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# Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

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Thus it is not just that the future is no longer what it used to be', as a piece of graffiti announces from the wall of a house in Berlin. It is increasingly overshadowed by the problems which are opening up in the present. The future no longer offers that projection space into which all desires, hopes and fears could be projected without many inhibitions because it seemed sufficiently remote to be able to absorb everything which had no place or was unwelcome in the present. The future has become more realistic, not least because the horizon of planning has been extended. But this also means that it is drawing closer to the present. With the abundance of human activities and their repercussions over a period of time, which become apparent because they require periods of planning and development that cannot be reduced at will and can be cancelled only with difficulty, a momentum of the present has been established which has to concentrate on itself. The scope of action is restricted because a part of the future is already being disposed of in the present; the ecological loops of human action become loops of time which react upon the present. The invocation of the future, in the name of which political action was justified for a long time, had to be reduced and at least partly transferred to the present.

Time conflicts and temporal asymmetries resulting from the need for coordination and integration of different time-structures and structuring patterns can be resolved by institutional mechanisms which establish priorities or invent workable compromises,9 or they find direct expression in the change of cultural symbols which serve as means of orientation. Time', as the Finnish philosopher von Wright concluded in an astute analysis, ‘is man's flight from contradiction.'1o In order to be able to accept change, time has to be created. In order to be able to accept changes with time, it could be continued, the categories of time have to be changed repeatedly. This is happening at present, under the pressure produced by the collapse of the concept of progress and the potentially negative consequent effects, which are becoming manifest with delays in time through the effect on the natural environment. The temporal category of the future is being abolished and replaced by that of the extended present.11

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The contradiction which is being fled from in this way arises, among other things, from the fact that the insatiable desire for technological and scientific innovations, and the rapid pace at which they are to be converted into economic growth, produce both the unforeseeable element and the essence of the innovation, and in addition also seek to bring under control all the consequent effects of this very innovation. The open horizon is to be preserved, and what has not been conceived is to remain conceivable, yet the positive and negative repercussions are equally to be known and controllable in advance. ‘Choosing the future', determining it, so runs a popular political slogan; it suggests that it is in fact possible to choose and determine. Such a demand is intended to open up scope for participatory structuring and to encourage people; to rouse the imagination, which threatens to ossify over the monotony of everyday life and the tightening regulations within and between institutions. A different' lifestyle, a 'different' way of working, is to be propagated. But this future which is to be created is already taking place now, is being determined in the extended present.12

The fact that the future is being generated in the present, that it is a relatively brief period of time at the beginning of a sequence which determines the further course of processes, is confirmed by analyses dealing with the genesis of technology. Initially, in the case of every innovation there are countless possibilities for development, which very soon undergo a radical limitation, however, in the sense of an evolutionary selection.13 What is left immediately after the elimination of the competition of a great variety which do not prove to be serviceable is a few options. The time-paths become compressed and narrower. The extended present has chosen the future and not vice versa.

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The future is constricted ‘in time' by the planning of longer-term intentions. It contains both: the symbolic construct which consists in the shifting of the drawing up of the boundary of time, and the real anticipations made by planning, by decisions about financing, and by action in organization, which are established in the extended present. Because the relation between present and future shifts, the future can be put into operation – in the present. The longer-term interdependences begin to take shape. The limited understanding in the recognition of problems and the equally limited means of mastering them which are available today likewise refer to the period of time lying immediately ahead, and not to a distant future. With the mounting pressure that solutions to impending, recognizable problems have to be found now, and with the ticking of the many clocks which have installed warning signals, there does not remain enough time to accommodate them in a moment conceived as fleeting, or to consign them to the amnesia of the future. The future of our children is no longer predominantly interpreted in individual terms – as the desire for social advancement and well-being – but as a question of collective survival. It is the time of the next generation which is being argued about now. The dramatic increase in complexity and density draws the future closer to the present – not just for the conscientious manager who already enters appointments in next year's calendar. This is also true of the calendar of societies. The years 2000 or 2025 are almost within reach.14 A loan is raised on a future by the latter being fetched into an extended present, in the hope that the present will suffice to yield the requisite interest - and the added value - needed for repayment. The future is disposed of as if it were the present, and an extended present is thereby produced.

