Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

The village without a sanitary and medical infrastructure is just as far or as little removed from the most up-to-date computer system as is the latter from the terminals connected with it. Making an approximative simultaneity possible with the aid of modern electronics has by no means led to a social simultaneity. On the contrary, new inequalities are arising from non-simultaneities. Paradoxically, the gap which separates developing countries from the industrial nations with their technological and economic advantage is growing to the same extent that temporal and spatial distances are shrinking.

The discovery of simultaneity as a phenomenon of the perception of time and its real, economic and technological implementation are at the centre of the first chapter. They lend the connection between power and time a qualitatively new dimension. Whoever governs simultaneity controls the temporal dependences derivable from it. Yet despite the attainment of ever higher speeds in the networking of information technology, despite the continuing expansion of the technological infrastructure which installs simultaneity, it remains an illusion. In a certain sense it replaces the horizon of the future which has sustained the belief in progress over the last two hundred years, as the discrepancy between experience and the expectation of constant improvements which keeps on renewing itself and strives towards an open future. The greater the approximation to simultaneity, the more the little temporal differences count. As in sport, where tenths and hundredths of a second have long decided victory or defeat,in the international competition for markets and advantages in technological innovation it is the little temporal discrepancies which bring profit and further advantages. Such a simultaneity institutionalized world-wide, with its discrepancies calculated to produce dependences by means of non-simultaneity, also has consequences for the quality of time itself. While in the phase of industrialization it was above all the equation of time and money which resulted from the industrial capitalist logic of production and made time a scarce commodity, timie is now being speeded up itself: it is becoming accelerated innovation.

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Introduction

The disappearance of the future and the extension of the present taking its place are the subject of the second chapter. The drawing up of the boundary between the temporal periods which mark past, present and future is not a universally valid one. Society and its members judge it differently and in each case project into it their hopes and their problems and contradictions unsolved with regard to time. With the end of an age in which, by means of the time-structure of industrial production, both linearity and the belief in progress were sustained, the category of the future is losing much of its attractiveness. A present geared to accelerated innovation is beginning to devour the future. Problems which could formerly be deferred into the future reach into the present for their part, press for solutions which admittedly may not be on the agenda until tomorrow but demand to be dealt with today. The permeability of the time-boundary between present and future is increased by technologies which facilitate temporal uncoupling and decentralization, and which produce different models of time referring to the present that have largely become detached from linearity. But the process of continual 'creative destruction', as Schumpeter called the business of innovation, leads to another problem of civilization: that of obsolescence, the ageing of technologies, the production of waste. The past cannot absorb the waste fast enough. Through the creation of more and more new things, there is an inevitable increase of that which has to be disposed of. Both processes require a changed balance – in an extended present.

But what is it that so relentlessly drives on the civilization of scientific technology in terms of time, that generates the insatiable need for what is new, a need which presses for even more acceleration? This is the question posed in the third chapter. If it is true that the linear continuum, which entered the so-called modern era with the belief in progress from the eighteenth century on, has broken down, if time ‘has died', as some writers and philosophers see it, that time which was based on the continuum at least, what takes its place? Is it the moment which, detached from perpetual continuity, is enhanced into the source of hope that time can be stopped, which makes interim periods possible that are not subject to the flow of the linear continuum? Or is the continuum with its built-in acceleration replaced by a new time-cycle, this time marked by technological recurrence, in the form of the long waves of the Kondratiev business cycle or its variants?

Introduction

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From a scientific and technological point of view, the acceleration of the process of innovation can be reconstructed. It is connected with the temporal conditions which can be artificially produced in the science laboratory, and with the temporal and spatial possibilities of scientific work by means of which natural phenomena can be kept temporally available in the laboratory. Other timestructures are thereby induced which continue to have an innovative effect. Scientific and technological innovations strive for the unexpected and attempt to plan it none the less. They would like to anticipate the consequent effects, but with the emergence of the newly created objects from the laboratory and through their entry into social reality, they also move into another temporal domain.

The theme of proper time runs through several chapters. The history of the time-givers, above all the clock, reflects the relationship of human beings in their temporal limitation between their social environment and their 'own', individualized time which develops only gradually. Clocks as time-givers also embody the values of a society. The first clocks had little in common with the functional time-givers which show values today that have long since been made international. With the emergence of bourgeois society, in which subjectivity gradually became a new point of reference, there also arose the partial release from a common, social time. For the first time it became possible for the female reader of a novel to absent herself in time and to transpose herself to an imaginary world also temporally detached from social reality. In the world of the bourgeoisie, the public time of work was set against the private time within the family. Both were temporally regulated, with precisely specifiable rites of transition. In this polarization there arose a specific I-time-perspective which knew how to distinguish between one's own time (proper time) and that of others. With the intensification of working life and increasing pressure of time, but above all with the emergence of women from the private time of the family and their participation in the public time of working life, there grew the desire for a new category of disposal: disposal of one's own time, rights to which are declared, as if it were a question of acquiring possession of it.

