Time

The Modern and Postmodern Experience

Helga Nowotny, Neville Plaice

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745618371, 9780745608921
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Helga Nowotny's exploration of the forms and meaning of time in contemporary life is panoramic without in any way partaking of the blandness of a survey. From the artificial time of the scientific laboratory to the distinctively modern yearning for one's own time, she regards every topic in this wide-ranging book from a fresh angle of vision, one which reveals unsuspected affinities between the bravest, newest worlds of global technology and the most ancient worlds of myth."
--Lorraine Daston, University of Chicago

This book represents a major contribution to the understanding of time, giving particular attention to time in relation to modernity. The development of industrialism, the author points out, was based upon a linear and abstract conception of time. Today we see that form of production, and the social institutions associated with it, supplanted by flexible specialization and just-in-time production systems. New information and communication technologies have made a fundamental impact here. But what does all this mean for temporal regimes? How can we understand the transformation of time and space involved in the bewildering variety of options on offer in a postmodern world?

The author provides an incisive analysis of the temporal implications of modern communication. She considers the implications of worldwide simultaneous experience, made possible by satellite technologies, and considers the reorganization of time involved in the continuous technological innovation that marks our era. In this puzzling universe of action, how does one achieve a 'time of one's own'? The discovery of a specific time perspective centred in the individual, she shows, expresses a yearning for forms of experience that are subversive of established institutional patterns.

This brilliant study, became a classic in Germany, will be of interest to students and professionals working in the areas of social theory, sociology, politics and anthropology.

1

The Illusion of Simultaneity

Except for light switches nothing worked by pushing a button. The phonograph had to be wound, a lot of the cars had to be cranked, coffee was ground by cranking, too, and the hand still had uses beyond separating pieces of paper money and pointing.

Arthur Miller, Timebends

At the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century, something began to stir in Europe. ‘Eight hundred years ago’, writes Adolf Holl, ‘people in some European cities began to feel a strange and previously unheard-of desire. They wanted to know the time.’¹ God’s time, as the French historian LeGoff put it, gave way to the time of the traders. What was dawning was a premonition of a future which would prove to be open to the human creative capacity. A future which involved risks, for only someone prepared to risk his or her assets again and again for the sake of an opportunity was able to head for this horizon. With the eighteenth century, the horizon of the future became dynamic. The idea of progress entered the history of the human race and temporalized it. Today the tension between present experience that does not value what is past and an expectation oriented towards what is, in tendency, endless improvement has largely collapsed. The belief in progress in the last two hundred years has been severely shaken. But the need for time, which the natural sciences first declared with the Enlightenment when they included in their programme the achievement of what is new, and hence, according to Hans Blumenberg, opened up the ‘divide between lifetime and world time’, has continued to grow.

What has also increased, however, is precision in the measurement of time, which can be conducted with the aid of caesium atomic clocks. Time has become a unit of measurement per se, to which other fundamental measurements, above all the measurement of length, are reduced. For some time now, it has been specified as the unit of time which light covers within a certain time. The human brain perceives space via time differences established by the nervous system. The accuracy of gauges in physics makes it possible to detect variations and small irregularities where one previously saw constants. Thus we know today that the period of the earth’s rotation, which before 1967 served as a basis for the measurement of time, varies slightly between summer and winter, and from year to year. These variations are partly regular, partly unpredictable. World time is established by an international clock authority, the Bureau International de l’Heure in Paris, on the basis of the readings which come from the largest measuring laboratories in the world. At intervals of about one and a half years, so-called leap seconds are inserted into the coordinated universal time, of the UTC, to prevent deviations of more than 0.7 seconds from navigational time from arising.² The range of the measurement of time within physics contains periods which extend from 10–15 thousand million years (the time light requires to reach the earth from the remotest still observable galaxy, which indicates the age of the known universe as well) to 10⁻¹⁵ seconds (e.g. for phenomena in the atomic sphere). But phenomena are also investigated which require even less time, for instance the duration of elemental processes which can be imagined down to 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds (Planck’s scale).