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For Emile Durkheim, who wrote The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912, it was obvious that it was the forms of social organization from which people draw their fundamental thought categories such as space and time. For a conception' of time means nothing other than an intellectual grasp of that which surrounds people in their natural and social environment. And Norbert Elias stresses:

that time assumes the character of a universal dimension, is nothing other than a symbolic expression of the experience that everything which exists is part of a continual sequence of events. Time is an expression of the fact that people seek to determine positions, the length of intervals, the speed of change and more besides in this flow with a view to their own orientation.15

It follows from this that, depending on the state of social development, time as a social institution, as a symbolic means of orientation, is differently conceived, and confirmed and institutionalized by behaviour, social habits and interaction. That is why there are different conceptions of time in societies; they change with the demands which are made in the present on the society of individuals.

Yet this is no longer the simple formula of the different evaluation befitting the past, present or future in a society, which was believed not that long ago by empirically oriented social researchers to contain the key to the understanding of problems of time.1⁶But the abolition of the category of the future, and its replacement by that of the extended present, does not suffice to cope with all the contradictions which have arisen and the pressure of problems. What has been set in motion is rather also the relationship between the linear and the cyclical conception of time. This is generally regarded as fundamental to the temporal architecture of a civilization'(Krzysztof Pomian). Its components can be taken apart and put together again, but even through the plurality of times - psychological time, solar, liturgical and political time, clock time and the ultra-long or extremely brief time of science¹7 – the deeply rooted dualism of thought and temporal perception runs in straight lines or in recurring movements. One's own experience of life sufficiently nurtures both views. The movement from birth to death can be conceived as part of a cycle, indeed as recurrence, or as a more or less straight line which runs from the starting point to the final point. The linear, says Michael Young, stresses the new and leaves behind it what is familiar and has already been experienced. Viewed in these terms, it does not repeat itself and nothing is repeated in it. But no more can the cyclical bring back what is familiar, what has already existed, and what is identical in human life, although it produces something new.18As with every dualism, there is ample illustrative material for both ways of seeing things, but in the valuation befitting them from a social standpoint they remain in a peculiarly ambivalent, and unstable, because easily 'revaluable' position. The extended present, which can no longer be conceived in a linearly open, continual future, must therefore necessarily re-evaluate and absorb the body of cyclical time. The arrow of time admittedly continues to point forward, but it is now composed of many, recurring cycles. Science confirms this, as if its report had been ordered by society at the right time. From chronobiology, which deals with circadian rhythms and investigates the different oscillations and frequencies of the cycles of the human organism, via physics to the history of art or economics, science offers a whole host of insights based on a complementary view between the linearity and the cyclicality of time.

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If in the life of society, however, the impression prevails that linearity takes precedence over the cyclical conception of time, and if society is furnished with the adjective 'metronomic', there are understandable reasons for this. The contrast between the two fundamental conceptions of time arose with industrialization and the importance given to linear quantification during this period. The clock, although it is itself a measuring instrument geared to periodic recurrence, became the metronome for a changed rhythm of social time.19 The machines in the factory buildings, although they too were constructed with a periodic recurrence of their mechanical sequences in mind, were rightly regarded as the embodiment of the linearity which was built into the capitalist process of accumulation. It was based on another quantifiable medium, the universal medium of exchange per se, into which time could be transformed from now on: money. Time became money, and more or less money could be made from time. Time could be rationalized'from now on, i.e. by the appropriate organization of capital and work, ‘saved', ‘gained’ and ‘increased', in order to produce more. Counting hours or minutes, and measuring time, was given an additional instrumental importance with industrialization, which it has not lost to this day.

