Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

The process of habituation to the new technologies is still in full swing. It is always also a learning and mastering process. What the machinery has to offer - global simultaneity and the social representation and integration into it of countless, local proper times – is being rehearsed at the moment, and turned into social habituation. Through technology, people's relations with one another change, but a new relationship between proper time and the social time which unites people can also be established through it. There is a long way to ${ \bf g o } ,$ however. At the moment, the juxtaposition of times outweighs a new togetherness. The struggle for the social recognition of proper time and its representation in the global, standardized system of world time as a political fact, too, began with the spread of the technological infrastructure and the obligations to join in produced by it. It is being continued by the struggle for a political structuring of the structuring spaces and times thus opened up. This makes it clear why the aspect of conflict in habituation is so strongly to the fore at present. Proper time, viewed as self-time from the perspective of the individual, has to come to fresh terms with the time of others, with outside time, above all in the institutionalized complex of working hours and its changed relations to time free of work. It also becomes clear why it is not so much psychology or physics which lie at the heart of the challenge, in the scientific observation and in the first phase of the subjective grounding of proper time, but rather biology and sociology, and certainly also political science. For in order to find a fairly acceptable social ‘solution'to the need for coordination of proper times, the proper time which people bear within them as biological beings in their common features, but also in their individual variations, must be considered in the rules of social existence and of technological mediation. The solution presupposes that the specious present' is not just interpreted as a phenomenon of individual psychology, but becomes socially and politically interpretable.

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It also becomes clear why the structuring of proper time is confronted with two problems which are to be settled in the life of every individual and at the level of society. They are linked by what has here been described as the juxtaposition of times: out of the awareness, already put forward as a problem, of the temporal co-presence of proper times, which is technologically held together and yet temporally differentiated by the illusion and the norm of simultaneity. This requires an examination of the resultant tendencies socially to tolerate, indeed to sanction social inequalities as non-simultaneities. The small temporal difference, which becomes ever larger in its social repercussions, driven forward by international economic and technological competition, leads to the danger that the juxtaposition of courses of time and different speeds results in social divisions, and that large sections of the population are temporally left behind. How much temporal drifting apart a society can bear, and whether acceleration can be made controllable, consciously slowed down or delayed, is an open question arising from the juxtaposition of proper times, which not only concerns norms of social justice but is also important, as shown in the next chapter, for economic and technological development. The other complex of questions results from the point of view of the temporalization of proper times themselves. For every individual proper time has its history. It begins in childhood and with that which is further learnt about society; it changes, in keeping with social circumstances, into old age and up until death. One's own biography, in which the irreversible arrow of time is incorporated, consists of the combination of sequences. Only thus is social identity constituted and changed. Through the juxtaposition of times in a highly differentiated society, the individual is also faced with very different temporal pressures, to reconcile proper time with the requirements of institutionalized outside time; pressures and expectations which can vary greatly in temporal terms in the course of one's biography. Arranging sequences means being able to produce meaningful relations between them and thereby establishing identity. Juxtaposition can also occur in one's own life - it is then necessary, according to Luhmann, at least to retain one's sensitivity to coincidence, for this is what can still lend continuity to the gathering of coincidences.27

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The Illusion of Simultaneity

Individual proper time is necessarily fitted into the length of a lifetime. Longer periods of experience are open to society; even if, as the core of the systematic reflection of historiography requires, it arranges sequences, and gives them meaning, to rearrange them again in the light of later, fresh experiences, the various modalities in which people's experiences produce history are still 'stratified', in a temporally graduated fashion. Simultaneity has already been treated here, and it recurs in the form of the possibility of narrating the experiences of those involved', as the historian Reinhart Koselleck believes. He focuses on various ways of gaining experience. The first kind of experience is always as unique as it is unrepeatable. It is the experience which is the result of surprise, since somebody has an experience who has to be surprised'. Hence it also has to be repeatedly undergone afresh by every single person. What is repeated is simply this fact. The second possibility of gaining experience is that which is repeated, whether in the life of a single person, or as the result of a process of accumulation, and hence through the experience of many people. Experience is stabilized in the medium term here, and experiences are specific to one's generation to an increased extent. They result from the biological handicap alone, which moulds every individual life through the temporal discrepancy between parents and children, but they receive their social signature through the political and social events experienced in common, as a generation. Although they are differently perceived and undergone, such phases of experience nevertheless evoke a minimum of common interests, comprehending all age-groups. Once these are institutionalized, they establish a common history.

