Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

The occurrence of things is governed by our changing attitudes towards the processes of invention, repetition and discard. Without invention there would only be stale routine. Without copying there would never be enough of any manmade thing, and without waste or discard too many things would outlast their usefulness. Our attitudes towards these processes are themselves in constant change, so that we confront the double difficulty of charting changes in things, together with tracing the change in ideas about change.31

Kubler's analysis is aimed at aesthetics and not the useful inventions', as he calls them, of technology. But there are definitely similarities, mediated by 'our attitude'towards these processes. The inherent tension between repetition, the desire to return to familiar patterns, and invention as the desire to escape from habit through new variations, characterizes symbolic production no less than the technological kind. It is the basis of the complementarity between linearity and cyclicality. The individual is protected by society against too many variations by a complex and subtle structure of routine and habits. But many examples can all too easily be cited, beginning with the tourbillon social of the industrial revolution, in which this tension gets out of balance and turns into extremes. And what about the decision to throw things away, to eliminate them from circulation? Throwing away always also comprises a change of values, since something that was once valuable is thereby degraded. Earlier societies partly developed elaborate rituals in order to preserve things. The burial objects and funeral cults of many cultures in prehistoric times bear witness to this. Today many things are thrown away, of course, but others are under preservation orders: objects of daily use, animals and knowledge suddenly acquire the value of antiques because they belong to a culture which is in the process of disappearing. At the end of a cycle there is thus not necessarily a void: there are symbolic and real possibilities of storing in the collective memory at least a part of the population'threatened with destruction, or giving it a place in the museums, like the burial objects which were supposed to accompany the dead on their way in the other world.

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From the Future to the Extended Present

The fascinating recurrence of the cyclical, and the investigations which aim systematically to bring to light the ‘internal clock' in the succession of technological artefacts, of ideas or of art objects, and to specify the proper time of populations and systems – all of these do not exempt a society from facing up to the question of the orchestration of these cycles. On the contrary. The problem of waste makes it all too obvious that in every society the relative speeds at which innovation, repetition and obliteration, i.e. destruction, occur have to be counterbalanced against one another. It is not just a question of making relative weightings. With the abolition of the category of the open future, which predominated in the machine age under the notion of the linearity of time, all three processes crowd into the extended present. The denser the rate of innovation in the present, the more waste in the material and metaphorical sense is to be expected, and the more problems with waste disposal will have to be solved – likewise in the present. With the rediscovery of the cyclical and the extension of the present, attempts at a social solution have been set in motion to produce mechanisms in time for a new balance between the processes of invention, repetition and throwing away. Inventions, that is technological innovations, are desirable precisely in their unpredictability, but their positive and negative repercussions have to be recognized and controlled as early as possible. In temporal terms, the capacity for prognostication of this early recognition is compressed into a period of technological genesis in which the possibilities already reveal themselves, but can still be worked on and shaped: the time of becoming in the extended present. The problems of waste press for early recognition and prevention, for pre-emption before waste becomes such. But can waste be recognized and disposed of right at the beginning of a curve of innovation? Innovation has to be translated from uncontrolled technological and social growth into planned and rationalized reform. The problem of waste is even harder to handle if it has to be solved at the very beginning of the process of innovation by techniques of avoidance or disposal. From a certain order of magnitude on, the cost of waste disposal can no longer be externalized. More order and control, more management of processes, are on the agenda here too, where everything presses for early recognition, prevention and pre-emption. But what selectivity is required here, and who determines the criteria to be employed? And who will guarantee that with the weeds inherent in the uncontrolled growth the roots of creativity are not removed as well?

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In the machine age, the notion of the linearity of time prevailed because time, following the laws of economics, was equated with money for the first time and thus made into a scarce resource. Time = money was at work in the motions of the machines, and these produced incessantly towards an open horizon of the future. In the nineteenth century, science, technology and industry had become an empirically redeemable substratum for the idea of progress. The general empirical theorem of scientific and technological inventions was that they promised further progress without being able to calculate it exactly in advance. Indeed, it was precisely the fact that future progress could not be experienced which was empirically verified, as it were; its calculable unknownness secured the conclusiveness of its actual occurrence.32