The measurement of time itself is an ancient cultural phenomenon. Having as biological beings the internal clock within them and the regularly recurring motions of the sun and stars around them, human beings produced a system of measuring time as a cultural achievement early on, which served to orient and coordinate their activities. In agrarian societies, it seemed obvious also to orient oneself in the measurement of time by the course of the cyclically recurring seasons. Over and above the practical functions of coordination, the measurement of time was always also used to project one's own social order and its periods of time into the cosmos and into nature, in order then to elevate the heavenly and natural order to the normative yardstick for the social system of structuring time. The power of the priests resulted from their knowledge and their function as time-givers. The measurement of time consequently serves as a setting of temporal standards and standardizations, from fixing the 'right' moment in the harmony between cosmos and human beings and separating sacred' times from profane ones, to the setting of records in sporting competition or the ascertaining of only just perceptible spans of attention for the purposes of conveying information. What has changed is the scales of measurement and instruments. The measurement itself is made by bringing into relation mobile continua which can be of many different kinds, one of which serves as a reference point for the other.20 In other cultures there was an astonishing abundance of different scales of measurement which served as a reference point, and accordingly many kinds of temporal dimension were measured. Only the scientific measurement of time brought the reduction to a single dimension, the homogenized, linear time of physics.

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Socially prevailing notions of time are therefore strongly influenced by the scales of measurement used. The linearized, homogenized continuum of mobile sequences which became the basis of the scientific measurement of time does not remain confined to physics, however. All other processes of measurement return to it. It is built into machines and technological equipment, and it is linked with the idea of measurement per se. And a great deal is measured: from the number of votes cast to the gross national product, from events recorded in the Guinness Book of Records to detailed budget expenditure. The idea of a linearized and homogenized scale of measurement has also seized hold of history. Its chronology is regarded as the final authoritative reference point for the course of all events in the human calendar per se. In his critique of chronological time, Siegfried Kracauer attributes the uncritical acceptance enjoyed, in his view, by the conception of flowing time among historians to an irresistible desire to translate the formal quality of irreversible flowing into content. It is the desire to be able to grasp the historical process as a whole, in order to be able to ascribe particular qualities to it as a whole. These may consist in the development of inherent possibilities, or in the idea of progress in the direction of a better future. Neither Hegel nor the comparatively more realistic Marx, nor many others, were able to resist the temptation to try to unfold, tackle and conceive the course of history in its entirety. Chronology is thereby given a material' importance of the first order.21 But the time of the calendar is an empty time, a vessel with no contents.

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The mobile continua which are brought into relation with one another in the measurement of time by one serving as a reference point for the other, no matter whether they serve mere dating, dividing up into periods or interpretation, are not chosen arbitrarily, however. They are superior' in a very definite sense, and they are made ‘superior' relative to the social organization of a society, its power structure, its value system and its builtin dynamics of development. Significances are ascribed to them which, viewed from a different perspective, are not peculiar to them. But once they have attained a significance, this continues to have an effect and rubs off on other interpretations. This was the case in the relation between linearity and cyclicality. Just as the arrow of time which points from the past via the present into the future says nothing as yet about dividing lines which mark individual periods of time, linearity does not rule out a cyclical recurrence from the start. But it is not possible to abstract from human ascriptions of significance. Every conception of time has to accommodate the idea ofirreversible change and the idea of repetition; they therefore correspond to the reproducible’ time of physics. Societies can, however, make a choice within certain limits, construct their time and change this construction again.

