The dimension of time seems to be attracting great notice, to judge from the
number of recent movies that focus on it, such as Back to the Future, Terminator,
Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1989)
was a best-seller and became, even more surprisingly, a popular film. Remarkable,
in addition to the number of books that deal with time, are the larger number
which don't, really, but which feature the word in their titles nonetheless,
such as Virginia Spate's The Color of Time: Claude Monet (1992). Such references
have to do, albeit indirectly, with the sudden, panicky awareness of time, the
frightening sense of our being tied to it. Time is increasingly a key manifestation
of the estrangement and humiliation that characterize modern existence. It illuminates
the entire, deformed landscape and will do so ever more harshly until this landscape
and all the forces that shape it are changed beyond recognizing.
This contribution to the subject has little to do with time's fascination for
film-makers or TV producers, or with the current academic interest in geologic
conceptions of time, the history of clock technology and the sociology of time,
or with personal observations and counsels on its use. Neither aspects nor excesses
of time deserve as much attention as time's inner meaning and logic. For despite
the fact that time's perplexing character has become, in John Michon's estimation,
``almost an intellectual obsession'' (1988), society is plainly incapable of
dealing with it.
With time we confront a philosophical enigma, a psychological mystery, and a
puzzle of logic. Not surprisingly, considering the massive reification involved,
some have doubted its existence since humanity began distinguishing ``time itself''
from visible and tangible changes in the world. As Michael Ende (1984) put it:
"There is in the world a great and yet ordinary secret. All of us are part
of it, everyone is aware of it, but very few ever think of it. Most of us just
accept it and never wonder over it. This secret is time.''
Just what is "time''? Spengler declared that no one should be allowed to
ask. The physicist Richard Feynman (1988) answered, ``Don't even ask me. It's
just too hard to think about.'' Empirically as much as in theory, the laboratory
is powerless to reveal the flow of time, since no instrument exists that can
register its passage. But why do we have such a strong sense that time does
pass, ineluctably and in one particular direction, if it really doesn't? Why
does this "illusion'' have such a hold over us? We might just as well ask
why alienation has such a hold over us. The passage of time is intimately familiar,
the concept of time mockingly elusive; why should this appear bizarre, in a
world whose survival depends on the mystification of its most basic categories?
We have gone along with the substantiation of time so that it seems a fact of
nature, a power existing in its own right. The growth of a sense of time--the
acceptance of time--is a process of adaptation to an ever more reified world.
It is a constructed dimension, the most elemental aspect of culture. Time's
inexorable nature provides the ultimate model of domination.
The further we go in time the worse it gets. We inhabit an age of the disintegration
of experience, according to Adorno. The pressure of time, like that of its essential
progenitor, division of labor, fragments and disperses all before it. Uniformity,
equivalence, separation are byproducts of time's harsh force. The intrinsic
beauty and meaning of that fragment of the world that is not-yet- culture moves
steadily toward annihilation under a single cultures-wide clock. Paul Ricoeur's
assertion (1985) that "we are not capable of producing aconcept of time
that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual,'' fails
to notice how they are converging.
Concerning this "fiction'' that upholds and accompanies all the forms of
imprisonment, "the world is filled with propaganda alleging its existence,''
as Bernard Aaronson (1972) put it sowell. ``All awareness,'' wrote the poet
Denise Levertov (1974), "is an awareness of time,'' showing just how deeply
alienated we are in time. We have become regimented under its empire, as time
and alienation continue to deepen their intrusion, their debasement of everyday
life. ``Does this mean,'' as David Carr (1988) asks, ``that the `struggle' of
existence is to overcome time itself?'' It may be that exactly this is the last
enemy to be overcome.
In coming to grips with this ubiquitous yet phantom adversary, it is somewhat
easier to say what time is not. It is not synonymous, for fairly obvious reasons,
with change. Nor is it sequence, or order of succession. Pavlov's dog, for instance,
must have learned that the sound of the bell was followed by feeding; how else
could it have been conditioned to salivate at that sound? But dogs do not possess
time consciousness, so before and after cannot be said to constitute time.
Somewhat related are inadequate attempts to account for our all but inescapable
sense of time. The neurologist Gooddy (1988), rather along the lines of Kant,
describes it as one of our ``subconscious assumptions about the world.'' Some
have described it, no more helpfully, as a product of the imagination, and the
philosopher J.J.C. Smart (1980) decided that it is a feeling that ``arises out
of metaphysical confusion.'' McTaggart (1908), F.H. Bradley (1930), and Dummett
(1978) have been among 20th century thinkers who have decided against the existence
of time because of its logically contradictory features, but it seems fairly
plain that the presence of time has far deeper causes than mere mental confusion.