Everyday life in society has a different look to that in physics. In social life, time-scales are used which are suitable to human behaviour and human perception. They range from the mythical times of the ‘once upon a time’ to the immediately perceptible present, and can accordingly be indicated in tens of thousands of years or in split seconds. Infinitely long or infinitesimally short periods are experienced as larger or smaller in relation to the human perceptive faculty. But in social existence as well, the precision of the measurement of time has been refined and the temporal range extended. It is not just that past and future have been extended in the footsteps of the periods of time opened up by the measurements of physics – a spatial extension of a standardized time, gradually encompassing the earth, has also taken place. A lot of things have contributed to this: the processes of increasing economic and political integration and the technological possibilities which provide the transport of goods, people and information more quickly and on a broader basis, but also a gradual alignment of ways of life which began with the industrial mode of production. The insistence on a standardization of time in social life manifests itself in the approach towards a world-wide simultaneity, the perception of events and of processes which occur at the same time in different corners of the earth. Today people again feel a peculiar and hitherto unheard-of desire: they want to have more time for themselves.

What leads people to declare their pressing need for time so categorically, especially in this pronounced first person form? After all, they have got their time-saving machines which make their lives easier and relieve them of tedious or heavy manual work. Means of transport are always available to take them at great speed to almost all corners of the earth. Today many more things work by pushing a button than just the light switches. Modern communication technologies attain speeds which can no longer be directly perceived by human sense organs. But through integration into world-wide simultaneity there grows the need to distinguish one’s ‘own’ time from that which connects people with others; there grows the desire to be able to control the interlocking to some extent oneself, to gain ‘temporal sovereignty’ over one’s local time, which is now visibly and noticeably integrated into world time. It is not so much the very long and the very short time, the time of history, of the ‘longue durée’ and the specious present, of the perception of the flow of time in split seconds, which seek contact and resolution in a juxtaposition charged with tension, but one’s own, subjective local time that sees itself confronted with a public world time which – spatially extended over the entire earth – professes to be simultaneous.

The discovery of the simultaneity installed almost everywhere today, which can transport, exchange and generate world news and stock market prices, financial transactions and television pictures via satellite transmission, first made itself felt, in spectacular fashion, at the turn of the century. As the American cultural historian Stephen Kern has shown in detail, the period between 1880 and 1918 laid the foundations for the drastic changes people experienced in the sense of space and time. It was as if the technological, artistic and scientific achievements of this epoch converged to break down the well-rehearsed spatial and temporal structures of social perception and transform them into a broad experimental field, in which new ways of seeing, different spatial forms and, not least, new, more democratic, social and political relations were to be tested and rehearsed. Spatial distances which had been insurmountable up till then were erased by the invention and regular technological improvements of the telegraph, the radio and the telephone. Through the electrification of the cities, the difference between day and night could be artificially negated for the first time. The cinematograph succeeded not just in making pictures move but in slowing down or speeding up the captured movements at will, indeed even in winding them backwards and thus creating totally new ways of seeing. It is not surprising that it was above all the artists and writers who got swept up in these changes and who attempted to give voice and expression, sound and form to the new sense of space and time. The classical narrative mode of the novel or the conventional stanzas of lyric poetry were rejected, and replaced by revolutionary innovations. The changed sense of time seized hold of music and led to the creation of atonalities never heard before, which were based on the twelve-tone scale. In the plastic and graphic arts and in painting, forms were sought which made it possible to portray several perspectives at the same time; form and colour were to be capable of reproducing the changes from moment to moment. Without any historical exaggeration, it can be said that the remarkable artistic creativity of that period, whose ‘intoxication with space and time’ was to last far into the inter-war period, drew more or less consciously on the ruins of a declining social system, in which it was no longer true, as formerly, that everything had ‘its time and place’. It was rather a question of defining time and place anew, for the greatest possible – and for the first time also democratic – variety of perspectives and points of view, of positions and subjective experiences.³

In a different way, space and time – and the perception of them – also moved into the centre of scientific study. In physics, Newton’s idea of an absolute space and an absolute time was written off virtually in passing.⁴ In thermodynamics, with the thermal death of the universe the temporal vector was stringently formulated for the first time. In 1905, Einstein calculated within the framework of the Special Theory of Relativity how time appears slowed down in a system moving away at constant speed. With the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, he extended the theory to accelerated bodies. Since all matter in the universe produces a gravitational field, and since gravity is equally acceleration, every body has its own time. In a later popularization of his theory, Einstein compares the old mechanics, which only recognized a single clock, with his theory, according to which ‘we can imagine as many clocks as we want.’⁵ With quantum mechanics, that subjectivist element was introduced into physics which led to the abandonment of a realist description. But does not this subjectivist element, the role which was ascribed to the observer, stem from the fact that the vector of time did not really find its way into the theoretical structure of quantum mechanics, but was merely appended to it, with the aid of the concept of the observer?⁶

