Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

The death of time, as a poetic and philosophical expression of the superseding of an epoch by another one, is itself a recurring theme which historians have called epochal consciousness.23 To conceptualize this here means seeking to capture time by means of concepts: The concept lives on time. Its work consists in capturing the problem of development, fixing and shaping it.'24 But neither the consciousness of change, nor capturing it by means of concepts, escapes the basic experience of repetition and of irreversible change, to which all aspects of time return. The repetitions which this epoch has set itself are those which stem from the production of what is always new – it is the process of innovation, which is accelerated with the aid of science and technology. But through the repetition aid of science and technology. But through the repetition which lies in the creation of what is new, the irreversible changes arise. The artificially created time of the laboratory, where under experimentally designed conditions nature is kept temporally present, leaves the laboratory, embodied in information technologies. This is also an irreversible process. It leaves options open – this is also the fundamental characteristic of the social constitution of time. The original myth of Cronos, as historians and anthropologists explain it, is in reality a creation myth. What is created is a concept of time, which in turn itself bears the historically social features of the society creating it.25 The portrayal of the same myth at another time, and with other means of artistic expression, reflects at least as much very personal fears and ideas for overcoming them. Cronos's fear of the new age is understandable in view of what was then approaching in the way of acceleration and institutionalized willingness for constant, even though ‘creative' destruction. The new age has kept on incessantly spewing forth its children ever since: the triumphal entry of laboratory time into society is one of its last up to now. The culture of science and technology dominant today finds other prerequisites and limitations in dealing with this, but it can look back on all previous experiences at the same time. Cronos does not have to devour his children a second time. But will the myth of creative destruction through innovation be sufficient to prevent it?

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Cronos's Fear of the New Age

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

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Politics of Time: The Distribution of Work and Time

. . . adults who have to be happy so that children can be happy. We need time for this. We need time for an everyday life without hustle and bustle. We need time for everyday culture. We need time for the chance to be a public person. And we need time for leisure. We do not need leisure time instead of a job, instead of a family, instead of politics. We need it as surplus time.

Christiane Müller-Wichmann, Zeitnot

Nowhere does the desire of individuals to have more time for themselves manifest itself as strongly and overwhelmingly as in that time unit which itself became its temporal reference point: in what is called everyday life. The change which this concept has undergone reflects the change in the quality of the perception of time which the latter has experienced in the extended present. Everyday life – this is no longer the merciless routine of a never-ending chain of toil and drudgery, relieved solely by the temporal contrast, the temporary release symbolized by the holiday, the Sunday.¹ Everyday life has shed the stasis of an ahistorical permanence which was bestowed on it by a succession of history-making turbulences, focused on other - 'Sunday' – events, or which a Eurocentric approach had all too thoughtlessly ascribed to non-European societies. Everyday life is the successful rehabilitation of the time of ‘ordinary people', who have long since become the majority, in advanced industrialized countries at least. Everyday life is the temporal dimension of the welfare state, in which it is institutions like those of social security that more or less effectively guarantee the temporal mastery of one's life-history – through school, health service and national insurance, including old-age pensions - but in which the smaller temporal units, the transitions from yesterday to tomorrow, with all their joys and cares, their formal and informal relations, are to be coped with by people themselves. This everyday life has long since devoured the Sunday, which became the weekend, but the weekend can be individually deferred and fixed on another day.

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In the extended present, the festivals, the truly extraordinary times, have also shrunk and are solely to be found as archaic residues. Even the carnival, that game of inversions and of liberation from old certainties, that escape from reality into an orgiastic recreation of the cosmos,2 now has to seek its moments in an extended present which can no longer afford to make longer periods completely free for games and tomfoolery, for a reversal of values and for disguises of all kinds. Everyday life still affords time for the so-called vicissitudes of life, but even here it is laid down how much time is to be expended on these: so many days off work in the case of a death; so many days off work for getting married; and so many for precisely defined vicissitudes of other kinds.³

Everyday life has become the bracket combining work and so-called free time; the private spending'of time and public spending form a new combination in everyday life. The great public institutions of the state and the economy, and their temporal perspectives, are confronted with the temporal perspectives of the citizens and employees, the economic subjects. In everyday life and all those private matters which become capable of being experienced, and thereby become a political issue, only through the conflict over the time they take up, the great changes are revealed concerning the quality of time itself, the valency attributed to it, and the exchange relations between quantity and quality. The ‘issues’ at stake here have to do with increased demands on the quality of everyday life, with the massive entry of women into working life and with the different time culture which they bring with them. But it is also a question of services which cannot be automated and realized in the same way as the production of goods;4 they thus demand other temporal patterns which have to do with informality, with the quality of human relationships and with caring, and are based on other exchange relations between time and money. The conflict over the reduction in working hours, which Oskar Negt believes to be a 'political'struggle and not a mere wage conflict of a conventional kind,⁵ still pre-eminently feeds off the traditional notion of a uniform, continuous, predominantly male working life, whereas the social reality of the labour market has long since become unsteadied' and, in the opinion of many authors, 'feminized'.6 What is collectively due for distribution, that for which a new politics of distribution has to be found, is work and time: work, because the previous ‘standard biography', given an increasing tendency to participate in work and a stagnant social volume of available work, will be accessible only to a small fragmentary group of the gainfully employed in future; and time, because it is not least a question of a redistribution of paid and unpaid work between women and men.