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Introduction

Such a configuration brings with it conflicts and problems of distribution. The fourth chapter deals with them. Time has become the subject of politics. Urgent questions about the distribution of work and of time within a society in which the former became the prerequisite for the latter break with unquestioned conventions and shake the established distinctions between work and free time. The complex and increasing significance which time has gained for people today in their different situations in life and phases of life finds its expression in equally different time-preferences. There thus arises a conflict-laden coexistence, having many associations, of time-cultures and desires for better coordination and synchronization, for fairer patterns of distribution in an everyday life in which private time and public time are vaguely mixed.

What new patterns of distribution could look like, what social uchronias arise from the unsolved problems and what solutions there may be, are summarized in the final chapter. It is about action in time, about people playing with time. People create time through their cooperation and their coexistence, their diachronic interconnections beyond time and through their synchronic relations in time. The time of action always contains elements of decision; it is confronted with the uncertainty of the outcome. Trust presupposes expectations of a longer-lasting relationship, it is based on expected durability. Short-term interactions negate time, and where time is neglected, responsibility also dwindles. The separate development of every human being is codetermined by that point at which he or she joins the stream of social development; self-awareness, tools of thought, concepts and perceptions are marked by a stamp of historicity specific to one's generation. But this is equally true of the coming generations to whom a world is bequeathed which they have not yet been able to shape. Is more thinking necessary in intergenerational categories, in view of the momentum which is produced by human intervention in the natural environment? What scope for action in time is there for timely action?

Introduction

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Time is always also a strategic concept. There is timing in everything, even if the verb 'to time'is not to be found in the German language. In the conflicts between the super-powers, in the international rivalry of firms and nations, in the chronogram of every organization which has to decide whether it should expand or not, the choice of the 'right' moment is important. Learning to handle one's own reserves of time better in the face of a limited term of life, resisting the pressure of time, presupposes an appreciative openness towards the strategically playful aspect in time. Some things may be learnable in seminars on time management, but there are innumerable playful approaches and strategies. It seems important to me to learn to understand the temporal frameworks and rhythms of the social background, the rules to which timing is subject in each society. Only against the background of speed can slowness be determined and learnt. Only against the background of temporal limitation can the latter be surpassed.

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Introduction

The previous history of the Western linear system of time is closely connected with industrialization and the brutal adaptation of human labour and life to the machine. The exploitation of the resources of time which had been made scarce led first to painful wear and tear – in the hope of a better future. Today the future has caught up with the present, but time, individually and collectively, has remained limited. New resources of time are in demand. They are opening up through the extension of time in the present and through the availability at all times which technologies make possible. But the latter in their turn demand a temporal availability of human beings. So where is the time to be found?

There thus arises the longing for the moment. In strategic terms, it has to be the right' moment. In playful creative terms, it is the moment which – for a short time - makes everything possible, and from which history flows.

Seeking the moment and finding it ultimately means acknowledging one's own temporality.

For the genesis of this essay, many temporal prerequisites were necessary. Two of them can also be designated in spatial and institutional terms. I would like to thank Clemens Heller, who invited me to the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris in February 1987, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as whose guest at the conference centre in Bellagio I was able to complete this text.

Helga Nowotny

Bellagio, August 1988

Introduction

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

Except for light switches nothing worked by pushing a button. The phonograph had to be wound, a lot of the cars had to be cranked, coffee was ground by cranking, too, and the hand still had uses beyond separating pieces of paper money and pointing.

Arthur Miller, Timebends

At the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century, something began to stir in Europe. Eight hundred years ago', writes Adolf Holl, people in some European cities began to feel a strange and previously unheard-of desire. They wanted to know the time."1 God's time, as the French historian LeGoff put it, gave way to the time of the traders. What was dawning was a premonition of a future which would prove to be open to the human creative capacity. A future which involved risks, for only someone prepared to risk his or her assets again and again for the sake of an opportunity was able to head for this horizon. With the eighteenth century, the horizon of the future became dynamic. The idea of progress entered the history of the human race and temporalized it. Today the tension between present experience that does not value what is past and an expectation oriented towards what is, in tendency, endless improvement has largely collapsed. The belief in progress in the last two hundred years has been severely shaken. But the need for time, which the natural sciences first declared with the Enlightenment when they included in their programme the achievement of what is new, and hence, according to Hans Blumenberg, opened up the 'divide between lifetime and world time', has continued to grow.

