Time The Modern and Postmodern Experience

90

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

The analysis of innovatory activity has remained a hotly disputed subject. The heroic figure of the individual entrepreneur, who was the deus ex machina for Schumpeter, has given way to a more sophisticated viewpoint of complex, increasingly intertwined events, in which a technology based on scientific findings (sciencebased technology) and a mechanized science on the one hand, and the market on the other, operate in mutually reinforcing interaction. Even though individual technological or scientific ‘breakthroughs' can be repeatedly identified, it has long since become clear that appropriate institutional, research-organizational and economic and financial prerequisites are needed in order to be able to hasten benefits from the point of view of the market. Instead of individual invention and its career, it is the dynamics of innovatory development, represented in the temporal trajectories of entire systems of technology, with the probabilities of their implementation, which shape the phenomenon of innovation' in terms both of science and technology and of social organization.1⁶

The temporal peculiarity of innovations is still the fact that they are embedded in the competitive time of the market. Innovations which reach the market have entered the competitive field of economic forces from that moment on, and it is obvious how this force field increasingly is shifting into the offshore area of innovation-creating research. From a macroscopic viewpoint, the contest to oust one another then begins, the struggle for the niches, whether of already existing and occupied markets or of those still to be created, which are intended to react to needs freshly to be aroused. Considered from a closer viewpoint, it turns out that Schumpeter's distinction between entrepreneurs as innovators and their ‘mere imitators' has become completely blurred. Particularly in high-tech fields, the buyers of technological innovations are themselves highly discriminating customers, who for their part can have a lasting influence on the innovative product through their specific demand. But they are also subject, as ultimately are all consumers – to the pressure of competition. Acquiring a consumer item which has just come on the market at a point in time before others do has become a sign of distinction in the context of mass consumption, where the period of time that has elapsed in the acquisition of goods determines the status of consumers.17 The small temporal difference expresses social distinctions, while big economic competition finds expression in the international temporal advantage in the business of scientific and technological innovation.

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

91

Acceleration in and through the machine, benefits and profit through innovative temporal advantages in the market, and temporal availability through the dissemination of 'laboratory time'in everyday life by means of technological objects and artefacts, have become the characteristic features of the dynamics of innovation. For more and more of the work of scientific discovery which takes place in the laboratory leaves its mark on the technological objects and processes which then come on to the market and enter the area of industrial production and the everyday environment. More and more technological objects have something of 'laboratory time'about them. It is characterized by the continuous presence of objects and their constant temporal availability. They are at hand round the clock and their temporal processes can be checked, programmed, and articulated almost at will.

92

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

Under laboratory conditions, it is possible to accelerate things and slow them down; unique temporal events are possible as well as varied repetitions. Gradually, such temporal processes are also being introduced into society. Laboratory time is leaving its mark on the 'normal world'. Technological artefacts offer availability, but also demand availability of the human beings who operate them or at whose disposal they are supposed to be. The process of interdependence between machines and human beings is beginning to build up again.

In comparison with the living labour of animals or of human beings, every machine offers temporal availability which far exceeds that of the organic sphere. Technologies and technological artefacts are created by human beings and geared to particular ends. As a prerequisite and consequence of their being socially embedded, particular forms of organization of work are necessary or result from this, as well as particular knowledge, abilities, attitudes and behaviour in human beings who work on them or use them in everyday life. There is, as the sociology of industry and technology well knows, broad scope for the social shaping of technologies. These can be culturally determined, or can be shaped in economic and political terms. Of the built-in ‘social constructions', of aims and normative ideas, habits and requirements which leave their mark on artefacts and which, particularly in feedback with the social organization in which they are used, reveal a complex behaviour pattern, the built-in dimension of time is surely one of the most fundamental dimensions. Technological artefacts are standardized, but they also standardize human and social behaviour. This standardization has long since included the area of private life beyond the workplace, and the distance which is to be covered between these two poles of individual and collective existence in industrialized countries.