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Today, however, the urgent desire prevails to recognize the consequent effects as early as possible even in the extended present, in order to steer them into desired or undesired channels. So much that is new has been and is being produced that the old is becoming too much. Hence the pressure for limitation is growing. Finiteness is entering into the conceptions of time. But it is not enough, following linear thinking, to remain confined to quantities or to labour under the illusion that the answer is to produce less. Cyclicality seeks to provide a remedy here. It offers a point of view in which the necessity is taken into account, theoretically at least, of making the processes of innovation predictable as early as possible, in order to learn to control the prerequisites for one's own surprises. The present is thereby extended further. But transforming the moment of becoming into the decisive point of selection holds dangers which result from the inadequacy of the instruments of diagnosis and prognosis, and from the multiplicity, still good for surprises, which results from the possibility of human behaviour. Creativity has many forms of expression, errors must remain tolerable and systems amenable to error. The other option attempts to come to terms with the end, to risk the evolutionary leap, and to find solutions for the problem of waste and obsolescence which are suited to a scientific and technological culture. Here, too, the quantitatively linear point of view is not sufficient which seeks merely to preserve, for how much and what can be crammed into museums, classified as a historical monument, artificially stored in reserves? Hence it is a question of the conversion of energy, matter and knowledge. It is a question of the revaluation and transformation of waste, of technological procedures for this as well as institutional economic incentives and a changed social awareness. The cyclical conception of time offers the model of flowing back into the cyclical process, of recycling. Time is so construed here that it is the finiteness of a variety of cycles, which mutually influence one another in their features and can be influenced by human behaviour. At the end, after decay or completion, something new can begin. But the new is no longer as light-heartedly new as the belief in progress once promised. It is new material into which old material flows, not as a past continuing to have a linear effect, as the lead weight of a tradition, but as recycled proper time of a cycle of innovation. Only thus can new social forms of existence emerge from the proliferation of multiple times: in the extended present instead of in the future.

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From the Future to the Extended Present

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

Every finite knowledge .. . encounters the same boundary in the case of dynamically chaotic systems: after a period of evolution, which results from the intrinsic dynamics of the system, the concept of individual development loses its meaning; what remains is solely the statistical calculation of the probabilities of evolution.

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Entre le Temps et l'Eternité

When the sociologists of science were preparing to go into the laboratories in order to observe scientists at work directly on the spot, other questions were to the fore than those under discussion here. Like anthropologists who seek out an unknown tribe to get themselves initiated into its mysterious customs, in order thus to learn to understand exotic symbolic constructs, they first wanted to check the meaning of the conventional distinction between 'scientific'knowledge and the 'non-scientific'kind. Even if the great ‘epistemological break' in Gaston Bachelard's sense, which distinguishes the savage thought of humanity from that distorted by science and separates amateurs from experts, was not totally to be denied, it was at least to be relativized. What, apart from the door to the laboratory, separates the world of science from society? It was undeniable that the muttering of incantations by the local sorcerer on the Ivory Coast, or his meticulous inspection of a dead person, differed in their effect from the treatment of a cancer patient with laser therapy or the investigation of a gene with the aid of a DNA probe in a Californian laboratory. The sciences operate with a far greater degree of efficiency than the sum total of everything which the practice of magic and socio-religious empathy ever had to offer before. But what is the cause of this enormous difference in effect? What was so enticing about the laboratory was to trace the inroads made by society into this sphere. Through the investigation of social practices, of the social influence on the generative process of knowledge, one intended to gain insights in order better to understand how science attains its effectiveness and how 'natural reality', which does not belong to the social order, is nevertheless constituted by the social generative process.

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In the course of these observational inquiries and expeditions of discovery into the territory of the laboratory, previously entered only by scientific 'natives'and which is devoted to the generation of scientific knowledge, what presented itself to observation was pre-eminently that which was visible: the activities of the scientists, their technical practice in handling apparatus, in measuring and checking natural processes which – invisible to begin with – are made visible only by the processes of measurement. The sociologists of science further encountered what was entered and written down. Notes and diagrams of all kinds, photographs and pictures which are produced with the aid of information technologies.

