Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

One person who is examining the discovery of recurring social pulses'on the basis of extensive data evidence, and covering a period of 200 years of human inventions, and innovations of a technological and non-technological kind, is the physicist Cesare Marchetti. Radical in his claims, he thinks he has traced the high level of self-organization in Western industrial societies in a quantifiable and hence verifiable form. The kind and number of examples he uses are impressive. It is a question of populations' of cars or computers, or of the substitution of each of the most important energy sources, from wood to fusion energy. But a population'can also be the series of the erection of Gothic cathedrals, the career of criminals, or lists of publications by scientists as well as catalogues of works by artists. The basic figure of Kondratiev's cycle appears everywhere, which models growth, maturity and decline in logistic curves. The ‘internal clock'of the activity of social innovation which Marchetti thinks he has found indicates, towards the end of a period of recession, at the rock bottom of the sine curve, at the same time the beginning of the next wave of innovation. With its rise, new markets open up for the products it will produce, and it leads to the creation of new jobs and investments. This ‘megabreathing’ of society can be explained - in so far as Marchetti enters into explanations – from the perspective of the theory of evolution: not just in the biological process of evolution, but also in the social one there are niches which are to be found at different levels of abstraction. Whether bacteria, cars or mega-technologies for the production of energy – the observed populations first grow into niches which they try to colonize'. In doing so, they are never completely alone – other rivals are either already in the niche or equally push their way in. A logistic equation, named after Lotka-Volterra, describes the relation between the size of the colonizing population and the speed of growth at which it approaches saturation point. It is essentially a question of processes of diffusion, since they are easier to measure and count than mutations (technological innovations) or selections (the testing of innovation). In case a niche is already full, the ensuing rival has good prospects of being able successfully to oust the less efficient population and ultimately to fill the niche.

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It is that simple: everything follows the logistic curve, as Haldane had shown for biology as early as 1924. The successful rivals owe their growth to it, the losers their death.26

Undoubtedly, the study of these and similar phenomena of (predictable) recurrence – however one may judge its result or the methods used to attain it – holds a powerful intellectual fascination, one which thrilled even the early statisticians, then still wholly 'because of the beauty of God', which seemed discernible in birth rates and death rates (Süßmilch).27 But there is more at stake than the fascination of scientific predictions, if one is to be able to take successful action in social life which is so inscrutable, or to be able to discover the beauty of regularities beyond the will or the intention of human beings.

The search for the ‘internal clock', the proper time of technologies and whole techno-systems which arise, grow and perish by being superseded by subsequent, retrospectively superior ones, is the attempt to find the time discipline of cyclical recurrence and to use it by trying to acquire it. It is furthermore the attempt to get to grips with those problems which were denied by linearity: to explain breaks and discontinuities, compared with which the discovery of curves of growth and decline is relatively simple. To be on the trail of the proper time of a series of technological, scientific or artistic innovations, or of a whole 'system' of works, also means internalizing the time discipline contained in such regularities to the point where they can be included in what can be advanced by means of method, organization and institution, and condensed by means of acceleration', as it was formulated at the beginning of the machine age. Only it is no longer a question of acceleration alone. Deceleration can also be appropriate, depending on whether the product is in the phase of 'youth', 'maturity' or 'senescence'. The use of anthropomorphic terms like these in the relevant literature by economists28 indicates how much the investigation of the 'life cycles'of technologies has become a self-evident part of marketing strategies and analyses. Striving for a prolonged product adolescence’can definitely be in the interests of the American economy in a particular phase of its competition with Japan; and not just in this, of course.

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What a difference between the time discipline which was to the fore during the machine age and that which industrial production envisages today: during the industrial revolution, time discipline consisted in the mostly forced and painful habituation of people to the temporal requirements of the machine and its economic conditions of production. It presupposed the laborious learning of punctuality, to which children were habituated at school from an early age – as a preparation for working life – a process which was implemented with brutal methods and required an extremely long time to lead to that internalization which has become a matter of course today. Punctuality as a temporal 'virtue' no longer exists today; it is expected as an element of self-discipline from all members of society who want to take part in working life. Efforts are no longer concentrated on human beings today, but on the prerequisites for and consequences of the activity of innovation in terms of temporal organization. The timetable in the life cycle of a product or a market is to be investigated and then made controllable. The physical and mental adaptability of human beings is presupposed; they are already sufficiently disciplined with regard to time. What now has to follow is the adaptability of institutions: marketing, the influencing of tastes and of fashions, the programming of artificial obsolescence in a society which has already been familiarized with disposability'. Innovations and markets are to be subordinated to the temporal discipline of rise, saturation and decline; beforehand one has to learn it, and in order to be able to learn it, it has to be investigated.

