Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

What was euphorically celebrated at the turn of the century has become prosaic reality today, but with nontrivial consequences. The plurality of private time forces its way into publicity, is absorbed by it. From the original experience of private time and subjectively justified temporal existence, the temporal self, and also the bourgeois one, has been catapulted into working-time regulations, lifetime regulations, retirement age regulations. The private time of every man and woman has found its place, its time, in world time, but through communication technologies this private time has become one which is always connectable, available, and public. In. between there lies a process of the collective appropriation of communication technologies which matured technologically after the Second World War. Through the creation of a corresponding infrastructure and that typical convergence of individual technological systems into a gigantic techno-system, in which the diverse sectors are combined with one another,14 the technological and economic preconditions have been created to make communicating and acting in an approximative simultaneity not just possible, but a necessity. Simultaneity has become workaday routine for many people. It is no longer predominantly dramatic events, like the fate of the sinking Titanic or those ritual moments which serve to strengthen the feeling of solidarity among people, which convey simultaneity, but the course of everyday work, the constant temporal presence, real or virtual, of others.

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There were social techniques of producing simultaneity in other centuries too, of course, above all the elaborated technique of the ritual which was developed by people in all cultures. In its social orchestration, this was also intent on establishing relations with the natural and supernatural environment and incorporating the existing social order into its coding. In the ritual, spaces and times could be effortlessly overcome, as it were. But it was the proper time of the group which took precedence over the proper time of the individual. It was the group which produced time in the ritual, rehearsed it, caused it to flow into other temporal transitions, and finally dissolved it. It was systems of order which had been made by others that were confirmed in the ritual by the participants, but there was as yet no individually detachable form of mediation which could be bought on the market. What the mediation of the sense of simultaneity by modern technologies and that by the old social techniques have in common is the social obligation to join in. Anyone who does not participate remains outside, becomes an outsider. Only the obligation to join in has now become an economically mediated one. The steep social hierarchies which still prevailed at the turn of the century may have been dismantled in favour of a middle class which has grown in numbers, but social inequalities have not disappeared. They can be translated into temporal inequalities. Society runs the risk of moving at two speeds, as they say in France, à deux vitesses. The fast group are doing it right. They are, from a technological point of view, up to date, ahead of the competition. They are rewarded for it, in material terms as well. The slow group are far from being socially recognized in their slowness. It requires poetic imagination to portray a world in which both, the fast and the slow group, have their complementary place. The author Sten Nadolny has turned his Entwicklungsroman\* about the English seafarer and North Pole explorer John Franklin into a subtle study of the art of being slow and giving meaning to the rhythm of life. In his days as a ship's captain, the hero records in his diary: The slow job is the more important one. All the normal, quick decisions are taken by the First Officer.' In addition, he ponders on the discovery of his friend Dr Orme, who suggested, in view of the 'fatal acceleration of the age', measuring the speed of all individuals with instruments and then deciding what each one was particularly suited to. There are overview occupations', like coachman or Member of Parliament, and 'detail occupations' like craftwork or the medical profession or painting. Those in the former can well be exposed to the acceleration of the age; those in the latter will be best able to follow it from their seclusion and carefully judge the work of the fast group and the rulers from its results.1⁵

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\* A novel showing the development of a character. (Tr.)

The slow group are those who have been socially left behind. In an interview with an unemployed youth, which was recorded in February 1984 in Bremen in the course of an empirical investigation, the ‘standstill' of time in the social situation of being unemployed' is made plain. ‘Tiger', as the youth calls himself, wants to make time stand still because there must not be such a bad time in his life'. His strategies are directed towards making this time irrelevant. But far more than this becomes apparent. A standstill means a relapse in time. Tiger and his family - his father is a dockworker – live in a temporally different, in an anachronistic world. With their needs, their sacrifices, indeed even in the way they practise solidarity, they lag behind the 'historical' time of their social environment. The connection of a telephone becomes the symbol of their connection' with the outside world. The family comes under this pressure, however, only through the father's illness and the drama of a possible ‘too late'.16

Simultaneity, which we are also talking about here in its absence, does not automatically become translatable into equality. In this respect it is an illusion, just as it is clear that within the world of physics there can be no simultaneity. In contrast to the bold promise of one commentator at the turn of the century, space and time have not been annihilated. The convergence mediated by simultaneity via obligations to join in built into technologies and the techno-system gives inequality an additional temporal dimension. This appears not least in the situation in which many developing countries find themselves today. The progress of humanity conceived in evolutionary terms still compares itself with the arrow of time which points irreversibly forwards. For a long time, the various stages of development which societies supposedly had to pass through suggested that there could be only one evolutionary ladder. In the meantime, the paths have become more winding, and the all too simplistic thought patterns have been discredited. Measured against the degree of implementation of technologies and their concentration, the contours of the temporal differences stand out more sharply. In the old evolutionary ladder of social development, shaped by European ethnocentrism, the hierarchically temporal conception of different speeds of development also had a - patriarchal – protective function: the less developed societies were acknowledged to live in a different time, and their officially declared backwardness allowed them to some extent to retain their own lifestyle. Living at the end of the civilized world was equated with a certain right to temporal backwardness. Being exposed to the pressure of simultaneity, as occurs in view of the thrust towards development by modern telecommunications technologies, means forfeiting the right to one's own speed of development. What counts is no longer the ideological justification, but the temporal-technological obligation to join in. In view of the illusion of simultaneity, it becomes even more difficult to refuse the programme of a development intent on catching up – the patterns of perception have been changed too much by the technological possibilities, and the dependences relating to financial policy are too real, which, via the temporal apparatus of the credit system, map out the path to come.17

