Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

The extent, structure and intrinsic quality of time free for consumption follow from what is produced and from the working conditions in which it is produced. 'The long arm of the job'still continues to reach into life, of course, but it becomes longer and more mediated. How time free for consumption is spent today, what is done in it and how, has resulted from two initial conditions: from one's own working conditions and from the nature of consumer goods and services, i.e. of that which others produce. They bear within them their built-in 'time', which makes certain temporal demands on all those who want to consume them. Where the work processes can be temporally uncoupled, optimized and above all intensified, the same will also be true of the chosen leisure activities. Where consumer goods bear within them their built-in, pre-produced and programmed complexity for the self-development of the user, where every kind of sport has its own outfit, kit, and practice and journey times, where every hobby insists on assuming a professional character and together with free time a lifestyle’ and a corresponding feeling are propagated, consumption becomes the mimicry of production and cannot do much more than follow the given times. It used to be the content of work, its duration and burden, which moulded – in an immediate and unprotected manner – the remaining time, which was preeminently experienced as time free from work. What could be done in it was, like a cruel parody, dictated by work, for which the content and the structure of free time were only able to fulfil a compensatory role. Today, it is admittedly still one's position in the hierarchy of income and qualifications in the labour market, and the job patterns connected with it, which are dominant in the choice of freedom of consumption and its activities, but these are joined by the mediation via consumer goods and by the time structures built into it. The time for consumption becomes independent as part of a comprehensive process of social differentiation. But unlike the potlatch and other festivals which were held in tribal and agrarian societies, the festivals in industrial societies are rationed in terms of time and mostly of brief duration. They tend to become everyday routine themselves, which then sparks off the desire for new festivals which are themselves soon submerged in everyday routine again. In contrast also to the former alternation between maximum labour intensity and idleness, resulting from a primarily task-oriented division of time which had imposed on agrarian societies an irregular system of time adapted to the rhythms of nature, the tendency today is rather to extend labour intensity to the idleness which has become time free for consumption.

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But alongside the time for production and consumption, there is the time for interpersonal services. The shift in the allocation of time between public, paid time and private, unpaid time, however, and the political conflict over their exchange relation, become understandable if the role of the state is analysed as well, which has entered into the division of labour between the sexes. For the establishment and consolidation of the welfare state, which is here taken to be synonymous with a socio-political system that recognizes many forms of expression in concrete historical terms, work was and is the central, integrating mechanism holding the institutions of social security together. It is status in the labour market, when, for how long, in what capacity, and with what breaks somebody is employed, which determines whether and to what extent he or she is entitled to draw the benefits of the social security system in cases of illness, accident, unemployment and old age. It is the already paid, pre-financed time in the labour market which decides who – as in the cases of insurance claims just mentioned – is permitted to draw time with payment, yet without work. For those who were not included in this work-insurance system, not even through their family affiliation above all to a male employee, remedial measures developed which, as a continuation of the old poor relief, were always conceived merely as a safety net. The original aim of the welfare system was rooted in making means of subsistence available whenever income was lost for recognized reasons, that is, when either the labour market or the informal safety net of the family failed. In a second stage of the development of the welfare state, which did not occur until the 'three golden decades' after the middle of the present century, the state, with a rapid increase of public expenditure, took charge of the development of the tasks of reproduction which had been performed within the family at an earlier, rudimentary and still little-differentiated stage. Education, health and social services were now developed, professionalized and expanded on a governmental level. No longer just those who have a status in the labour market are now entitled to receive benefits, but everyone is now given new 'social rights'on the strength of their universal status as citizens of the state.

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In this phase, women begin to enter public life and the labour market in increasing numbers for the first time. The welfare state itself becomes the largest employer of women through the newly created possibilities of gainful employment. Not only is the burden on women eased by professional helpers, teachers, doctors, social workers and therapists, but they take up these professions themselves. Above all in northern countries, women begin to become aware of their double status as employees and citizens. It becomes increasingly more apparent that women shoulder the main burden of invisible and unpaid work, which is indispensable to the public welfare system. It also becomes apparent that women, by virtue of their different situation in life, have different time preferences from men; they desire more time, whereas men desire more money; women press for a reduction in the working day, while men tend to prefer a longer annual holiday. They begin to express these preferences and to oppose their interests to those of corporate organizations. As citizens, they demand not just 'time for work', but also 'time for everyday life', for those tasks which they fulfil in multiple ways in their supposedly private time.²4

