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# Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

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This has not always been the case. The sciences, as Blumenberg notes, announced their need for time very early on, indeed this partly even stands for the transition to modern science. But at first it was a need for time and a time-structure which was directed towards the past, which was intended to catch up on what reason thought it needed at the time of the Enlightenment. It was never a question here of procuring and creating time for the sake of pure knowledge alone. If the sciences have known how to meet their need for time successfully, then it is always because the time-structures discovered and created by them, and their peculiarities, had retroactive effect and were anchored in socio-economic connections, and in a practice through which every need for time on the part of science that was met became translatable into a societal need and demand for these very time-structures. They range from the rampant ideology of the machine age to concrete working-time regulations invoking it; from the logic of the pair of compasses, in which time is a succession of moments, and the actual change occurs when the eyes are shut, to the high-speed calculator. In historical terms, astronomy, which had tried as early as Kepler and Copernicus to reconcile the empirical observational data with the requirements of theory but also with a coming social 'turning point', was followed by geology. Today, it is the broad front of knowledge of the laboratory sciences which, increasingly interlocked with society and economics, anticipatingly articulates, moulds and puts into operation its need for time – as laboratory time. In the 1830s, there was a heated scientific controversy which began with a seemingly minor problem in the dating of geological strata in the English county of Devon, and ended with a new perspective on the history of the earth.⁶ But in order to comprehend the extent of the change in the understanding of the past with real, economic consequences for the present at that time, it must be recalled that the creation of the geological time-scale took place in a remarkably brief and dense period of scientific work in less than half a century. Around 1800, science admittedly knew that the earth was old, but there was no frame of reference at all to arrange historical events in their chronological sequence. The determining criterion generally accepted since then, based on the chronological order of fossils, did not yet exist. It was as if historians knew that there had been earlier civilizations on this earth, but had no idea whether the pyramid of Cheops had been erected before the cathedral of Chartres or not. Around 1850, however, history was a well-ordered sequence, embracing the whole world, of unrepeatable and recognizable events. It was defined by the history of life on earth, and established by a fixed nomenclature which was valid from New York to Moscow.7

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The truly remarkable thing about this period of the 'discovery of time' through geology, however, was that the past was scientifically safeguarded precisely at a moment when one of the greatest social experiments in Europe began: the phase of intensive industrialization and its side effects, whereby the social present and future of millions of people was swept into the swirling current of commencing modernization and profoundly shaken.

In view of this coincidence, it also becomes less astonishing that the conflicts between geology and established religion over a literal interpretation of the story of the Creation were limited. Of course, there was a small minority which insisted on it, but it stood no chance in the face of a pragmatic science for which even a concept like creation'caused no difficulties, even if it could not be precisely translated into scientific terms. Creation'was to prove problematic only where, as in the case of Lamarck, no creative activity was allowed to exist any longer behind the natural process of evolution, before fully flaring up in the controversy surrounding Darwin's theory of evolution. The harmlessness and casualness with which geology asserted its conception of time in the face of religion in the first half of the nineteenth century did not hold good, however, for other relations of this science to the society of its time. The establishing and ordering of the strata of the earth had highly practical economic significance, for it formed the prerequisite for the discovery and extraction of raw materials which were imperative for incipient industrialization. One of the protagonists of the Great Devonian Controversy', Murchison, was adviser to the tsar of Russia, for example, and convinced him of the futility of looking for coal in a Silurian rock stratum.

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Geology discovered time as the natural history of the earth, but only through the activity of scientists could this discovery be translated into practice. The historical connection which existed between the scientific concern with the 'natural time'of the earth on the one hand, and the industrial revolution on the other, went deeper, however, than the finding of coal leads us to assume. For Geoffrey Bowker, at any rate, who has conducted a semiotic investigation into the temporal perceptions of English and French geologists in the 1830s, it is obvious that the time discovered by the geologists soon turned into an ideological justification of the new conception of time which had infiltrated society.