There is nothing even remotely similar to time. It is as unnatural and yet as
universal as alienation. Chacalos (1988) points out that the present is a notion
just as puzzling and intractable as time itself. What is the present? We know
that it is always now; one is confined to it, in an important sense, and can
experience no other ``part'' of time. We speak confidently of other parts, however,
which we call ``past'' and ``future.'' But whereas things that exist in space
elsewhere than here continue to exist, things that don't exist now, as Sklar
(1992) observes, don't really exist at all.
Time necessarily flows; without its passage there would be no sense of time.
Whatever flows, though, flows with respect to time. Time therefore flows with
respect to itself, which is meaningless owing to the fact that nothing can flow
with respect to itself. No vocabulary is available for the abstract explication
of time apart from a vocabulary in which time is already presupposed. What is
necessary is to put all the givens into question. Metaphysics, with a narrowness
that division of labor has imposed from its inception, is too narrow for such
a task.
What causes time to flow, what is it that moves it toward the future? Whatever
it is, it must be beyond our time, deeper and more powerful. It must depend
as Conly (1975) had it, ``upon elemental forces which are continually in operation.''
William Spanos (1987) has noted that certain Latin words for culture not only
signify agriculture or domestication, but are translations from Greek terms
for the spatial image of time. We are, at base, ``time-binders'', in Alfred
Korzybski's lexicon (1948); the species, due to this characteristic, creates
a symbolic class of life, an artificial world. Time-binding reveals itself in
an ``enormous increase in the control over nature.'' Time becomes real because
it has consequences, and this efficacy has never been more painfully apparent.
Life, in its barest outline, is said to be a journey through time; that it is
a journey through alienation is the most public of secrets. ``No clock strikes
for the happy one,'' says a Germanproverb. Passing time, once meaningless, is
now the inescapable beat, restricting and coercing us, mirroring blind authority
itself. Guyau (1890) determined the flow of time to be ``the distinction between
what one needs and what one has,'' and therefore ``the incipience of regret.''
Carpe diem, the maxim counsels, but civilization forces us always to mortgage
the present to the future.
Time aims continually toward greater strictness of regularity and universality.
Capital's technological world charts its progress by this, could not exist in
its absence. ``The importance of time,'' wrote Bertrand Russell (1929), lies
``rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth.'' There is a
longing that is as palpable as time has become. The denial of desire can be
gauged no more definitively than via the vast construct we call time.
Time, like technology, is never neutral; it is, as Castoriadis (1991) rightly
judged, ``always endowed with meaning.'' Everything that commentators like Ellul
have said about technology, in fact, applies to time, and more deeply. Both
conditions are pervasive, omnipresent, basic, and in general as taken for granted
as alienation itself. Time, like technology, is not only a determining fact
but also the enveloping element in which divided society develops. Similarly,
it demands that its subjects be painstaking, ``realistic'', serious, and above
all, devoted to work. It is autonomous in its overall aspect, like technology;
it goes on forever of its own accord.
But like division of labor, which stands behind and sets in motion time and
technology, it is, after all, a socially learned phenomenon. Humans, and the
rest of the world, are synchronized to time and its technical embodiment, rather
than the reverse. Central to this dimension--as it is to alienation per se--is
the feeling of being a helpless spectator. Every rebel, it follows, also rebels
against time and its relentlessness. Redemption must involve, in a very fundamental
sense, redemption from time.
Time and the Symbolic World
"Time is the accident of accidents,'' according to Epicurus. Upon closer
examination, however, its genesis appears less mysterious. It has occurred to
many, in fact, that notions such as "the past,'' "the present,'' and
"the future'' are more linguistic than actual or physical. The neo-Freudian
theorist Lacan, for example, decided that the time experience is essentially
an effect of language. A person with no language would likely have no sense
of the passage of time. R.A. Wilson (1980), moving much closer to the point,
suggested that language was initiated by the need to express symbolic time.
Gosseth (1972) argued that the system of tenses found in Indo-European languages
developed along with consciousness of a universal or abstract time. Time and
language are coterminous, decided Derrida (1982): ``to be in the one is to be
in the other.'' Time is a symbolic construct immediately prior, relatively speaking,
to all the others and which requires language for its actualization.
Paul Val‚ry (1962) referred to the fall of the species into time as signalling
alienation from nature; ``by a sort of abuse, man creates time,'' he wrote.
