Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

In a different way, space and time – and the perception of them – also moved into the centre of scientific study. In physics, Newton's idea of an absolute space and an absolute time was written off virtually in passing.4 In thermodynamics, with the thermal death of the universe the temporal vector was stringently formulated for the first time. In 1905, Einstein calculated within the framework of the Special Theory of Relativity how time appears slowed down in a system moving away at constant speed. With the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, he extended the theory to accelerated bodies. Since all matter in the universe produces a gravitational field, and since gravity is equally acceleration, every body has its own time. In a later popularization of his theory, Einstein compares the old mechanics, which only recognized a single clock, with his theory, according to which ‘we can imagine as many clocks as we want." With quantum mechanics, that subjectivist element was introduced into physics which led to the abandonment of a realist description. But does not this subjectivist element, the role which was ascribed to the observer, stem from the fact that the vector of time did not really find its way into the theoretical structure of quantum mechanics, but was merely appended to it, with the aid of the concept of the observer?⁶

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

Within psychology and the areas of philosophy overlapping with it, questions about the relationship between the subjective perception of time and objective measurability, and the tension between ‘internal', experienced time and ‘external', given time, were likewise a central preoccupation. Since the 1880s, psychologists had been in search of the duration of the present. The intention was to measure the interval in which time could be perceived by the individual as a continuous whole. But what was this present? Was not that which appears concurrently a succession in the seeing of the object? Was not time more comparable to a flow than to a sum of discrete units? In William James's famous formulation of 1890, the present is ‘a stream of thought, of consciousness' and not a 'bucket of water'. The ‘specious present' of which James speaks was not comparable with a knife-edge, but was more like a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time'.7 It was more than just a fleeting moment, since it proved dense enough to make it possible to perceive more than just one event, to hear more than just one melody. Past events or perceptions could end, but they remained, as in Husserl, present as 'retentions'. For James Joyce, the condensed present was the only real place in which it was possible to have experiences. Because he gives interior monologues to the hero of his novel Leopold Bloom and his contemporary companions in ‘time', who inhabit with him the universe of the streets and pubs of Dublin, and compresses all experiences into those famous sixteen hours on 16 June 1904, the experience of simultaneity is both relativized and objectivized. The question as to whether public time, measurable, objective time, was part of inner awareness or not had found its artistic answer. Even the body can measure time, wrote an enthusiastic critic about Proust's masterpiece. And the two French anthropologists Hubert and Mauss, disciples of Durkheim, gave the following answer:

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The interplay of concepts which psychological reality forms from successive images consists in the matching of two sets of ideas. One is constant and periodical – it is that of the calendar .. . the other continually constructs itself through the act of producing new ideas. The mind is constantly endeavouring to bring together certain elements of these two sets in a single tension.8

What preoccupied people at that time, and what scientists and artists had taken up, was the question as to how real their own experience of time was. The more they realized that their own temporal and spatial categories, from a subjective point of view at least, were legitimate, and that there was obviously a public time of the calendar and a private time of their feelings and their body, the more urgent it became to clarify the relationship of these two kinds of time to one another. What sparked the discovery of simultaneity, which presupposed a world organized into time-zones, and which became subjectively comprehensible through communication technologies, was the confrontation between a now standardized public time and the variety of private, subjective times. The discovery became dramatically comprehensible through events like the sinking of the Titanic, whose SOS calls were heard by numerous ships within a radius of a hundred nautical miles. The next morning people in capital cities on both sides of the Atlantic could read about the dramatic events at the breakfast table in their newspapers.

The emergence of simultaneity – in contrast to its discovery – had been prepared in longer-term processes. It is first connected with the spatial extension of state control, then with the economic one of the market, and finally with that of technologies. European expansion, indeed expansion in general, first took place over territory. The colonial powers occupied foreign countries, took territorial possession of them. The nation-states within Europe arose in spatially delimited territories, within which they exercised a monopoly on the use of force and the raising of taxes.

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

Along with spatial control, the temporal kind is also established, but it still completely follows the imperatives of the organizational needs of the central powers: the temporal control of the bureaucracies, which is based on the punctuality that was necessary for maintaining discipline in the army, at school, and later in the factories. The process of diffusion of temporal control breaks away from the static system of time of the big bureaucracies only with the economic boom of capitalism and its expansion. Temporal control is symbolized by the idea of progress, of economic boom. The gap between the capital city and the village which still has no asphalt road or is not yet connected to the national grid is a temporal-economic one. Economic dynamics causes new centres to arise which are ahead of their times, and peripheries which are backward, wherever they may be geographically located. The primary distributive mechanism of this temporal control becomes the market. Calculated to surmount spatial limits, it seems to negate time in the act of buying and yet profits from the small temporal difference, from the advantages over competitors which a few hours, days or months bring in buying or selling. They are what decide on profit and loss. Extending and using these temporal advantages, applying them to many transactions, also became possible spatially over the entire world with the aid of communication technologies. It was not by chance that the first telephones were installed in order to be able to transmit the stock market prices more quickly; the ceremonial opening of the first lines was left to the head of state simply as an act of political courtesy. How extensively the market and technology pervade one another was strikingly expressed by those photographic images sent round the world by the media on the occasion of the stock market crash in autumn 1987. They showed almost identically dressed stockbrokers, holding at least three telephones to their ears, who were trying to save what could be saved in New York and Tokyo. Through the networking of computers, in which contingent conditions of purchase and sale were programmed, the standardization of time had reached a new, provisional peak.