The discourse which took place within geology about the beginnings of time turned it into a key science in the legitimation of the new social system of time which entered society with machines. Bowker reconstructs a fascinating picture from contemporary scientific texts by geologists on both sides of the English Channel. He shows how through a series of analogies and linguistic transformations God, the Creator in his relationship with his creation, was gradually replaced by a different analogous relationship, that which is established between the scientist and his creation, the machine. Science appropriates the beginning of natural time so to speak, by placing itself at the beginning instead of religion. It has to define this beginning afresh and thereby becomes the creator.8

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Time becomes time which has flowed, slowly been petrified, entered into sediments and deposits, and it fixes a beginning which can be dated for the history of the earth and of human beings. There thus arises at the same time the linear continuum, to which all other series of movements refer. But the decisive step is taken by the analogy with the machine. It becomes the vehicle of natural time when the series of movements prescribed by physics are built into it. It thereby becomes the regulator of the social time system of human beings, who have to conform to it. The time-structure of the linear, homogenized, arbitrarily divisible continuum is transferred through the machine from the realm of nature to that of society. The scientist feeds into the machine, which is his creation, the time of nature, whereby it was endowed with a temporal ordering power in the face of which all other social notions of time would prove inferior, if not impotent. In the social chaos which resulted from the industrial revolution and which was to lead society to the edge of the collapse of its old structures, science and technology became that authority and ordering power which appeared to be the saviour from collapse. In its name and in that of progress, there has been a demand ever since for the submission to a system of time which invoked natural time, and in accordance with which both machines and human beings had to move. The machine age, with its dominant conception of linear time, was able to remain unchallenged for so long not least because of this successful' connection between natural and social time, established by the transformation of the scientific conception of time.

The ousting of religion as a time-setting authority, and as the highest authority in determining time, thus had far-reaching consequences. Nobody would question the monopoly of definition on the part of science today, which since 1967, for example, has given the definition of a second as 9,192,631,770 periods of the caesium atom. Even if there are still various strange-seeming rearguard actions by religious fundamentalists, as in the USA, which find expression in so-called ‘creationism', attempts at a regressive departure from the scientific conception of time have no chance, and no significant consequences.

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In historical terms, the establishment of the scientific conception of time, which for its part bears the stamp of a particular epoch of the history of science and of the social forces of its time, and its incorporation into what became the dominant social conception of time, had succeeded. Once the linear system of time was set in the form of a chronology going back to the newly fixed beginnings, acceleration could start in the form of motion making everything dynamic, which seemed to stop at nothing. In the tourbillon social which broke out with the industrial revolution and wrenched people out of their countless 'small worlds', out of the small towns and villages with self-contained social structures and forms of existence, and kindled in them the insatiable desire for growth, when everything, as Marx wrote, 'was pregnant with its own contradiction', acceleration became the experience of modernization overshadowing and shaping everything else. The pace becomes more important than the destination: anyone who stands firm stands still; everything, above all time, becomes frantic motion: the new myth was speed.

In view of this wildly spreading acceleration, it is not surprising that many people reacted to it with a kind of culture 'shock', and the phenomenon of 'shock' itself was derived from the medical diagnosis of the physical and mental state of victims injured in railway accidents.9 But our subject here is not to be the collisions of the psyche and of countless existences with the locomotive of time, nor the countless metaphors with which people sought to put into words what they experienced as a gigantic torrent of motion, but the iconography of time. Artists have left behind images which are capable of expressing feelings more clearly than words.

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These are pictures in which dying time is portrayed, truth as the daughter of time as well as time devouring its children. They are marked by irony and melancholy, but artists are also required to interpret them for us today and allow us to read them afresh. In his poetic and philosophical essay, Massimo Cacciari refers to a portrait of dying time from 1764 by the English satirist William Hogarth, and to two pictures by Goya which were produced as part of the Quinta del Sordo cycle. For Cacciari, time, portrayed as Cronos, reveals in its progress the truth of its own death. In Hogarth's picture, there is even the will, which bequeathes all and every Atom'not to God (these words are deleted) but to Chaos whom I appoint my sole Executor'. Beside the emaciated Cronos there lie the pipe which has slipped from his grasp and the blunt scythe; the hour-glass has run out; the world is already in ruins. Cupid's bow is smashed to pieces, and the bell has cracked. The world is going up in smoke. Time has condemned itself to the 'consummatus est'; in the end it feels itself to be void. In Goya's pictures, according to Cacciari, what is portrayed is the folly of time. Large black eyes stare at the void which is now looming. In order to be able to survive, time is voracious, and in its insatiable greed it no longer even spares its own children. In order to survive, it also destroys the sole guarantee of its continuance. The same principle which justifies its existence condemns it to death. Time which consumes and destroys, in order to be able to live, is characterized by folly': it crazily rushes to its own destruction. Its death wish manifests itself in a desperate and blind will to live. Cacciari exhorts the beholders of Goya's figure to 'liberating laughter', to laughter which reveals the folly of time and thereby exposes its self-destructive mechanism: 'Voracious time reveals the untruth of human claims to immortal and unchangeable values. The moment of that laughter which begins to liberate us is only attainable if we comprehend the antiidolatrous truth which portrays destroying time.'1o