Within psychology and the areas of philosophy overlapping with it, questions about the relationship between the subjective perception of time and objective measurability, and the tension between ‘internal’, experienced time and ‘external’, given time, were likewise a central preoccupation. Since the 1880s, psychologists had been in search of the duration of the present. The intention was to measure the interval in which time could be perceived by the individual as a continuous whole. But what was this present? Was not that which appears concurrently a succession in the seeing of the object? Was not time more comparable to a flow than to a sum of discrete units? In William James’s famous formulation of 1890, the present is ‘a stream of thought, of consciousness’ and not a ‘bucket of water’. The ‘specious present’ of which James speaks was not comparable with a knife-edge, but was more like a ‘saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time’.⁷ It was more than just a fleeting moment, since it proved dense enough to make it possible to perceive more than just one event, to hear more than just one melody. Past events or perceptions could end, but they remained, as in Husserl, present as ‘retentions’. For James Joyce, the condensed present was the only real place in which it was possible to have experiences. Because he gives interior monologues to the hero of his novel Leopold Bloom and his contemporary companions in ‘time’, who inhabit with him the universe of the streets and pubs of Dublin, and compresses all experiences into those famous sixteen hours on 16 June 1904, the experience of simultaneity is both relativized and objectivized. The question as to whether public time, measurable, objective time, was part of inner awareness or not had found its artistic answer. Even the body can measure time, wrote an enthusiastic critic about Proust’s masterpiece. And the two French anthropologists Hubert and Mauss, disciples of Durkheim, gave the following answer:

The interplay of concepts which psychological reality forms from successive images consists in the matching of two sets of ideas. One is constant and periodical – it is that of the calendar … the other continually constructs itself through the act of producing new ideas. The mind is constantly endeavouring to bring together certain elements of these two sets in a single tension.⁸

What preoccupied people at that time, and what scientists and artists had taken up, was the question as to how real their own experience of time was. The more they realized that their own temporal and spatial categories, from a subjective point of view at least, were legitimate, and that there was obviously a public time of the calendar and a private time of their feelings and their body, the more urgent it became to clarify the relationship of these two kinds of time to one another. What sparked the discovery of simultaneity, which presupposed a world organized into time-zones, and which became subjectively comprehensible through communication technologies, was the confrontation between a now standardized public time and the variety of private, subjective times. The discovery became dramatically comprehensible through events like the sinking of the Titanic, whose SOS calls were heard by numerous ships within a radius of a hundred nautical miles. The next morning people in capital cities on both sides of the Atlantic could read about the dramatic events at the breakfast table in their newspapers.

The emergence of simultaneity – in contrast to its discovery – had been prepared in longer-term processes. It is first connected with the spatial extension of state control, then with the economic one of the market, and finally with that of technologies. European expansion, indeed expansion in general, first took place over territory. The colonial powers occupied foreign countries, took territorial possession of them. The nation-states within Europe arose in spatially delimited territories, within which they exercised a monopoly on the use of force and the raising of taxes.

Along with spatial control, the temporal kind is also established, but it still completely follows the imperatives of the organizational needs of the central powers: the temporal control of the bureaucracies, which is based on the punctuality that was necessary for maintaining discipline in the army, at school, and later in the factories. The process of diffusion of temporal control breaks away from the static system of time of the big bureaucracies only with the economic boom of capitalism and its expansion. Temporal control is symbolized by the idea of progress, of economic boom. The gap between the capital city and the village which still has no asphalt road or is not yet connected to the national grid is a temporal-economic one. Economic dynamics causes new centres to arise which are ahead of their times, and peripheries which are backward, wherever they may be geographically located. The primary distributive mechanism of this temporal control becomes the market. Calculated to surmount spatial limits, it seems to negate time in the act of buying and yet profits from the small temporal difference, from the advantages over competitors which a few hours, days or months bring in buying or selling. They are what decide on profit and loss. Extending and using these temporal advantages, applying them to many transactions, also became possible spatially over the entire world with the aid of communication technologies. It was not by chance that the first telephones were installed in order to be able to transmit the stock market prices more quickly; the ceremonial opening of the first lines was left to the head of state simply as an act of political courtesy. How extensively the market and technology pervade one another was strikingly expressed by those photographic images sent round the world by the media on the occasion of the stock market crash in autumn 1987. They showed almost identically dressed stockbrokers, holding at least three telephones to their ears, who were trying to save what could be saved in New York and Tokyo. Through the networking of computers, in which contingent conditions of purchase and sale were programmed, the standardization of time had reached a new, provisional peak.