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For human concerns, it cannot be so easily decided whether the closed'past follows a different logic from the always uncertain future and the present which is constantly impure' because it can be influenced by human behaviour, systems of belief, and ideas.22 Even though the past is over, it is capable of stipulating, via long-term historical processes, the marginal conditions within which the present takes place. The future, on the other hand, separable from the present by a fluid dividing line, admittedly promises the wealth of all possibilities and contingencies, but only a limited range of these possibilities can become present reality. The processes of separation are what sociology means by the terms structuring' and ‘structuration'.23 Time then becomes in the present the possibility of creation and destruction, the source of uncertainty and decision’(Elchardus). It contains the process of becoming, which is removed and also differs in its methodology from the reconstruction of the past. The extended present stresses the necessity of structuring, but also the possibilities of structuring. It tries to diminish the uncertainty of the future by recalling cyclicality and seeking to combine it with linearity. The present is no longer interpreted merely as part of the way on the straight line leading to a future open to progress, but as part of a cyclical movement. In addition, and overlapping with the chronological positioning which becomes a neutral background dating and loses the ideological overloading of a world history with which it was encumbered until recently, events become interpretable as part of a cycle. They are seen as part of a succession, a sequence, which follows its 'own time', which bears within it its clock or – in modern parlance – its programme or its temporal code, which determines ascent, repetition and descent or completion.

It is an astonishing social change which is taking place here. In its shortage of time and embroiled in temporal contradictions, society is using new strategies to try to solve the problematic situations which have emerged. The present is being extended in order to have more time for urgently impending decisions. But it is also being extended in the sense that it is now interpreted both in chronological linear terms and as a part of recurring cycles which all follow their own duration and typical curves of development. Dating now no longer occurs exclusively with reference to the time of the calendar, but with reference to the time of the ‘inner programme', the ‘genetic code', which dictates the term of one's life. New complementarities are opening up here which are also oriented to the proper time' of systems, and for which their positioning in the linear sequence of chronology becomes background noise. Because the ascription of significance shifts to the cycles, to the proper times of the connected events and processes which produce a system, the plurality of times naturally also increases. Many people think the time has come to confront the linearity which has retained predominance even in social life, through industrialization and the ways of life connected with it, deliberately with cyclical time and cyclical ways of life. On this view, their foundations would be discoverable in the biological rhythms of social existence. Habits would give stability to society through their cyclical recurrence. Since they too are subject to social evolution, it is not a static but a dynamic stability which would be produced in this way.24

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The idea of cyclical recurrence is as old as mythology and the continuation it has found within philosophy. The discovery of cyclical time is not and cannot by any means be new, in view of the fact that cycles are components of natural, cosmological and biological sequences of events. Even the rediscovery of social rhythms could be dismissed as the compensatory longing which fills a society that has grown weary of the domination of the metronome, or could be interpreted as a harmlessly endearing form of conservatism, which seeks to rely on habit as a factor of social stability. But this is not all. Precursors of the idea can be found without much difficulty, and so also can empirical observations. The regularity with which particular forms of economic crisis recurred impressed itself on social science early on. Other phenomena of social life which seemed to recur regularly were also observed, recorded and subjected to statistical analysis: wars, crop failures, revolts, but also seasonal variations in the birth and death rate, in the crime or divorce rate, stimulated the imagination of social science to record more accurate data and to search for the laws concealed in them. Simply on the strength of their far-reaching significance for economic events alone, it was the recurrent economic upturns and downturns which were vigorously examined. A Russian economist, Kondratiev, and after him Schumpeter and many others, thought they had found the pulsating rhythm of recurrence. In the form of so-called long waves, at intervals of about fifty-five years, there are, so runs the hypothesis, phases of technological innovation which have a lasting influence on economic events. Kondratiev himself wrote in 1928 that he was not of the opinion that the periodicity of the natural sciences was commensurate with the social world; by 'regularity' he understood the repetition of particular events or phenomena in time. Since then, with the aid of refined statistical methods and an enlarged data basis, long waves have turned into a small sea of research literature.25 As it was with Kondratiev himself, it is a question of being able to draw conclusions about the form and length of cycles from the observation of cyclical events, which either recur in strictly periodical fashion or at least show recurring sequences of alternating phases, and of examining their connections with one another.

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