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What has also increased, however, is precision in the measurement of time, which can be conducted with the aid of caesium atomic clocks. Time has become a unit of measurement per se, to which other fundamental measurements, above all the measurement of length, are reduced. For some time now, it has been specified as the unit of time which light covers within a certain time. The human brain perceives space via time differences established by the nervous system. The accuracy of gauges in physics makes it possible to detect variations and small irregularities where one previously saw constants. Thus we know today that the period of the earth's rotation, which before 1967 served as a basis for the measurement of time, varies slightly between summer and winter, and from year to year. These variations are partly regular, partly unpredictable. World time is established by an international clock authority, the Bureau International de l'Heure in Paris, on the basis of the readings which come from the largest measuring laboratories in the world. At intervals of about one and a half years, so-called leap seconds are inserted into the coordinated universal time, of the UTC, to prevent deviations of more than 0.7 seconds from navigational time from arising.² The range of the measurement of time within physics contains periods which extend from 10-15 thousand million years (the time light requires to reach the earth from the remotest still observable galaxy, which indicates the age of the known universe as well) to $1 0 ^ { - 1 5 }$ seconds (e.g. for phenomena in the atomic sphere). But phenomena are also investigated which require even less time, for instance the duration of elemental processes which can be imagined down to $1 0 ^ { - 4 4 }$ seconds (Planck's scale).

Everyday life in society has a different look to that in physics. In social life, time-scales are used which are suitable to human behaviour and human perception. They range from the mythical times of the once upon a time'to the immediately perceptible present, and can accordingly be indicated in tens of thousands of years or in split seconds. Infinitely long or infinitesimally short periods are experienced as larger or smaller in relation to the human perceptive faculty. But in social existence as well, the precision of the measurement of time has been refined and the temporal range extended. It is not just that past and future have been extended in the footsteps of the periods of time opened up by the measurements of physics – a spatial extension of a standardized time, gradually encompassing the earth, has also taken place. A lot of things have contributed to this: the processes of increasing economic and political integration and the technological possibilities which provide the transport of goods, people and information more quickly and on a broader basis, but also a gradual alignment of ways of life which began with the industrial mode of production. The insistence on a standardization of time in social life manifests itself in the approach towards a world-wide simultaneity, the perception of events and of processes which occur at the same time in different corners of the earth. Today people again feel a peculiar and hitherto unheard-of desire: they want to have more time for themselves.

The Illusion of Simultaneity

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What leads people to declare their pressing need for time so categorically, especially in this pronounced first person form? After all, they have got their time-saving machines which make their lives easier and relieve them of tedious or heavy manual work. Means of transport are always available to take them at great speed to almost all corners of the earth. Today many more things work by pushing a button than just the light switches. Modern communication technologies attain speeds which can no longer be directly perceived by human sense organs. But through integration into world-wide simultaneity there grows the need to distinguish one's own'time from that which connects people with others; there grows the desire to be able to control the interlocking to some extent oneself, to gain ‘temporal sovereignty' over one's local time, which is now visibly and noticeably integrated into world time. It is not so much the very long and the very short time, the time of history, of the longue durée' and the specious present, of the perception of the flow of time in split seconds, which seek contact and resolution in a juxtaposition charged with tension, but one's own, subjective local time that sees itself confronted with a public world time which – spatially extended over the entire earth - professes to be simultaneous.

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

The discovery of the simultaneity installed almost everywhere today, which can transport, exchange and generate world news and stock market prices, financial transactions and television pictures via satellite transmission, first made itself felt, in spectacular fashion, at the turn of the century. As the American cultural historian Stephen Kern has shown in detail, the period between 1880 and 1918 laid the foundations for the drastic changes people experienced in the sense of space and time. It was as if the technological, artistic and scientific achievements of this epoch converged to break down the well-rehearsed spatial and temporal structures of social perception and transform them into a broad experimental field, in which new ways of seeing, different spatial forms and, not least, new, more democratic, social and political relations were to be tested and rehearsed. Spatial distances which had been insurmountable up till then were erased by the invention and regular technological improvements of the telegraph, the radio and the telephone. Through the electrification of the cities, the difference between day and night could be artificially negated for the first time. The cinematograph succeeded not just in making pictures move but in slowing down or speeding up the captured movements at will, indeed even in winding them backwards and thus creating totally new ways of seeing. It is not surprising that it was above all the artists and writers who got swept up in these changes and who attempted to give voice and expression, sound and form to the new sense of space and time. The classical narrative mode of the novel or the conventional stanzas of lyric poetry were rejected, and replaced by revolutionary innovations. The changed sense of time seized hold of music and led to the creation of atonalities never heard before, which were based on the twelve-tone scale. In the plastic and graphic arts and in painting, forms were sought which made it possible to portray several perspectives at the same time; form and colour were to be capable of reproducing the changes from moment to moment. Without any historical exaggeration, it can be said that the remarkable artistic creativity of that period, whose ‘intoxication with space and time' was to last far into the inter-war period, drew more or less consciously on the ruins of a declining social system, in which it was no longer true, as formerly, that everything had ‘its time and place'. It was rather a question of defining time and place anew, for the greatest possible – and for the first time also democratic – variety of perspectives and points of view, of positions and subjective experiences.³

The Illusion of Simultaneity

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