These notes give insights both into the deep structure and into the surface composition of the phenomena investigated: they reproduce what had been entered' by means of the process of measurement into the apparatus constructed for this purpose. But the 'signs'thus registered have to be read and interpreted. The discussion between scientists serves this purpose, their 'negotiation' conducted together, which finally leads to a process of 'manufacture of facts': through the transcription of what has been ascertained and mediated so far, the scientific text emerges which, with the publication aspired to in a scientific journal, is turned at last into what, though discussible and criticizable, is still a fact'.1

Such a schematic course of the process of scientific work in the laboratory, as observed and interpreted by sociologists of science, is based on a spatial model which has also been explicitly elaborated by Bruno Latour, one of the most famous spokesmen of this approach.² According to him, the success of the natural sciences, in comparison with other methods of creating knowledge, is based on the fact that they manage to make a portion of natural phenomena'mobile', to extract them from the natural locality where they are found, and to transport them to the laboratory. What science creates in this process is mobile, transportable nature. Sometimes things and phenomena change their form, their substance or other properties during this process. Distortions can arise which ought to be corrected again if possible. For what is desired is indeed mobile nature, which nevertheless is to be preserved unchanged in its nature. Nature made mobile is to be brought into the laboratory as invariantly as possible. For only there are its motions committed to paper. The answers given by nature to the experimental conditions can be recorded as traces or images. Photographs fix series of movements, and much that is large in nature can be reduced in the laboratory to the scale of human perception: by means of the central process of miniaturization, it is increasingly possible to fetch more phenomena into the laboratory. This development signals a general trend according to which all the sciences are developing into 'laboratory science': with the aid of computer-based imaging technologies or space telescopes, they are even able, as in the case of astronomy, to become independent of observation in the field to a certain extent.³

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There are two working measures which, in the opinion of sociologists of science, cause the success of the natural sciences: on the one hand, along these lines more and more of nature made mobile is being brought into the laboratory, and on the other, accompanying this, there is a growing ability to increase the information value which nature provides under laboratory conditions by means of appropriate questions and processing methods. What is spatial' about this process is first the transport and the transfer of a portion of nature to the laboratory. Just as the explorers used to return with their captured specimens or at least with drawings and detailed descriptions of the wonderful things they had seen during their investigations, so today nature is brought into the laboratory with the aid of remote-controlled viewing and collecting instruments. The acceleration potential inherent in this process essentially results from the organization of work: transportation occurs more and more, and more and more quickly. But there is also a temporal dimension to this process. The capacity for acceleration of the process of generating knowledge also stems from the fact that the natural phenomena gathered in form a cultural relation with the researchers, and that they receive a share of their temporality, of the social time of the laboratory. Through the illustration and digitalization which accompany their transportation, the objects of investigation are brought into the procedural context of the laboratory, where they are kept continuously present:

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The integration and new constitution of objects of investigation in the interactional environment of the laboratory is, incidentally, connected with an increase in the possibilities of articulation. Interactional environments are temporally structured environments capable of acceleration, which are specified by the sequence of the changes in articulation of the participants.⁴

Because today, scattered over the whole world, researchers are linked up with observational and measurement data which are obtained from space, for instance by means of electronic transmission, then circulated and exchanged, it becomes possible to work simultaneously on a common 'knowledge front'.

It is an open question whether this extreme form of simultaneity built into the division of labour is a peculiarity of astronomy, for even Kepler offered Fabricius the use of his observational data in 1608 with the laconic question‘what if we cannot all do everything?'⁵ The builtin mechanism of competition also undoubtedly contributes to the acceleration of the generation of knowledge. But the really remarkable thing which results from the observations of the scientific laboratory is not so much the integration of the objects of investigation brought to the laboratory into the social temporality of the researchers, and into a work organization which strives for a division of labour with an approximative simultaneity, for in this respect the scientific research process resembles other industrial methods of production. The remarkable thing is rather not just that a separate space has arisen in the laboratory, linked by means of miniaturization and other techniques with distant, larger or smaller spaces in nature, but that a separate time-structure is created in the laboratory. Because it is possible to keep the objects of investigation continuously present in the procedural context of the laboratory, the temporal conditions of experimentation and possibilities of control over them are considerably extended. If the time-structures of an object become manipulable by experiment, its capacity for articulation increases. In the artificially producible present, other timescales become observable, sequences repeatable, processes possible to accelerate or slow down. In the laboratory, science creates its own time, which is not to be equated with the cultural forms of interaction'or the 'local temporality' of the researchers themselves. The laboratory time created for the investigation and interpretation of phenomena rather itself becomes a scientific and cultural construct, which begins to react upon the temporality of society at the latest when the objects of investigation, in however changed a form, leave the laboratory and continue to have an effect as artefacts in society. Laboratory time then brings its own need for time with it. This is directed, as in the laboratory itself, towards constant availability, accessibility and continuous presence.

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