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The exchange relations between the public use of time, that is spent with – paid – work, and the private, mainly unpaid use, are distributed extremely unequally in society. Publicly spent time, for the purpose of paid work, is an important prerequisite for the fact that time can also be spent privately. But it is easily overlooked that a good part of time privately applied also represents an indispensable prerequisite for its public use. The political aspect of this is the exchange relation. To the extent that everyday life is politically revalued, as time which belongs to the citizens, and that their contributions to the general welfare are made politically apparent, demands arise. New rights – everyday rights – become capable of formulation.7 Time becomes the potential medium of exchange between quantity and quality of time, since in the extended present both have to be calibrated anew.

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Politics of Time

Time possesses the property that it can only be experienced as conflict, states Rinderspacher; in this it resembles health or justice.8Where it does not stand in contradiction to one's own desire, where the infringement of temporal standardizations is not subject to social, economic or psychological sanctions, time as such becomes incapable of being experienced. But the conflicts which make time capable of being experienced in this way are of very different origin in the constellations of power which spark them off and in the outlines of society presented as ideal in each case. In the analysis of the conflicts over time, if not before, it becomes clear that time represents a central dimension of power which manifests itself in the systems of time that dictate priorities and speeds, beginning and end, content and form of the activities to be performed in time. In the beginning, it was the priests $\mathbf { w h o } ,$ in almost all societies, established the prevailing systems of time in accordance with those of the supernatural order, and separated sacred times from profane. Today, the systems of time are chiefly fixed by the market and the state. The market fixes times via the work to be done and the exchange relations between time and money. The state imposes its system of time via the legal system and thus structures the lives of its citizens. Standard biographies are created and legitimized, exceptions established. The law dictates biographical status – from when until when somebody is a child, a youth or an adult; which times are earmarked for military service or are given off for the birth and education of children; when the withdrawal from working life and going into retirement becomes obligatory. On the market, time is subject to the more universal medium of money with regard to the material and social range of its effect. Money can be accumulated and stored;

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it can be pooled, saved and made to ‘work' by earning interest, in order to be spent again at a later moment and in whatever partial amounts one likes. Time, if it is not a matter of working time which is invested for pension benefits, is ‘wasted’ if it finds no current use. In this respect, the rest period'of old age is pre-financed time. The money preference thus also predominates on the market. Money can be transferred directly and without respect of person, without being tied to demands on the interests and the motives, the spatial or temporal presence of givers and recipients. Time, on the other hand, remains tied to individuals and the context of their lives, to their biography and their abilities. The time of the ordinary worker or the secretary is 'worth'less than that of the boss, and it is not exchangeable at will. Only the market creates shortage of time via the universally prevailing scarce medium of exchange, money. The state, however, administers the shortage of time. Money is subject to no restrictions inherent in the medium. The nevertheless prevailing limitations on its use are social standardizations of what money is not allowed to do because it can do so much.9 It is left to the state, however, to divide up over life the time scarce in life, but tied to individuals. It is the task of the state, as a successor to the church in the secularized area of national solidarity, to establish the time fixed for festivals and to determine when work has to 'rest'. The state draws up boundaries which mark off its territory from that of other states, but it also sets temporal limitations for its citizens: working-time regulations and hours of business, who is allowed to work at night for how long, for whom and for what reasons the clock may be stopped or put back'. In comparison with the money preference prevailing on the market, the state can merely intervene in a regulating and compensating fashion, if it is a question of 'crediting' periods, for instance, which have been spent on something other than work. On the market, any lack of time can be experienced as an incentive to improve the efficiency of one's lifestyle by an increased consumption of goods and services. The money preference predominates as a rule even when, or precisely when, the development of income and the job situation deteriorate, because then it becomes a question of defending both one's relative and one's absolute positions in the distribution of income. Status is determined by income and not by the extent of the free time available, as becomes clearly apparent from the example of unemployment. The time spent unemployed is compensated for only in the short term – and time without money proves to be economically worthless for most people.10

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Politics of Time

In view of the powerful temporal structuring of everyday life by the systems of time fixed and governed by the market and state, and in view of the structural changes which are leading industrialized societies out of the machine age and placing them under the temporal regime of the new technologies, it is thus no wonder that the politics of time per se has become a key strategic problem for otherwise very differently structured areas of politics. Changed methods of production and increased international competition demand regulations of time which are as flexible as possible. But new types of question of the distribution of time are also impending wherever the everyday life of women and men increasingly comprises both everyday working life and the so-called private sphere, in which the by no means so private requirements of family life are to be reconciled with the temporal regulations of gainful employment.

