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But like knowledge that can be a game, playing with the moment also follows rules which lead from the sphere of the unreal into that of reality. For Winnicott, children discover and invent reality while playing; they play so that they can surprise themselves. In the game, the child discovers the self, which stands separately and differently, but in relation to the reality which it is not. Even for playing, it is central to set, shift and learn to keep to limits. Only because what 'prevails'constantly shifts is insight possible.

Separation from the mother occurs via a space, the transitional space, and with the aid of transitional objects which belong neither to internal psychological reality nor to the external one. The game has the constructive function of creating this space, which stimulates the creative abilities of the child. Winnicott develops a theory of culture as a continuation of the idea of the transitional object. The game of the child who finds an object whose creator he or she is in reality', and its continuation in the cultural creativity of the adult, take place in a space situated between the external world and internal psychological reality. For Winnicott, the ‘intermediate realm is the actual source of power for that which sets inside and outside in motion. Plunging into the intermediate realm means being able to intervene in the outside world with new energy.'32 But all this also takes place in the interim period. Creativity, the creative production of culture, requires not just space, but also time. The child has to learn to rid himself or herself of the initial illusion of his or her omnipotence so that he or she can create new illusions as an adult, in the transitional space and in the transitional time between the real and the unreal, which is not yet real. The game and its continuation as a cultural creative achievement is a great loosening-up exercise, creating subjects anew – an achievement which breaks rules and cancels systems, and thus gives the person playing the possibility of becoming a creator of culture himself or herself a little, through fruitful chaos.

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Playing time games, shifting limits, trying out ‘what prevails' and setting new limits is, as shown above, an essential part of the symbolic power of action between individuals. But the search for the moment goes on, not least in the sciences. Knowledge of the strategic moment seems imperative for practical application, and even Nietzsche suspected that fear of the unpredictable was the ulterior instinct of science. But the search for the moment can be interpreted in another sense: as an inquiry into the first moment, the origin, in which the universe could have arisen and time along with it. The time of physics, which with the advance of the natural sciences separated from the matrix of social time and which in the machine age became the ideologically linear guide rail for progress, to which all other time had to submit in the name of its external, objective reality, is beginning to approach the social conception of time again. Not just because the intensified study of the possible origins of the universe, and particularly of the question whether it was a unique event from the point of view of physics, can be interpreted as a kind of time game on the part of physicists. Prigogine and Stengers speak of a new coherence which is beginning to emerge between different scientific disciplines, and which is beginning to open up to the problem of development' in general. The concept of the event', for instance, has changed in that it is now the event which accounts for the difference between past and future, whereas wherever the arrow of time is denied in physics, past and future are regarded as equivalent.33 What physics has recently discovered is that most, if not all, cyclical phenomena can be chaotic'and vice versa. Transitions between the time of unreproducible’ and the time of 'reproducible' phenomena thus become possible in both directions. For the time of reproducible phenomena, we can therefore speak of a reversal of time, since the flow of events can be reversed, i.e. without the observed events changing the development already completed can be retraced. For chaotic phenomena, however, it is not possible to reconstruct their past or to reproduce them. Accordingly, there would also be two kinds of evolution.

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At the moment, it is not yet certain whether the explosive phenomena which could have occurred with the big bang belong to the sphere of 'reproducible' or 'unreproducible' time. Prigogine and Stengers suspect that the hypothesis of the uniqueness of the cosmological beginning, according to which there must have been a ‘zero time', is to be abandoned. They suggest instead that the universe could have arisen, in a kind of ‘gratuitous action', from fluctuations of the vacuum, from the motions of mass and energy which together amount to zero. In the beginning, there would therefore have been no unique event, but a transition between states of entropy stemming from a fluctuation – a fluctuation not unlike that between chaos and order.

Recently, another physicist, Stephen W. Hawking, has likewise suggested abandoning the hypothesis of the uniqueness of the big bang. Uniqueness would be the state in which the space-time continuum has shrunk to an infinitely dense, infinitely small point, a state which cannot be described in terms of physics and in which time has no significance. Among other things, he tries to answer the question why at least three arrows of time point from the past into the future, even though the laws of physics do not distinguish between the directions pointing forwards and those pointing backwards: the thermodynamic arrow of time, according to which disorder is increasing; the psychological arrow of time, according to which the past but not the future remains in the memory; and the cosmological arrow, according to which the universe is expanding and not shrinking. Hawking now hopes that a new, yet to be discovered, great, uniform theory (quantum gravitation) could lead to the conclusion that the spacetime continuum does not represent a 'line' which begins with the big bang and ends with the great collapse, but is a 'loop' without beginning and end. According to his proposal, the space-time continuum would admittedly be boundless, but not infinite, just as the earth appears boundless to a stroller, even though it is finitely vast. But human beings, and hence knowledge of the universe and time, could only exist in the expanding phase. They represent a tiny fraction of order within an increasingly disorderly universe³4 – enough, however, to lead the social matrix back into nature.

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What do such ‘time games'on the part of the natural scientists mean for people today, for their desire for proper time, and for their longings to escape the constraint of time and to be able to structure time differently? How can the complex balancing acts in the daily juxtaposition of times be better accomplished, and how will a society within the extended present cope with the current problems of accelerated innovation, increasing routine, and throwing away? Having time to play with the moment, being able to plunge into the interim period of transitions, presupposes a recognition of how this time is constituted and how it can be created. The ‘this way and no other' which scientific knowledge has to offer includes the 'now this way' and ‘now the other'as a possibility of being able to intervene and structure things, at least under certain conditions. The glance behind the mask in which time appears in social life makes it possible to stage the game differently as well, starting from a changed sense of time which, like every feeling, is itself the result of history, of experience.

Cronos's fear which caused him to consume his stock, his children, has not been able to hold back the new age with its activities spewing forth innovations. With machines, other motions and speeds entered social life and changed people's perceptive faculty. An even more accelerated, yet more diffuse quality of time, because pressing for constant availability, adheres to today's machines. Machines and people are forming new temporal combinations, just as the relations between people, mediated with one another via machines, are assuming a different shape. The social arrow of time also points forwards. The constraints which seem to emanate from time have not been broken, but the game, the team-game, may perhaps be loosening up. The longing for proper time has become publicly communicable, but proper time is made possible only by others. It is up to the children of Cronos to seize the moment which presents itself to them from so many sides. It is not a question of the unique first moment, but of the socially perceptible one. It is necessary to discover and to shape it – as a repeatable moment which fluctuates to and fro between social chaos and social order, between the self of proper time and the time of society.

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It will then become apparent whether the children of Cronos have emancipated themselves.

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Postscript

What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination?

He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations.

As in what ways?

From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.

Fames Foyce, Ulysses

Notes

The literature of social science on the subject of time is extremely extensive. For a systematic review see Helga Nowotny, Time and Social Theory. Towards a Social Theory of Time: Time & Society, 1992 Sage (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), vol. 1 (3), 421–54. The following notes do not therefore aim to be a bibliographical guide. They contain merely the references given in connection with the text, and a few further ones.

Introduction

1 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Entre le Temps et l'Eternité, Paris: Fayard, 1988.

2 Helga Nowotny, ‘Time Structuring and Time Measurement: On the Interrelation Between Timekeepers and Social Time', in: J. T. Fraser and N. Lawrence (eds), The Study of Time II, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1975.

Strukturelement von Lebenswelt und Gesellschaft, Linz: Universitätsverlag R. Trauner, 1986.

Chapter 1 The Illusion of Simultaneity

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Notes

Notes

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