At the same time, an almost symbiotic, complementary relationship is to be observed between social discipline, the rules and norms needed for maintaining it, and the standardizations which are already built into technologies. Here, too, the long-term societal development increasingly passes from a regulation which to begin with is attained externally by outside constraint, to the internalization of time discipline and to the imposition of selfdiscipline.18 But this process of development occurs by including technological artefacts, which dictate temporal norms. These serve, on the one hand, to maintain and stabilize the time discipline introduced, but also lead to internalized feats of adaptation by including extra-somatic technologies. No society has done without the measurement of time and technologies, however rudimentary their structure, in the form of tools with which the structuring of space, time and social organization occurred.19But in pre-industrial societies, when not yet all time was the 'time of economics', it was neither necessary nor possible to keep people available for technological artefacts. People had to be available for the times of God' and for work. The rule of Saint Benedict, to which the first 'metronomic social system' in Europe is indebted,20 provided for eight prayers which were distributed over the day and night and were preluded by peals of mechanical bells – a relatively externally controlled time discipline of punctuality and regularity, in other words, which moreover was valid only for a minority elite. Regularity which oriented itself by the mechanics of the even rhythm of machines also determined the time discipline which regulated the life of the bourgeoisie in the period of industrialization: a kind of social mechanics developed, which dictated the daily routine. ‘The new bourgeoisie,'wrote Lewis Mumford, meals: from this period on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock. Waste of time became . . . one of the most heinous sins.21

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

93

94

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business: so long for dinner: so long for pleasure – all carefully measured out, as methodical as the sexual intercourse of Tristram Shandy's father, which coincided, symbolically, with the monthly winding of the clock. Timed payments: timed contracts: timed work: timed

In contrast to the bourgeoisie, for whom the wasting of time was of course detestable, but was still an open option, the subjection to the time discipline of the machine was inconceivably harsh for the workforce.

The machine offered a previously unknown availability for purposes of industrial production and for the accumulation of profit, but equally demanded a previously unrequired adaptation of the workers, who had no choice. As a living appendage of the machine, they were tied to it, initially without socio-political protective measures; indeed even the originally planned breaks were rigorously suppressed. Increases in productivity, which become constant towards the end of the nineteenth century, essentially resulted from an improvement of technologies and of the organization of the whole production process, but also from an improved tuning of the behaviour of human beings to the rhythms of the machine. Only gradually, and always in a manner charged with conflict, were the temporal norms of working-time regulations established in a precarious balancing act between the internalization of the work habit and the external necessity of social existence in an industrial society.

Today, the social norms which refer to the time discipline of human beings are largely internalized and are developing in dynamic interdependence with the temporal norms built into technological artefacts. Acceleration, in its continuing social transformation, does not just mean an increase of speed in all social processes. It presupposes a temporal norm of generally increased mobility, which is at the same time the result of technologically and economically established processes of the conveyance of goods, people, energy and information, which have to overcome spatial and temporal distances. Thus mobility does not remain confined to a technological specific, which can be optimized, i.e. realized in technological and economic terms. Instead, mobility is elevated to a socially dominant temporal norm, an assumed and striven-for social condition which is presupposed and hence expected, but is also to be regarded as the result of previous acceleration. Goods, people, energy, money and information are to change their position with increasing frequency, in order – in a comprehensive economic and cultural sense - to circulate. Being mobile has, in its social valency, assumed the meaning of mental and physical fitness for many people. The willingness for professional mobility is regarded as a prerequisite for remaining in the labour market and, skilfully handled, as a prerequisite for advancement in a successful career.

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

95

Social advancement is equated with social mobility, even though, strictly speaking, social decline is an equally probable form of mobility. International competition flourishes against a background of mobility, an immensely accelerated circulation of everything that is mobile or can be made mobile. Innovations and their dissemination promote mobility in the area of cultural production; it is not enough to innovate, since innovations have to be disseminated and this presupposes mobility. As always, when norms and social values are involved, an ideological distortion to maintain existing imbalances in power or to disguise the latter is never far away. In striking contrast to the expectations of mobility, for instance, which are entertained of the average employee, there are the key areas of political and economic power, which show astonishingly little mobility. Where, as in banking for instance, trust and familiarity with practices and discretion are presupposed, mobility is desired only in one's own closed sphere.

Another dominant temporal norm which was built into production technologies through its relation to economics and nevertheless became a generalized norm, indeed a social status symbol, is the shortage of time. This results from the economic value it was given with capitalist accumulation and industrialization. Time was discovered as a factor of productivity, and the economy is fundamentally shaped to this day by questions of the economy of time. Shortage of time became a central value in industrialized societies – far beyond the area of production in all areas of life. Making more of the time which is available and in short supply is the supreme principle for technological artefacts as well as for human activities. Rationalization measures, the invention of the conveyor belt, the notorious time and motion studies and other Taylorist prescriptions for identifying wastes of energy and then eliminating them, are only the most famous examples of the allembracing temporal norm of shortage, which people and machines have to face and which is internalized in both - in people by the rules which became a matter of course for them and which manifest themselves in their being 'pressed for time', and in machines which can ‘survive' economically only when they are able to come to terms with the shortage of time.