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Officially, it began unspectacularly and almost, disregarding the consequences, trivially. In 1884 one of the then numerous international conferences was held which were striving for a standardization of norms, weights and measures.9 Out of practical, commercial and political necessity, states were pressing for international agreements which were intended to introduce more clarity, convertibility and rationality into the confusing variety of local, regional and national standards. No bold utopias inspired the advocates of standardization, but the sober calculations of engineers, industrialists, civil servants and army officers. At the international meridian conference, the object was to divide the world into twenty-four timezones each with an hour's difference and to draw an obligatory international date line. A decision had to be taken about where ‘east' and where 'west' was, since it followed from this which places in the world would be chronologically ‘ahead of’ or 'behind' other places. Such a decision was arbitrary, of course, but temporal coordination at an international level could only result if there was a temporal dividing line which met with international assent. Since then, the 180th meridian at the same distance east and west of Greenwich has been regarded as the international date line. Crossing it eastwards, travellers gain a day, while in the opposite direction they lose a day. If it is Tuesday evening in Tokyo, it is Tuesday morning in New York and not Wednesday morning, for instance. Since then, New York has been all of fourteen hours ‘behind' Tokyo and not ten hours ‘ahead'. The standardization of world time had direct technological and also military benefits. Unlike in the Middle Ages, when it was still customary to be woken for battle by cocks which had been brought along, the machinery of war now also required a coordination which was as accurate as possible. Equally, world time was the condition for the coordination of the many local systems of time with one another, for establishing timetables without which the spatial extension and concentration of the transport network would have been inconceivable.

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

Historians of technology have described in detail how the first modern technologies overcoming space and time, the telegraph and telephone, radio, but also the cinema, just like the railways before them, did not merely help to reduce geographical distances but conveyed the feeling that social barriers could also be overcome. At the turn of the century, the hierarchical structures of the nobility, but also those of the bourgeois world, had begun to totter. The potential for change, the susceptibility of existing power structures to a levelling' technology, was strikingly illustrated by the possibility of disrespectfully crossing bounds of protocol which lay within the capacity of the technological media. It was not by chance that telephones were not admitted to the Imperial Palace in Vienna, typewriters were regarded with mistrust, and electric light was reserved for the streets and the citizens, for they equally threatened a social hierarchy in its fine distinctions, which were also spatially and temporally coordinated.10 It was obvious that waiting periods could be reduced by the telephone, and that many a ministerial art of processing files would soon become superfluous. For the visionaries of the approaching democracy, it was a question of reducing not just political power distinctions, but cultural ones as well. The cinema, celebrated as the democratic medium per se, made it possible from now on to bring the enjoyment of art and culture, indeed simple entertainment, out of the exclusive court theatres and out of the bourgeois cultural sphere, and to make them available to everybody for little money. It was a period which did not yet suspect what dimensions the saturation with mass media would assume, and that television would literally come to every tin hut. Finally, means of transport, from the railways via the bicycle to the motor-car, opened up free spaces for a society which has since made individual mobility one of its central values. Yet it was something more than this. In retrospect, it was not just that geographical and social spaces opened up, but it was as if society had succumbed to an intoxication with space and time.

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The intoxication with time resulted first of all from the directly perceptible increase in speed, hastened and mediated by technology, but absorbed into the life of society as a whole, an increase which individuals could not evade. Technological change means nothing other than the accelerated sequence of social changes. The speed with which a good deal of social distance was reduced, and how quickly habits could change or a good deal of social distance could shrink, caused people to overlook to begin with how little other, invariable power structures were changing. Only from today's standpoint does it become clear that technologies do not always bring the promised liberation, but that they definitely can be used to perpetuate existing inequalities.

The intoxication with speed came to Europe from the United States after a time-lag. There was hardly an account of a journey from the twenties and thirties by Europeans who had returned from the USA which was not fascinated by the hectic pace prevailing there and the cult of speed, commented on by the Europeans with a mixture of admiration and the forebodings of cultural pessimism. Quite a few practitioners of the new psychology were confronted in their analytical sessions with the anxiety and the neuroses of those of their patients who could not cope with the temporal demands. A kind of 'cultural hypochondria' broke out, which gave warning of the disastrous consequences of the intoxication with speed and causally connected many ills of the period with it.11 Conversely, it was this very cult of speed which was emphatically celebrated in the futurist manifesto. The dynamics of the machine age, as the futurists saw it, was energy translated into speed up to the final consequences of selfdestruction – war.