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With the welfare state undertaking tasks of reproduction and services which were formerly fulfilled within the family, even though on a smaller scale, neither in a specialized nor in a professionalized manner, patterns of time entered public gainful employment which cannot automatically be adapted to those of industrial production. Even if the lessons in schools are thoroughly standardized in terms of form and content, and even if hospitals or old people's homes may be regarded as ‘factories'for patients in many respects, the periods of time furnished there and devoted to nursing cannot be rationalized, automated or made flexible in the same way as they can for the new production technologies. Not yet – for the pervasion of personal services with new communication technologies, the computerization of hospitals and social services, is imminent. There still remains a period of interaction with patients or clients, however, which cannot easily be handled via machines, a balanced negotiating process of the giving and taking of time. Peter Pritchard, one of the few doctors who have tackled the problem of time as a form of interaction between doctors and patients, argues for a participatory orientation 'that is not popular with professions, but is slowly gaining ground'.25 It is a question here of more than a better use of waiting periods. But even if doctors and others learn to budget their time better through better organization and a change in their personal habits in their lives and work, there still remains a stubborn residue: a period of inter-human caring, furnished in the form of a service which cannot be replaced totally by technology, or totally by monetary calculation, or by organization, however skilful it may be; a residue of time freed of financial charge as the exchange medium of human relations which – still – resists, in its irreducibility and universality, the general exchange medium of money and its dominance on the market. There are residues of relations in which time can only be exchanged for time, and in which the norm of reciprocity determines the prevailing tone of human gatherings. But it can be seen that time in which empathy, affection and solidarity can be expressed only through personal presence is on the retreat, that new conventions are establishing economically acceptable exchange relations, when time becomes replaceable by money and technology, and by purchased substitutes. Personal presence becomes a partial one with the aid of technological communication – the voice on the telephone, the electronically transmitted word, the instantaneous but indirect communication, replace the complete person. What remain are archaic remnants of an exchange relation in which time could only be traded for time, and the mediation of purchased replacement time via money did not yet exist. All time of caring, occasions for mutual joy or mourning, time which is qualitatively tied to particular individuals, retains traces of these archaic remnants, but they are simply remnants.

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In the everyday routine of the welfare state, the human time of services presents itself in a much more banal fashion, of course. In recent years, private forms of organization, unpaid voluntary work, and informal networks have increasingly also become a theme of government social policy.26Patients and clients are being discovered as partners’ of professional helpers and by professionally operating institutions. Their time is an important resource for furnishing one's own services and self-help. Under the pressure of falling social security benefits, a corresponding revaluation of all informally usable resources occurs which ultimately return to the resource of unpaid, private time. Laura Balbo has employed the image of crazy quilts in this connection, that patchwork of colourful remnants stitched together by American pioneer women in their remaining free time. In exactly the same way, women also use their remaining time today to furnish those services at home, in schools and clubs, in hospitals, neighbourhoods and offices, which are regarded as private.27

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In the labour market, the general preference for money predominates over the preference for time; what people do in their private time is interpreted as the desire of consumers. To the extent, however, that the boundaries between public and private are beginning to become blurred in everyday life, by formerly private time becoming public since it invades public space and publicly paid (working) time, new – political – questions arise about a fair distribution of work and time. All stated preferences for working time are preferences related to certain phases of life and situations. They are dependent on sex and age, one's family situation, income and class affiliation. And to the extent that people's biographies, conditioned by the general work situation, become more unsettled, the time preferences are also exposed to larger fluctuations. They become transitional preferences.28

Analysis of the conflicts and of the difficult negotiations over reduction in working hours falls short if they are seen merely as an extension of the previous conflict, and not as much more fundamental questions of distribution and organization. The extension of public time and public space into what was formerly called the private sphere is increasing – technologies are crossing this boundary as well as the interdependences just described between cases of unpaid free time furnished for purposes of general, public welfare. In this way, private everyday life becomes more public, becomes part of the market and the state, and emerges from its former anonymity and political protective coating. As consumers and female citizens, people demand new rights and seek to have a hand in shaping the political processes which intrude on their everyday lives. The politics of working time and the politics of living time are closely connected, and they are linked with one another via the labour market and social policy. The current model of the labour market is still based on rights, incentives and achievements derived from a continuous, lifelong and full-time working biography. This normal case has ceased to be the norm, though, just as normal working hours have long since become abnormal, and in the Federal Republic of Germany only a quarter of all households correspond to the popular notions of a normal family – parents with children.

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But that is not all. Even the public health sector and the state-run social services are getting into difficulties in the face of a demographic shift which is drastically increasing the proportion of the elderly, and cost increases which are connected with the technologizing of medicine and the equal rise in expectations and demands. Care', writes Martin Lagergren in a study of the allocation of time by professional helpers in the Swedish welfare system, ‘is above all a question of time spent by somebody for somebody else.' The study has calculated, by means of a simulated model, that the limits of financial feasibility will soon be reached.29 What then? Where is the unpaid, urgently needed time to come from? Are measures in which the state taxes the free time' of its citizens, just as income is taxed now, the solution, or is it to be found in the horrific vision of a fully automated hospital, with electronically connected home-care services which transmit the nurse's smile via a screen?