The life cycles of technologies are confronted with other super-cycles and epicycles in the financial sphere, where risk capital has to be created and destroyed'in order to keep the profitable cycle alive. Viewed thus, the production of goods and services, of jobs and of capital, obeys a single cycle of enormous complexity, controlled by the individual life cycles of the subsystems, and decided at the right' moments of buying and selling. A remarkably complex institutionally controlled management of time attempts to recognize these cyclical interconnections in their temporal interdependences, in order then to be able to implement the strategy of the controlled interval. This is the attempt to achieve a planned and managed growth by controlling its speed, and in the knowledge that as a result of the built-in cyclicality growth will be followed by decline, and obsolescence. If it is possible to learn to control acceleration in a cycle, then time discipline becomes ever more extensible. Chronobiology and chronosociology are joined by chronotechnology. This has little use for the linearity of the machine age. What is interesting is no longer the individual worker in interaction with the machine when the so-called man-machine-system has long since been incorporated into a larger organizational complex, but the proper times through which phases of innovation occur in institutional and organizational time discipline. Biological metaphors should not tempt us to see linearity as 'hard' and cyclicality as soft' time discipline. As with the chronology of history, they bear no content, they are – to begin with – empty.

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Modelling of processes by means of statistical methods, heuristics and simulation increasingly deals with the phenomenon of the unexpected, of discontinuous processes and of surprises. Linear extrapolations of trends, derived with the aid of parameters from a combination of temporal series and comparable sectoral analyses of the existing system, are regarded as inadequate for the portrayal of changes at the level of the world system – climatic and ecological, demographic or economic ones. Instead of prediction which can be derived in linear terms, the focus of interest is possible deviation and the regularity which might perhaps be found in it. Surprises can happen to individuals, institutions or whole societies. To be able to incorporate them in predictions increases the range of possible measures in order to be prepared for them. The cycle between prediction, even of the unexpected, and possible control begins to come full circle: it is the question of the extended present.

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In the meantime, however, it is necessary to cope with the surprises which have already occurred. In retrospect, one of the biggest surprises is probably the realization that even progress can age. In Robert Jungk's pun, progress has become pro-dross. Incessant innovation creates new problems of obsolescence. Ageing and obsolete industries, the regions in which they are established and on which they have left their mark, like the increasingly ubiquitous rubbish dumps, are a conspicuous expression of the other side of innovation. Storing the most dangerous waste materials has become a detective game with lethal consequences in the oceans. If the predictions about the end of the current Kondratiev cycle are to be believed, around the year 1995 not only will a new phase of intensive technological innovation begin, but many firms will also ‘die’ as organizational units, and many jobs will be 'destroyed'. The social cost of these and other ageing processes is high. Just like the phenomenon of human and social ageing in view of an ageing population in the industrial nations, it is only slowly coming to public awareness. This results in a new social, and not just individual, experience. The level of expectations of a not inconsiderable minority is shrinking solely because of their advanced age, while the ageing process of technologies is being accelerated by succeeding technological innovations.

Ageing is measured on a socially accepted scale of reference, which is generally the chronological one of calendar time. But this level of abstraction is not very meaningful when it is a question of grasping the social and individual differences which come to light. Above all, the cultural definition intervenes which distinguishes ageing from 'becoming obsolete'. Becoming obsolete means ageing more quickly than is to be expected from the average rates of ageing or is prescribed by the norm. If technologies, firms and regions age more quickly and clearly 'become obsolete' today, just like people's professional qualifications and the knowledge acquired in their lifetime, then it seems reasonable to suppose that the norm of ageing changes according to the amount of innovation. The faster the rate of innovation, the faster the growth of proneness to obsolescence.

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This gives rise to the problem of the cultural maturity of a society, among other things, which is shown by whether it learns to overcome its own problems of waste. The French palaeontologist Leroi-Gourhan gives an impressive description of an evolutionary leap in this respect from the early days of mankind. 'We possess', he writes,

precise records of three dwelling places of the Moustérien, one of them situated in the open air in Moldovo on the Dnjestr, two in caves: in the Grotte de l'Hyène and in the Grotte du Renne of Arcy-sur-Cure in Yonne. They differ considerably in form: the dwelling place in the USSR is a circular area roughly eight metres in diameter, evidently the site of a tent or a hut; the dwelling place in the hyena cave lies in a hall five to six metres in diameter, and that of the reindeer cave lies in part of a gallery two metres wide and five to six metres long. Despite these differences, the three dwelling places show a striking conformity. They consist of a central area in which the fireplaces are situated and which is relatively free of animal remains, but full of stone tools; this central area is surrounded by a dense belt of scraped and smashed bones. If we disregard the structure which must have existed in Moldovo, then the reconstruction yields a very meagre picture. Neanderthal man lived surrounded by the remains of his hunting quarry, which he pushed away a bit in order to create a space to live in.