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

The other form of the intoxication with time consisted in the discovery of world-wide simultaneity. It feigned a sense of time according to which the individual could be in any place at the same time and participate in everything happening elsewhere. The present was everywhere, and one could communicate with people all over the place. And what was to be communicated was the fact that the thirst for knowledge about what was happening elsewhere, for information about other places, other events, other people, was not yet threatened with permanent oversatiation as it is today. In their own way, the writers of poésie simultanée, like Apollinaire and others, gave expression to what was expected of simultaneity by a generation which was not yet suffering from the shortage of time that prevails today, nor yet had to indulge in desperate efforts to find time for love as well in an overcrowded appointments diary. Even though it was an artistic avantgarde which thought it could blithely shrug off constraints of space and time, and celebrated what Western, individualized consciousness was bold enough to celebrate for the first time – namely the fundamental experience that the subjectivity of private existence was a reality – many other people shared this experience with them. The bourgeois individual, and this is what we are talking about here, who had also been repeatedly circumscribed by the prevailing social order, was suddenly confirmed in his or her very own, subjective experience through the use of pieces of technological equipment which allowed him or her to establish a link of simultaneity with other individuals in other places. Accordingly, the sum total of all private existences constituted a spatially permissible diversity of reality. What positively exploded through the discovery of simultaneity was the temporal objectivization and legitimation of the individual consciousness, of the subjectively experienced existence. From then on, there was not just one historical 'world-time', analysed and thought out further by Voltaire and other thinkers since the Enlightenment; its disintegration into something that was a kind of co-presences was comprehensible to subjective existences which were objectivized because technologically linked with one another and constituting public time. There were as many subjective times as there were thinking, feeling, knowing, communicating individuals. Thus the bourgeois individual discovered his or her own temporal subjectivity against the background of a growing international integration by means of transport systems and business relations, unwillingly represented by the artistic avant-garde. This temporal subjectivity could be interpreted as a component of public time because private time was thenceforth to be recognized as legitimate, or as a preliminary form of the resistance to those impersonally exercised constraints of time which were already inherent in the technological and economic forms of organization. In the supposed simultaneity, the objective existence of which seemed indubitable owing to its technological embodiment, there was room for one's own subjectivity, it was part of the objective spatio-temporal reality; but it could already – legitimately – be conceived as contrasting with and opposed to it.

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Today - fifty and more years, as well as a world war, later - a recurring discovery of simultaneity can be detected. There is no lack of protagonists seeking to celebrate each latest generation of telecommunication technologies as a revolution' and promising a fresh liberation of human beings through the merging of space and time, of workplace, working hours, free time and home. In contrast to the beginning of this century, however, when millions of people noted with astonishment the marvels of technology, which immensely stimulated their imagination but only gradually impinged on their own lives, today almost everyone has become involved or at least potentially affected. What was then reserved for a few privileged people has risen, in industrialized countries at least, to a general standard. In the USA in the last ten years alone the share of investments by firms in the purchase of information technologies like computers, telecommunications systems and equipment has doubled from 20 to 40 per cent, as the Office of Technology Assessment notes in its report on the situation of American industry.12 Other countries are following suit at appropriate intervals. In the Third World, coups d'état have been prepared with the aid of transistor radios, and the television aerials on the tin roofs of slums have become proverbial. The global village of which one of the early enthusiasts of the approaching age of information, Marshall McLuhan, wrote as early as the sixties, in which there would be no shortage of possibilities of communication, seems to have been turned into a reality.

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

But there is not only joy and jubilation about the new simultaneity. The social repercussions of the new information technologies are at the centre of heated public debates, which spark off questions of property rights and public control, economic concentration and the protection of citizens against unauthorized linking of data gathered about them. Above all, however, the unemployment figures in the industrial nations and the assumed causal nexus with the job-destroying' potential of the new technology cast a shadow over the elation. The restraint of state monopolies over institutions of communication and information, and questions of what kind of infrastructure, pricing policy, consumer and data protection to invest in, are merely a few main features of an area of politics which has grown in a subtly diversified way, and the existence of which the advocates of poésie simultanée would never have thought possible. The initially celebrated experience of privateness as a legitimate part of a publicly recognized simultaneity has turned into real nightmares of the vulnerability of the private sphere, which has to take refuge from the excess of what is technologically possible in new basic rights and other protective legislation. The variety introduced into the daily routine of steady habits by the first radio programmes and the incipient leisure industry has given way to a surplus of aims and styles of leisure. Despite a reduction of the working week, the journeys to work and journey times are getting longer, and the social costs of any kind of mobility higher. Despite being incomparably better equipped with mechanical household appliances, women still do more housework than men, and they are left with less work-free time in the almost constant ratio of 1:3.13 Increased standards of cleanliness, longer journey times, even to take children to school or to their leisure activities, dealing with authorities and other public institutions, and finally holiday stress and all the unfinished things which have become the paraphernalia of the modern individual permanently suffering from lack of time, no longer admit the sense of leisure. Simultaneity has everyone under control. Spans of attention have been scientifically investigated and are used for the efficient structuring of commercials on television. What passes over the screen in colourful succession is a parody of simultaneity: the events which are shown follow the rules of dramatic portrayal by a medium. They have little to do with the social reality from which they have been detached. Whether they are fiction or are to be seen from the point of view of simultaneity has become largely irrelevant to the observer.

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