96

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

If the machine age is approaching its end today, or to put it a better way, if machines and technological artefacts have changed so much that they also contain other temporal norms than those which were fed into the old production technologies, then the newly added temporal norm is that of flexibility. It finds its technological equivalent in the temporal availability that information-intensive technologies have made possible, but also presuppose. Information-intensive technologies have attained a new quality of speed, which far exceeds that of human perception and the human ability to keep up. The moment it has become technologically possible to carry out operations and processes in 'nearly no time', the additional gain in time becomes of marginal use. Through informationintensive technologies, another law of the machine age is also abolished, according to which worker and machine, producer and consumer, transmitter and receiver had to be simultaneously present. With the aid of new techniques of preservation and processing as well as storage, it has become possible largely to uncouple the acts of production and consumption not just in terms of place, but also in terms of time. Video recorders and stereo systems aid the consumption of cultural products independently of the moment of production, just as the techniques of preserving food have long since made it possible to eat fruits out of season. In the meantime, biotechnology is preparing the next preservation technique of temporal uncoupling: that which refers to the production and the use of living cells.

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

97

Temporal uncoupling, which extends from the older technologies of preservation in the case of food, via large areas of the production and consumption of services and cultural products with the aid of techniques of storing and processing information, to the biotechnological processes of the uncoupling of living organisms, helps the temporal norm of flexibility to attain a new, powerfully enlarged area of influence. As with other temporal norms, it is to be expected that it will also be culturally and socially diffused beyond the original area of production. Temporal flexibility, as well as the decentralization within the area of production which often goes along with it, will realize neither the utopian hopes nor wholly the fears, however, which are connected with the introduction of new technologies and a changed organization of work.

Every local decentralization presupposes a renewed form of centralization at a higher level. Every temporal flexibilization requires, with increasing complexity, new mechanisms in order to hold the seemingly loosening temporal connections together. Flexibility becomes possible against the background of a previously unattained degree of constant temporal availability, as the prerequisite and consequence of which it functions. Only the availability of people and their substitutes, technological artefacts, opens up the testing of new temporal patterns of uncoupling and coupling that can be optimized, which need the temporal norm of flexibility to legitimize them.

98

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

The extension of the temporal availability of technologies and human beings has already assumed visible and measurable proportions. Murray Melbin speaks of the colonialization of the night' and means by this the increase in nocturnal activities in American cities: New York does not sleep and neither does Boston, as can be seen from the frequency of crime, the number of admissions in the hospitals at night, but also the number of people who go to 24-hour supermarkets, bowling alleys and repair shops of all kinds. Many factories, but also post offices, newspaper editorial offices, hotels and hospitals work in three shifts; service industries like the fire brigade, key cutting service, places where one can get new nappies or insecticides, TV repair services and burial places, are on call day and night.22 But the economic pressure of availability is also growing on the machines installed in the factories. If only because of the capital investment they contain, they have to run continuously, which leads to a distinct rise in shift-work. In the case of automated plants, the problem no longer arises, since they hardly require workers any more. Availability is automatically guaranteed.

What are above all ready on call' and continuously at hand are the electronic communication technologies, which have moved into offices and households. With the emergence of 'laboratory time'from the laboratory, now embodied in these technological artefacts, the patterns of temporal perception change once again. Other social structurings of time are needed in order to adapt to the demand for continuous attainability and to be able to use it.

Only gradually do temporal protective zones develop, so-called core times', in which presence or absence is demanded. Other technologies take on as substitutes the work of ‘answering' and cause machines to speak with machines. But people will not be able to absent themselves as easily as the euphoric supporters of information technologies think. On the contrary. Other demands are made on their temporal availability; they have to react to the time-structures made possible in the new technologies by laboratory time, and structure them. New, collective and individual time-strategies in dealing with the new machine time, laboratory time, have to be developed. Technology is no longer to be found merely at work, no longer merely in the infrastructures like transport and energy systems, but everywhere, even in one's own house or, as with the mobile personal telephone, on one's own body. In the case of strategies for dealing with this, to be negotiated collectively, individual time-preferences therefore play a far greater role than was previously the case. But every timestrategy, however individually determined, bears within it the stamp of social time, for nobody can free himself or herself of the temporal patterns which connect him or her with others. The ‘flexibilization' is a relative one. Here, too, time proves to be structure and structuring, and social time keeps on flowing through individual existence. The two following chapters are devoted to these themes.

Cronos's Fear of the New Age

99