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The contrast to the dwelling places from the period around $3 0 { , } 0 0 0$ BC could not be greater:

The whole space is carefully cleaned; outside, we come across some heaps of bigger rubbish and, scattered over the slopes, the rubbish dumps', little piles of ashes, interspersed with flakes of stone and tiny fragments of bone. The moment in evolution at which the first pictorial representations appear is thus simultaneously the point when the living space is marked off from the chaos of its surroundings. The role of the human being as an organizer of space appears here in its systematic arrangement.29

If we agree with Leroi-Gourhan that the organization of inhabited space is not a question of mere technological convenience but, in the same sense as language, the symbolic expression of universal human behaviour, then clearly the three requirements regarding the dwelling place were successfully met for the first time here: ‘to create technologically efficient surroundings, .. . to give the social system a framework and... to create order in the surrounding universe from a single point'.30 Can the solution to the problem of waste incurred in each case be regarded even today as one of the turning points of cultural evolution? Whole branches of industry are engaged in disposing of waste in modern industrial civilization, transporting it away, re-storing it and permanently disposing of it. Science and technology offer new methods of cyclically built-in waste utilization, where in a closed system the waste incurred – no matter whether gaseous, liquid, or in solid form – is to be transformed in such a way that it is either used again in production, or reaches the outside world only in safe remnants. A particular problem is the waste whose toxicity persists over long periods of time, and which loses its endangering potential only very slowly. Will the process of civilization, described by Norbert Elias as the gradual transformation of outside constraints into self-constraints, which took place in the course of the increasing integration of human interactions and the setting up of monopolies on the part of the central powers who were establishing themselves, be continued in the extension of individual standards of cleanliness beyond the territorial confinement to the domestic sphere controllable by oneself? The historical process of civilization is an example of a blind but directed, long-term social process which runs otherwise than intended, and whose ultimate results were neither foreseeable nor intended in this form by those involved.

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Today, from the varied point of view of those involved which results not least from very different fields of interest, it seems clear what is desirable. But equally the obstacles in the path of any overall plan, however well intended, and any 'grand design', are insurmountable. The effects of waste production know neither spatially territorial nor temporal limits, they ignore the sovereign rights of nationstates and the time spans of parliamentary terms. But the control mechanisms which can emanate from state authorities via statutory regulations like laws or prohibitions, or can be steered via the market through economic incentives, are either territorially restricted or, as in the case of multinational companies, hard to bring under a particular state jurisdiction. Households and individuals can, for their part, admittedly change their social awareness and feel responsible for further domains of action than the one which is directly their own, but action and awareness bear a peculiar relation to one another, determined by further circumstances: insight into the problem alone does not suffice to entail appropriate action. Scientific and technological solutions, on the other hand, which are among the most important vehicles of evolution, do not for their part occur in a social vacuum. Market conditions and economic interests, lead times for development and competitive relations with already existing waste technologies characterize the multiple interdependences between economics, science and technology. The transformation of outside constraints into internalized, yet also individualized selfconstraints is probably not sufficient to bring about an advance in civilization in the face of the problem of waste. Collectively anchored self-constraints, on the other hand, require the invention of new institutions and institutional mechanisms of coordination and control. They can neither be constructed voluntarily, nor do they occur in an antisocial sphere. They arise as a social process taking account of existing power structures, which are reproduced and yet continue to become differentiated, under certain conditions.

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One of these, the temporal condition, is the increase in the urgency of the problem in conjunction with the cyclicality imputed to innovative events. The regular production of waste is foreseeable. The postulate holds good here, too, of 'being able to comprehend' the prerequisite for the uniqueness of one's own surprise', in order to be prepared for it. In an age obsessed with innovation, the ageing of products, technologies and abilities, the formation of waste, is no surprise any more. But what follows this comprehension? One solution consists in the attempt to control the ageing process in temporal terms. 'Successful ageing' is the appropriate motto coined for the human ageing process. Through an artificial acceleration or deceleration of particular functions and processes, negative effects can be outweighed; through knowledge of the different proper times of systems or sub-systems, better temporal coordinations can be achieved. But the underlying problem, which was long concealed by the linearity of the machine age, is of a more general nature. In comparison with organisms or organic components, the machine could feign indefatigability and immortality. In a different sphere of production, the symbolic one, this could never happen in the same way. Artistic production has never gone along with the linearity of the machine. Works of art, or rather their elements, can be arranged in the form of sequences, as art historian George Kubler suggests in an interesting analysis, which represent in their turn stylistic directions which supersede one another. Every stylistic direction, every sequence, from the revolutionary new beginning, via mature development to final decay, is composed of connected phenomena which represent the attempt to find answers and provide solutions to quite specific problems of form or content. Cyclical succession is highly sophisticated, since for every sequence which determines a stylistic direction it is also necessary to find an answer to the following problem:

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