which can raise those sparks in things in all their transitoriness. There is the temporary interim period of a Yes which is stronger than catastrophe, that But which unmasks the idolatry of the homogeneous and empty continuum.'31

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