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But why does time die of its own mortality? What makes it aware of the latter? Also in the first portrayal Cacciari chooses, in Hogarth's picture, time is dying. With the last breath from the mouth of Cronos, while all around in the midst of a ruin everything lies devastated, the values of the world prove to be mortal products of time. But what has caused this self-destruction?

Like all artistic masterpieces, these too remain open, despite poetic and philosophical interpretations, to readings and further questions, even to those which come from other systems of discourse. A Cronos who wants to survive commits the unpardonable folly of consuming his own stock, his own children. Shock sits in his wide-open eyes, in his emaciated body. And what was the great thunderbolt which not only carries off Hogarth's hoary Cronos but has laid the whole world, finis mundi, in ruins, legally sealed before being handed over to chaos? If all existing values are destroyed in the process, as Hogarth depicts with delicate irony, if all hopes of continued existence are vain, what has caused this collapse? What does the iconography of the new age look like, the semantics of which does not yet enter the picture, but whose temporalized movement is already perceptible as a concept of history? In another painting by Goya, triumphant truth – is it the daughter of Cronos? – is depicted as a young, naked female figure. Cronos is still holding her by the hand, but he himself, furnished with large wings, has to give way. In the foreground sits history as a witness narrating the events, but what radiant young truth is it which Cronos has to release from his clutches?

The new age, which is mentioned increasingly more often from the second half of the eighteenth century, manifests itself through a new concept of time and becomes the distinctive feature of an epoch which succinctly describes itself as the 'modern age': ‘Time does not just remain the form in which all stories take place, it gains a historical quality itself. History then no longer takes place in time, but through time. Time is dynamized into a force of history itself.'11 It is recognized and accepted by contemporaries as the modern age. It manifests itself by being able to produce something new, and this is first of all - new knowledge. The old structure of knowledge, which extended from the early Middle Ages into the nineteenth century, was based on the principle of preserving the stock, of incorporation and storage in the great encyclopaedic and classificatory tradition. For Voltaire, the Encyclopaedia was still an ‘everlasting' and unsurpassable ‘inventory of human capacities'. In 1767, when the enterprise was still by no means finished, Voltaire stated that it was not just the first, but perhaps also the last example of its kind on earth. He saw it as containing the prerequisites, as regards theoretical content, for the final success of reason – the climax of human history, which admittedly still needed disseminating and implementing as a kind of post-history of uncertain duration.12

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The new knowledge arises under changed conditions of creation and in changed structures of organization. It becomes disputable knowledge which has to lay itself open to criticism, and is capable of improvement through criticism. What is important is no longer how and at what point it can be incorporated in the existing ordered structure of total knowledge. It does not become true through true safe-keeping, but when it can be exposed to open argument and increasingly to the experimentally empirical test procedure by means of measurement and pieces of equipment, and can hold its own there. In accordance with its epistemological condition, it is a knowledge on call, and it bears within it the willingness to give up the position it has achieved at any time in favour of later, but better knowledge. It is a knowledge committed to scientific progress. The beginnings of the changed conditions for generating it lie in the eighteenth century, that period in which the decisive preconditions are created for the subsequent, dramatically increasing growth of scientific knowledge in particular, due to the systematic opening up of new sources of cognition and their methodical utilization. It is also a century, however, which is pervaded with a vast destruction of knowledge. Knowledge previously preserved only with great effort and protected by the aura of tradition increasingly comesunder the pressure of experimental test conditions which it cannot withstand. In the eighteenth century, it first becomes apparent how the novelty of cognition begins to transform the standpoints of preservation and of previously valid classification. The newly tapped sources of cognition, the journeys and expeditions undertaken in the course of progressive colonialization, create curiosity about the new and lead almost inevitably to a change in the processing capacity of science. The old schemes of classification, based on generalization and classificatory abstraction, are no longer sufficient to absorb the partly exotic knowledge dragged in from all over the world, without bursting the conventional categories of classification. It is the century in which not just the 'birth of the clinic'takes place, but also that of the laboratory, that organizational invention for the purpose of generating knowledge, which gradually, confirmed by its successes, turns all science into laboratory science.