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If anthropologists criticize their own discipline by saying that in their fieldwork, in conversation with their informants, its practitioners acknowledge to their opposite number that the other' is located in the same time as the anthropologists, since only on this condition is communication possible, while the same anthropologists, in writing scientific texts, constitute the other' as an object who lives in another time, the time of 'tribal reality' - then this shows another problematic aspect of simultaneity.18 The existence of different and contradictory forms of consciousness in the same time, their temporal co-presence, can be denied, or established as distance. Distance is something the forces of progress need so that it can be overcome with time.'But can all dating in an imaginary or conventional chronology of development be avoided by recognizing temporal co-presence, even if this chronology is not conceived in deterministic and evolutionary terms? Is the village scribe whom Jean-Jacques Salomon comes across in the French central Alps when he is preparing to write his book about the computer age an anachronism, or is his existence part of the everyday juxtaposition of times, even in a state which prides itself on its high technology?19 Is the unemployed 20-year-oldTiger’ temporally less 'behind’ if as an interview partner he is recognized in his spatio-temporal presence as co-temporal, as a contemporary? Who is making what ascriptions here, and how do things stand in social reality – really?

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It is certainly correct that the distances from the respective others' in the developmental history of humanity have shrunk, and that precisely in the shifting of the balance between I'and ‘we'there also lies an element of the process of civilization.20 Denying the other' a soul and hence humanity, or shunting him or her on to a lower stage of development, classifying him or her in another time, admittedly express various forms of distancing, but still always remain social distancing and hence an invitation to discrimination. In Western industrial societies, the unemployed live in a different time. It may be the temporal ‘moratorium'which ‘Tiger' imposes on himself, or it may be the agonizingly slow passing of time described by Marie Jahoda in her classic study on the unemployed of Marienthal, where a whole morning's activity is summed up in the statement 'meanwhile it's getting on for lunchtime'.2i But do the unemployed live in a different time because they are or were not fast enough, or are they unable to be fast enough because they are unemployed?

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What is juxtaposition of times in view of a situation of temporal co-presence here, and what – intentional or unintentional – togetherness? How can the indisputable fact of the different speeds in the courses of time, measured against à normative target of temporal development, be revoked, whose imperative is derived from the illusion of simultaneity?

In physics, thanks to the accuracy attained in the measurement of time, the predictions of the Special Theory of Relativity have been directly observed. If two observers are equipped with clocks and move at constant speed relatively to one another, the clock of the one or other will be slow in comparison. The concept of simultaneity for two events occurring in different places has thus lost its significance in terms of physics. Each observer has his or her proper' time, which is measured by an accurate clock and which is always borne with him or her. If all the relative speeds of the different observers are known, their proper time can be calculated by means of the mathematical equations of the theory.

In social life there is also a proper time which everybody bears with them. It arose relatively late, and its capacity for political articulation is only in the process of development. In earlier societies there were hardly signs, and there was also no need, of an individualized time. The social time of the group, of the tribe, held good for all members, even though distinctions grew along the lines of social distinction: according to sex, according to age-groups, according to occupation based on the division of labour, according to status and according to power. The European Middle Ages, which lived largely without clocks, developed different systems of time for different social activities. The religious sphere - as in other social systems - was an exception, and also held a special position with regard to time. Not only were there 'holy times', the set times in the flow of secular time, but work in the service of God', as the religious sector was called, followed its own strict temporal rules. The conflict over time first flared up when God's time was no longer consistent with that of traders, and it became unclear whether it was permitted to lend money in order to earn interest in time.22