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The concept of ‘free time'conceals what political options are open. On the market, depending on income, the option arises of buying or of do-it-yourself. Through the universal medium of exchange, money, all allocations of time are left up to the consumers. In the area of state politics, it is a question of working out options which mediate between the politics of living time and the politics of working hours, between the unattainable ideal of lifelong full employment for all and an extremely fragmented employment situation of part-time jobs, in which the employees are at the mercy of the employers without trade union protection and are discontinuously employed. It is a question of finding a balance between the divergent interests and time preferences of women and men, but also between the expanding conflicts of interests of the corporately organized trade unions and the desire of women for more part-time jobs. The questions of the distribution of work and time under discussion here turn out to be difficult in several respects. The status and the rights derived from one's position in the labour market always turn out to be stronger than the universal status of an ordinary female citizen. New difficulties arise from the lack of a generally applicable set of criteria for the quality of the time under discussion. Time is translatable into money, but the same quantity of time means something very different for those who live in different circumstances or who have different possibilities of shaping their time. Viewed in this light, the purely quantitative factor of time stemming from the machine age has been joined by a qualitatively organizational factor, which has long since overshadowed the purely quantitative one. It is one thing to perceive the nature of time, its valency and social setting, in a discriminating fashion; it is another to meet the different political demands on its organizing capacity for coping with everyday life. In both cases, however, time has ceased to be a private matter. What are the prospects of solving the conflicts presented here? In a detailed analysis from the strategic viewpoint of active participants, Helmut Wiesenthal comes to some striking conclusions. Most serious of all is probably the empirically established conclusion that there is no general time preference in the sense that a larger group of employees desires 'more time' and is prepared to sacrifice portions of income for it.30 There are limited time preferences, against the background of a surprisingly broad spread of actual working hours, but they cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Even the influence of monetary trade-offs is limited: almost three quarters of those asked prefer the present relation between time and money. Wiesenthal infers from this an approximate satiation of the relative need for free time. A reversal is possible, of course, but the conditions in which it could occur are narrowing: there would have to be precise objectives like the earlier demand for the eight-hour day; real income would have to rise continuously for a while in order to create the need for more time for spending money; more attractive uses of free time or so-called income-substitute activities, like working in $\mathtt { o n e " s }$ own garden, which presuppose no additional need for income, would have to be offered. This results in a pessimistic outlook for the chances of a re-standardization of the divergent patterns of working time. Since the present initial position of the working-time situation is extremely divergent and unequal, a levelling up could only be carried out via individually specific changes in working time. This, in turn, encounters considerable difficulties. The more concretely the patterns of distribution of working time aimed at are defined, the smaller the segment of employees becomes which sees its preferences realized in them. From the multitude of articulated time preferences, not a single one appears capable of social generalization any more.

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The situations at work and in life seem to have moved into a state of temporal flux. The experience of temporal systems changes with one's situation in life, and the perception of time becomes a dependent variable. In a situation in which there have to be frequent changes between different jobs, situations in life and spheres of life, the decisive standpoint of individual orientations also changes more easily. And yet, in such a situation in life and at work, marked by deep temporal uncertainty, the desire grows all the more powerfully to have the right of disposal and possession of something which itself has to remain available: proper time.

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Viewed in terms of society as a whole, a paradoxical structural convergence of patterns of time arises, in which uncertainty strives for new order. The area of industrial production is characterized by a comprehensive phase of rationalization for the reorganization of industrial manufacturing. Flexible manufacturing systems simultaneously facilitate special and mass production; through so-called ‘just in time’ organization, a close adaptation of production to a demand that is becoming more sophisticated can be made through computer-based networking of processing stages with one another, and of the temporally optimized delivery by suppliers. The extended technological and organizational possibilities are geared to optimization that is economical in terms of cost and time, but they increase the patterns of combination between human presence and mechanical processes. Whether and how far these new possibilities of combination, which permit an emancipation from formerly rigid practical constraints, are passed on to employees is an open question which will be decided politically.31

The other extreme is dominated by patterns of time which, because it is mostly a question of unpaid time tied to individuals and connecting individuals, are not yet under the same pressure of rationalization. It is the temporal availability – at any time – in service time which is used by people for people. Even though we cannot totally abstract here from the marginal economic conditions of the possible substitutability of individuals by technologies or other paid helpers, there are optimizing strategies. The child who can be alone only in the presence of his or her mother, who has to remain in sight in order to be supervised, and the mother who combines this supervision with countless, overlapping secondary'activities which simultaneously come up in household routine, with countless interruptions again and again, are used to a flexibilization' of their daily time in another sense, which is not yet fully rationalized in economic terms. The doctors whom Peter Pritchard advises to organize their time in such a way that, if necessary, they can also find time for their dying patients, would equally be living a flexible and optimizing routine, oriented towards being on call, while not totally caught up in the money nexus.

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