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Henceforth, nature is not just observed, but reproduced and generated in the laboratory. With the revelation of what is invisible to begin with, the social construction of the natural world begins. A still substantially artificial auto-production of phenomena'commences, as Stichweh calls it, which not only prevails in the contest to oust the old, more rigid knowledge, but forms the basis of the scientific conception of the world which has been current since then.13

Was it perhaps this vision which so frightened Cronos that he turned to the last resort and staged his suicide by devouring his children, while the new age began its triumphal march and has been incessantly disgorging its children since then? Did the world of the old skinflint Cronos, as Hogarth portrays him with bitterly ironic mockery, sink in emotionally sublime fashion into the final state of proclaimed chaos because neither the accumulated property nor the values and virtues sustaining it were still assured of their continued existence, in the face of a new age which did not just practise accumulation for the sake of hoarding, but which was preparing to invest in order to turn all tied-up funds into liquid assets? The modern age and its characteristic form of motion, acceleration, did not content itself with frightening old Cronos by producing new knowledge, but it set to work in extremely pragmatic fashion to translate it into action. What Francis Bacon had already outlined with his patterns of argumentation – the hope for a systematic improvement of the sciences, if one strives to recognize not just the benefit for tomorrow but the causes forever, if one replaces chance with planning and then guides it towards a wellcontrolled progress of inventions, while providing mutual help through the division of labour – all this now began to be realized. The sciences became the key sector in which 'progress' or progression' could be continually registered during the following period.14Scientists and technologists began, as Bowker had said of geologists, to implement the new age, by incorporating faster and coordinated series of motions into machines. Acceleration was first of all that increase in motion which emanated from the machine and which immediately embraced all other areas of life, and thus became the empirically indisputable basis for the belief in progress.

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What the Enlightenment lacked, a dynamic concept of economics, was now made good in economic practice. The period of transformation, which separates knowledge and research from application and use, became the driving element in capitalist competition geared to innovations, through the instrument of the market and with the aid of new contemporaries, the capitalist entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs had devoted themselves to implementing whatever was new on the market at any one time and dedicated their work, in Joseph Schumpeter's succinctly coined phrase, to creative destruction. The entrepreneurs were shaped by the new age and its temporality. The element of creative destruction refers to the process of innovation itself, to the accelerated process of making way for new products and procedures. But what sustains the market in temporal terms, what constitutes its specific temporality, is the temporary cost advantage which the capitalist entrepreneur can expect. The motive force is profit. In Schumpeter's version, the entrepreneur knows how to gain a cost advantage - admittedly only a temporary one – with the aid of innovation in the face of the large number of traditionally oriented 'hosts of the economic cycle', who remain attached to the old, static order of the circulation of goods.1⁵ Entrepreneurial profit thus arises from the discrepancy between the market price prevailing on static markets and the individual cost price at which the entrepreneur can produce by virtue of innovation. Schumpeter wishes to trace the law of societal development, and he thinks that this law is indigenous to the sphere of economics. The final cause, and the motor of development, is the sporadically occurring changes, brought about by creative individuals, in the productive combination'of new goods, new methods of production, new markets and sources of raw materials, as well as the creation of new forms of organization, particularly those of monopolies. These new combinations lead sooner or later to institutional adaptations, which result in qualitative changes in the structure of society. Through entrepreneurial capitalism, according to this classical interpretation, business life is removed from a stationary state into one of perpetual dynamism, of continual innovation. As Schumpeter and other observers noticed, the innovations usually occur in droves': this results in the economic waves which had struck Marx and Kondratiev and others as a characteristic of economic development under capitalist circumstances. The abrupt changes in a previously stationary state lead to signs of an upswing in the economy which are only superseded by a countermovement after some time. The occurrence in droves'of innovations, their bundling up in phases of innovation, is put down to the fact that countless imitators stick to the heels of the successful entrepreneur, and that the willingness of consumers to accept innovations grows in the course of time.

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