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The endless quarrels over the reform of the Gregorian Calendar and over the standardization of local times which differed from town to town were conflicts over the territorial scope of certain social systems each of which had its corresponding system of time. For the people who lived in these systems, however, it was their occupation, their status, and their place of residence that decided which rules of time they had to follow. With the advent of clocks, communally usable, visible reference points were created, which were superior in accuracy and reliability to the means of orientation previously used, the observation of heavenly bodies or the behaviour of animals. It was enough now to glance up at the clock on the church steeple to find out what time it was. One's own sense of time, regulated by the recurring festivals of the ecclesiastical year, by social habits and the necessity of adapting one's work rhythm to the requirements of agriculture, was sufficient to dictate the generally valid, social time. Only with the advent of capitalism, when time could be converted into money, did the attitude towards time characteristic of industrial societies emerge, and the process of detachment of a lifetime which had become measurable in working hours begin. The machine first required to be operated – to the point of total exhaustion. The time that was left was used up in restoring the capacity for work which had been expended in one's working hours. The relation of one's own time to that of others, to social time, had come under the laws of economy – the economy of time. The machine dictated the metronomic rhythm for the machine age. Viewed in this light, the struggle of the organized labour movement in the nineteenth century for shorter working hours was a first step towards the recognition of a minimal proper time, but this was still viewed wholly as collective time and filled with contents which had been collectively mapped out: those of urgently needed recuperation. For the bourgeois individual, however, the emergence of individuality and subjectivity brought a separate sense of time. But the latter remained, as for the female reader of the novel, or for entries in the diary, which became the temporal organ of private feelings, still wholly embedded in the private sphere, withheld from the eyes of others, the secret time of the emergent self.23

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Only at the turn of this century, as was shown earlier in this chapter, was there an explosive emergence into public life of these millions of subjective times which had previously been kept secret – prepared by the processes of economic integration, and made possible by the technologies which were capable of creating the illusion of simultaneity. It was the epoch in which proper time was constituted, just as it was the saddle period’from 1750 to 1850 which had constituted 'modern times'and the temporalization of history. It was up to an artistic and scientific avant-garde to express its new perceptions, experiences and feelings. It was not just by chance that the psychological theories of the time were intensively concerned with the problem of perception, of duration, of memory and of the traces which every temporal perception left behind in the memory. It was not by chance that the Theory of Relativity, even though it was understood by scarcely more than a handful of physicists, met with an enormous popular scientific response. It was not by chance that the fascination of simultaneity, precisely because it still represented the extraordinary, extended to the smallest village, even though the only evidence of this is what historians have found in the oral historical tradition. The emergence of proper time, in its subjectively experienced quality and scientifically grounded for the first time, thus entered the public domain. But it needed a further, social-organizational and technological infrastructure, created only in the second half of this century, to socialize proper time, to practise its use, and to make it a habit which has since made its temporal mark on everyday life. Here it is now practised and experienced, and in cases of conflict also suffered. Here it is trivialized. Since the socialized version of proper time, its now public dissemination and acquisition by everyone, just like the subjectivized version before it, the articulation of which was reserved for a minority, is mediated via technology, it seems reasonable to look for the determinants of the temporal changes in technology itself. It was as true then as it is today that cultural hypochondria' is never very far away from what is regarded as a non-pathological normal state. Numerous fears and prognoses arise in connection with the widespread invasion by telecommunications media of all spheres of social existence. They warn of the dangers of a possible psychological isolation, a social uncoupling in a hyper-individualized world of one's own. Temporal perceptions, mediated via the screen, can lead to extreme fragmentation even in the perception of social relations. Sherry Turkle describes the psycho-structure of young computer freaks who, through interaction with technology, create their own world – even in terms of time – which largely isolates them from the social events around them.24Maruyama reports on a new generation of Japanese youths whom, following the computer generations, he calls the fifth generation of computer kids. They are developing hitherto unknown cognitive faculties which are lacking in the older generation, even if the latter has already grown up with computers. Thus, among other things, they are able to see several programmes on video screens simultaneously,. and to grasp the narrative structures; they develop their own games whose rules provide for a continuous switching on and switching off, and patterns of temporal perception combining speed and simultaneity.25

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But technologies alone can never manufacture time, any more than clocks, which indicate time. This requires interaction between people, from which mechanisms of coordination arise, functionally instrumental, but which are also used as symbolic means of orientation. Technologies mediate in these processes, channel, guide, give directions, and tend to alleviate or aggravate, increase or reduce social differences and distances between people. But they are not the neutral tool’ they are still often portrayed to be. Such a point of view denies the history of every technology, its derivation from previous generations of technology and their social origins and foundations. Michael Young views social evolution as essentially driven forward by the evolution of tools, parallel to biological evolution, which have developed into external organs of human beings. Like Leroi-Gourhan before him, he stresses the extra-somatic character of technological evolution by means of tools, which above all results in the range and capabilities of human sense organs being increased. By means of technological tools and equipment, the human eye can see, and the ear can hear, things which remain closed to it by nature. Information technologies, and especially the computer, are similarly beginning to increase and to amplify the capabilities of the human brain far beyond present achievements. The tools and machines with which human beings have surrounded themselves are being incorporated by them again in a certain sense. Society is assimilating its technologies again, they are becoming a habit, a habitualized way of life which leads to further use of the external sense organs. Like all habits, they soon become a matter of course; the habit of machinery then blends with the biological and social rhythms. A tool of any complexity', writes Michael Young, is a kind of material habit which encapsulates in the present the past experience of countless generations, and which is further elaborated before being handed on in a modified form, to be discarded or modified again.'26

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