To these two interlinked and mutually interdependent levels of time – the unique level and that conditioned by one's generation – a third level can be added, that which in the long term, whether insidiously or in phases, alters all established experiences, and changes the balance of experience altogether. Such long-term historical changes, which influence every current conflict or help to cause it, remain present as a background experience, even if they are raised into consciousness only by questions of historical method.

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But just as the individually experienced biography must be repeatedly restructured to produce a continuous narrative, room must also be made in history for the experiences of succeeding generations. Here, at the latest, proper time meets history: Whatever is mustered, especially in the way of statistical methods, it continues to be a question of finding long-term changes or lasting assumptions in order to be able to comprehend the uniqueness of one's own surprise.'28 Surprise indicates that the time-curve of history cannot simply be extrapolated from the past, that there can be discontinuities and breaks. The approximative simultaneity which this century, with the aid of its technologies, has made a reality and used as an illusion may certainly represent a surprise, in the sense of having to have an experience. As such, it deserves to be included in the process of writing down, extrapolating and rewriting history.

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From the Future to the Extended Present

A horizon is nothing, save the limit of your sight.

John Donne

With the Enlightenment, there also arose the need for time; for it was necessary to make up the delay of reason. There was only one means of making it up, that of speeding up proceedings. This is how Hans Blumenberg describes the central ideas of an age which first discovered progress and commandeered it for itself, and to which the consumption of time appeared a quantity that could be controlled. The idea of speeding up was still wholly tied to the agonizing thought of the 'delay of reason', but already oriented itself to the notion of the consumption of time for the historical achievement which was still to be performed. ‘Time, until then merely the medium for the appearance of events and protagonists, for the growth of subliminal empirical quantities into measurable results, itself becomes a power which can be thought capable of anything by virtue of its sheer quantity."1 Everything seemed possible, if only it had time enough, it would be said later. To begin with, the need was concentrated on gaining time, on the process of catching up which drew on the past. The horizon of time was powerfully shifted back in this direction, to begin with; biblical chronology was provincialized. 'Room is made in the space of time for the great extrabiblical cultures and for the supposedly long-term processes of the moral and rational perfection of human beings.'But it was obvious that the need for time also had to spread to the future, since the present could hardly be regarded as the perfection of all things. Problems of consciousness thereby arose for the individual which were to tear the latter to and fro between encouragement and despair in the face of a conception of history of such spaciousness that the individual life seemed to have no significance in it any longer." As an answer to the need for time which had become apparent, however, the attribution of meaning had to keep pace with the change of temporal perspectives, the extension into the past and into the future at the same time. The past could extend to genuine or false infinity', the illusion of closely centred conceptions of history could be destroyed and replaced by a world history of the human race. But for the future, it could neither be denied nor repressed that the lifetime still remained the measure of meaningful life expectancy.

Every extension of progress beyond what was still attainable by the present and individual consciousness endangered the structure of meaning which guaranteed the intended share of the individual in the continuance of the whole .. . Speeding up under the idea of 'progress' could and would not just mean securing its inner logic and making it irreversible, but also retrieving an indefinitely open future and putting it into lifetime proportions. Or at least supplying the extent of the individual lifetime with as many future possibilities as are attainable. The future dimension of progress should thus be anything but the temporal counterpart of the past whose dimensions are newly discovered and still to be discovered . . . In the tension which arose through the dissociation of lifetime and world time, it amounted to drawing or forcing more and ultimately perhaps everything into the life expectancy of the concrete and frail subject. Therefore progress' becomes something which does not just spring from its inevitability as regards objective content. . . , but which can be advanced by method, organization and institution, and condensed by speeding it up.³