The different time cultures in which men and women move, and into which they have been socialized, here increasingly clash. The extended present of everyday life now refers to both sexes, but their time cultures are still differentiated along sex-specific lines. Questions of equality and the realization of social rights arise again wherever the unemployment situation threatens to become endemic, and whenever a not inconsiderable part of the population is not yet, no longer, or only temporarily and marginally anchored in the labour market. A new possessory title arises – the possession of a job; while in its shadow the number of those with no such possessions grows. What superficially presents itself in public as a discussion about a reduction in working hours conceals highly different sets of interests. Conflicts which are still hard to name, because they cannot easily be classified in conventional areas of politics, demand new social feats of integration and above all synchronization for which there are no conventional models. It is as if the machine age had 'flexibly unsteadied' itself, as it is called in the technical jargon for the new automated production technologies. It is as if the 'long arm of the job', which detained workers in physical and mental fatigue and dependence in the evenings and on holidays, and whose far-reaching effects on ways of life shaped by industrial production showed such strong tendencies to persist, is finally preparing to release people from its rigid routine, while the flexibly unsteadied job has not yet fully established itself. In the transitional period, there is a burgeoning, as so often, of the ideal projections and utopian blueprints of a society which appropriates time again', and which is to assure the individual of temporal self-determination. It is obvious that the old exchange relations between working time and free time, which are derived in their construction from the linear and continuous' working biography of the male employee, are no longer true. The quantity of free time cannot be uniformly transformed into the highly differentiated, neatly arranged demands for quality, derivable from subjective situations. Highly different ideas and meanings are subsumed under the concepts of working time and free time. Empirical investigations show that two desires predominate: the desire for a 'normalization' of one's own working time, which arises at the very moment when the supposed 'normal working time'ceases to be the compulsory model for reality; and the desire for 'temporal sovereignty', for the self-determined approach in dividing up and shaping working time in coordination and synchronization with other needs of life.11 If in this connection the temporal conflicts are distinctly more perceptible to women, then it is because they have more powerfully contradicted the still conventional system of time, since their massive entry into working life, with their differently structured temporal needs. The empirical data further show how much more quickly the real working hours change than the ideas about them, but also what facts 'the terrible state of official working-time statistics'is able to conceal: on the one hand, the probably considerable overemployment of a section of employees in the face of a continuous process of structured mass unemployment; on the other hand, a process of unemployment which, according to all available data, is characterized by the cumulative dynamics of distribution of social inequalities in chances and risks of employment.12

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Corresponding to the temporal availability which provides the technological framework for the new production technologies, there is a general temporal uncertainty in everyday life. The machine age is superseded by the pressure of a universal temporal availability via goods and services which are produced in changed conditions and equally demand to be consumed in changed conditions. For temporal availability is also to be found in the use of new products. Thus new periods of time literally open up – denser, more intensive ones, striving for continuous presence - which contain the potential for immensely more stress, as well as that for a complex temporal intensification in the present.13

In the production process, the machine is on the verge of replacing human beings. Its speed has already exceeded everything which could be got out of human beings by systems of increased performance, however ingenious they may be. Hence other principles of organization, which aim at optimal performance and efficiency in conditions of electronically controllable speeds, push their way to the fore. In the use of modern technologies of manufacture, for instance, the stock manufacture of big series of standardized products is replaced by short-term manufacture to order. The cushion of stocks is reduced and new principles of organization regulate the production processes. The rhythm of production is ‘flexibly unsteadied'. Factory times and working times are uncoupled. The high capital intensity causes the management to use the factory right round the clock' as far as possible. Services and also a part of supply manufacturing, which are needed at irregular intervals to safeguard production but are to be furnished in synchronization with demand, are shifted outside. They turn into‘tertiary supply work'. With the largely automated loading of big containers, for instance, the organization of transport is such that it is possible – depending on the state of the financial transactions – to fix the place of sale and to direct the container there at the very last moment. So-called on-line systems provide that the actual act of production presupposes a skilfully planned optimizing organization, but one which is located outside in spatial terms and in manufacturing work. Production can then take place within the shortest time, but all other conditions, from financial calculations and storekeeping costs to supply operations, are located outside, but on call at any time. Flexible automation is merely the technological incarnation of flexible production methods, and the latter consist of a dense organizational network, linked by means of communication technologies, or small units and sub-units supplying work for one another. Economically valuable time is no longer lost because the worker is dawdling at the machine, but when there are costly waiting periods in an organization geared as synchronously as possible to optimizing time. Larry Hirschhorn has suggested the employment of highly specialized teams 'on call', who would have to rectify malfunctions. Apart from their highly specialized and complementary qualifications, they have to contribute nothing more than their temporal availability.14

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