Officially, it began unspectacularly and almost, disregarding the consequences, trivially. In 1884 one of the then numerous international conferences was held which were striving for a standardization of norms, weights and measures.⁹ Out of practical, commercial and political necessity, states were pressing for international agreements which were intended to introduce more clarity, convertibility and rationality into the confusing variety of local, regional and national standards. No bold utopias inspired the advocates of standardization, but the sober calculations of engineers, industrialists, civil servants and army officers. At the international meridian conference, the object was to divide the world into twenty-four time-zones each with an hour’s difference and to draw an obligatory international date line. A decision had to be taken about where ‘east’ and where ‘west’ was, since it followed from this which places in the world would be chronologically ‘ahead of’ or ‘behind’ other places. Such a decision was arbitrary, of course, but temporal coordination at an international level could only result if there was a temporal dividing line which met with international assent. Since then, the 180th meridian at the same distance east and west of Greenwich has been regarded as the international date line. Crossing it eastwards, travellers gain a day, while in the opposite direction they lose a day. If it is Tuesday evening in Tokyo, it is Tuesday morning in New York and not Wednesday morning, for instance. Since then, New York has been all of fourteen hours ‘behind’ Tokyo and not ten hours ‘ahead’. The standardization of world time had direct technological and also military benefits. Unlike in the Middle Ages, when it was still customary to be woken for battle by cocks which had been brought along, the machinery of war now also required a coordination which was as accurate as possible. Equally, world time was the condition for the coordination of the many local systems of time with one another, for establishing timetables without which the spatial extension and concentration of the transport network would have been inconceivable.

Historians of technology have described in detail how the first modern technologies overcoming space and time, the telegraph and telephone, radio, but also the cinema, just like the railways before them, did not merely help to reduce geographical distances but conveyed the feeling that social barriers could also be overcome. At the turn of the century, the hierarchical structures of the nobility, but also those of the bourgeois world, had begun to totter. The potential for change, the susceptibility of existing power structures to a ‘levelling’ technology, was strikingly illustrated by the possibility of disrespectfully crossing bounds of protocol which lay within the capacity of the technological media. It was not by chance that telephones were not admitted to the Imperial Palace in Vienna, typewriters were regarded with mistrust, and electric light was reserved for the streets and the citizens, for they equally threatened a social hierarchy in its fine distinctions, which were also spatially and temporally coordinated.¹⁰ It was obvious that waiting periods could be reduced by the telephone, and that many a ministerial art of processing files would soon become superfluous. For the visionaries of the approaching democracy, it was a question of reducing not just political power distinctions, but cultural ones as well. The cinema, celebrated as the democratic medium per se, made it possible from now on to bring the enjoyment of art and culture, indeed simple entertainment, out of the exclusive court theatres and out of the bourgeois cultural sphere, and to make them available to everybody for little money. It was a period which did not yet suspect what dimensions the saturation with mass media would assume, and that television would literally come to every tin hut. Finally, means of transport, from the railways via the bicycle to the motor-car, opened up free spaces for a society which has since made individual mobility one of its central values. Yet it was something more than this. In retrospect, it was not just that geographical and social spaces opened up, but it was as if society had succumbed to an intoxication with space and time.

The intoxication with time resulted first of all from the directly perceptible increase in speed, hastened and mediated by technology, but absorbed into the life of society as a whole, an increase which individuals could not evade. Technological change means nothing other than the accelerated sequence of social changes. The speed with which a good deal of social distance was reduced, and how quickly habits could change or a good deal of social distance could shrink, caused people to overlook to begin with how little other, invariable power structures were changing. Only from today’s standpoint does it become clear that technologies do not always bring the promised liberation, but that they definitely can be used to perpetuate existing inequalities.

The intoxicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• An Embarrassment of Proper Times: A Foreword by J. T. Fraser
• Introduction
• 1 The Illusion of Simultaneity
• 2 From the Future to the Extended Present
• 3 Cronos’s Fear of the New Age
• 4 Politics of Time: The Distribution of Work and Time
• 5 The Longing for the Moment
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index