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The eighteenth century, Blumenberg concludes, did not yet believe that human beings make history, but what could be made was the pace of history: 'Stepping up the pace presupposes the inevitability, safeguarded elsewhere, of the sequences. Not an edifying result; but, recognizable by its fascination, apparently the most comforting one in the face of the temporal dimension of the future.'4 In the nineteenth century, human beings made history – as Karl Marx correctly recognized – and by means of machines. The speeding up of the ‘formal outline’ had found its unsurpassed method and form of organization in the machine geared to industrial production. The newly invented economy of time, in which all time becomes economy'consisted in the fact that more was produced within the same time unit, or the same volume could be produced within a shorter time unit.5 The speeding up by the machine was oriented to a different, mobile continuum of reference which had become the symbol of the machine age or, in Lewis Mumford's phrase, the key machine of the industrial age per se: the clock. The ‘inevitability, safeguarded elsewhere, of the sequences', which could be fed into the rhythm of the machines, first of all forced people who had to work at them to adapt themselves to standards of performance which were becoming quicker and quicker. When English industrial workers smashed the clock mounted above the factory entrance (and not the machines at which they worked), their anger was directed at the hated symbol of timekeeping, by means of which their accelerated output was monitored.6 Finally, in Taylorism\* there followed the almost complete equation of an organic series of movements with the series of movements performed by machines, both prescribed in their inevitable sequences and measured by clock time. In the idea that all reserves of time, however insignificant they appeared, the hidden pauses and slow-downs, were to be rationalized away', the speeding up that was attainable by 'method, organization and institution'reached its provisional peak. What was to be forced into the lifetime of the concrete and frail subject' had indeed been pressed into it.

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\* A reference to the doctrine of the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), the founder of 'scientific management'. (Tr.)

The open horizon of the future, however, which just like the expanded past was indebted to the need for time felt by the Enlightenment and became an integral part of the belief in progress, was able to stabilize as the difference, permanently to be sustained, between experience already undergone and the horizon of expectation. The traditional space of experience and the horizon of expectation - previously – derived from it diverged; in the concept of progress this increasing distinction was repeated. Because the horizon of expectation was set in motion, history was made dynamic. As Koselleck strikingly proves, the modern era of history, which could now be explicitly called such, and its progress, became applicable in the same sense. Through changes in quick succession, which were experienced first as unique, and then as supersedable experiences of reality, the space of experience changed. At the same time, however, that expectation increased which was directed towards the open horizon of the future and promised a constant opening up into something better.7

This difference had continuously to be sustained. While it was constitutive for so long for the belief in progress, it did not last in the end – either in the precarious balance between world time and lifetime, or as the collectively keepable promise of a constant, glorious improvement of the future. The open horizon in terms of world history has repeatedly'darkened, and at the moment the cloud of further, man-made catastrophes is hanging heavily over it. Viewed in terms of the lifetime, progress has admittedly brought a catching up in social prosperity and material well-being for many people, in the industrialized countries at least. But individual happiness, multiplied by the large number of all those who also want to enjoy it in the same place and at the same time, is, as a glance at jammed motorways or similar consumer pleasures shows, of relatively brief duration and diminished content. What the future promises in the way of expectations seems to be at best more of the same and at worst a diminution of stock. Even acceleration does not help any further here. Since having to run faster in order to stay in one and the same spot exposes a different experience of progress, which in a relative state of being ahead can demonstrate an equal state of being behind. The escape routes which are supposed to lead out of the expectation of the future, which has become peculiarly empty, remain ensnared in the same basic pattern. They either point to a nonexistent idyllic past or place their hopes in the next phase of technological innovation. But despite predictions and promises, the horizon remains flat and motionless. The dynamics of depth of focus has clearly been lost. Progress itself, it may be said, has aged. In the ecological sphere, the repercussions are the most dramatic, because here linearity – the continuous pushing out on a continuum temporally directed towards the future – has most drastically and most lastingly turned out to be an unfounded hope. In the biosphere as in the geosphere it is sudden events instead, the upsetting'of natural balances, and the effects arising from synthetic reactions, which from the combination of processes of different kinds with mostly unknown proper times can lead to discontinuities and breakdowns.8 With the reduction of the time-scales within which mostly unpleasant consequences of present or yesterday's actions are to be expected, the pressure of time also grows which weighs heavily on the present. It is not so much the apocalyptically tinged visions of the end of time, but the at least scientifically plausible assumptions of clear periods of time within which negative consequent effects become foreseeable. The future mapped out in linear terms draws dangerously close to the present, filled with conditional negatives. If solutions are to be found which are to be realized as well, then as soon as possible. Now.

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From the Future to the Extended Present

From the Future to the Extended Present

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