In the timeless epoch before this fall, which constituted the overwhelming majority
of our existence as humans, life, as has often been said, had a rhythm but not
a progression. It was the state when the soul could ``gather in the whole of
its being,'' in Rousseau's words, in the absence of temporal strictures, ``where
time is nothing to the soul.'' Activities themselves, usually of a leisurely
character, were the points of reference before time and civilization; nature
provided the necessary signals, quite independent of ``time''. Humanity must
have been conscious of memories and purposes long before any explicit distinctions
were drawn among past, present, and future (Fraser, 1988). Furthermore, as the
linguist Whorf (1956) estimated, ``preliterate [`primitive'] communities, far
from being subrational, may show the human mind functioning on a higher and
more complex plane of rationality than among civilized men.''
The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin
of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route
away from aboriginal richness and wholeness. ``Out of the simultaneity of experience,
the event of Language,'' says Charles Simic (1971), ``is an emergence into linear
time.'' Researchers such as Zohar (1982) consider faculties of telepathy and
precognition to have been sacrificed for the sake of evolution into symbolic
life. If this sounds far-fetched, the sober positivist Freud (1932) viewed telepathy
as quite possibly ``the original archaic means through which individuals understand
one another.'' If the perception and apperception of time relate to the very
essence of cultural life (Gurevich 1976), the advent of this time sense and
its concomitant culture represent an impoverishment, even a disfigurement, by
time.
The consequences of this intrusion of time, via language, indicate that the
latter is no more innocent, neutral, or assumption-free than the former. Time
is not only, as Kant said, at the foundation of all our representations, but,
by this fact, also at the foundation of our adaptation to a qualitatively reduced,
symbolic world. Our experience in this world is under an all-pervasive pressure
to be representation, to be almost unconsciously degraded into symbols and measurements.
``Time'', wrote the German mystic Meister Eckhart, ``is what keeps the light
from reaching us.''
Time awareness is what empowers us to deal with our environment symbolically;
there is no time apart from this estrangement. It is by means of progressive
symbolization that time becomes naturalized, becomes a given, is removed from
the sphere of conscious cultural production. ``Time becomes human in the measure
to which it becomes actualized in narrative,'' is another way of putting it
(Ricoeur 1984). The symbolic accretions in this process constitute a steady
throttling of instinctive desire; repression develops the sense of time unfolding.
Immediacy gives way, replaced by the mediations that make history possible--language
in the forefront.
One begins to see past such banalities as ``time is an incomprehensible quality
of the given world'' (Sebba 1991). Number, art, religion make their appearances
in this ``given'' world, disembodied phenomena of reified life. These emerging
rites, in turn, Gurevitch (1964) surmises, lead to ``the production of new symbolic
contents, thus encouraging time leaping forward.'' Symbols, including time,
of course, now have lives of their own, in this cumulative, interacting progression.
David Braine's The Reality of Time and the Existence of God (1988) is illustrative.
It argues that it is precisely time's reality which proves the existence of
God; civilization's perfect logic.
All ritual is an attempt, through symbolism, to return to the timeless state.
Ritual is a gesture of abstraction from that state, however, a false step that
only leads further away. The ``timelessness'' of number is part of this trajectory,
and contrib- utes much to time as a fixed concept. In fact, Blumenberg (1983)
seems largely correct in assaying that ``time is not measured as something that
has been present all along; instead it is produced, for the first time, by measurement.''
To express time we must, in some way, quantify it; number is therefore essential.
Even where time has already appeared, a slowly more divided social existence
works toward its progressive reification only by means of number. The sense
of passing time is not keen among tribal peoples, for example, who do not mark
it with calendars or clocks.
Time: an original meaning of the word in ancient Greek is division. Number,
when added to time, makes the dividing or separating that much more potent.
The non-civilized often have considered it ``unlucky'' to count living creatures,
and generally resist adopting the practice (e.g. Dobrizhoffer 1822). The intuition
for number was far from spontaneous and inevitable, but ``already in early civilizations,''
Schimmel (1992) reports, ``one feels that numbers are a reality having as it
were a magnetic power field around them.'' It is not surprising that among ancient
cultures with the strongest emerging senses of time--Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan--we
see numbers associated with ritual figures and deities; indeed the Mayans and
Babylonians both had number gods (Barrow 1992).
Much later the clock, with its face of numbers, encouraged society to abstract
and quantify the experience of time still further. Every clock reading is a
measurement that joins the clock watcher to the ``flow of time.'' And we absently
delude ourselves that we know what time is because we know what time it is.
If we did away with clocks, Shallis (1982) reminds us, objective time would
also disappear. More fundamentally, if we did away with specialization and technology,
alienation would be banished.
The mathematizing of nature was the basis for the birth of modern rationalism
and science in the West. This had stemmed from demands for number and measurement
in connection with similar teachings about time, in the service of mercantile
capitalism. The continuity of number and time as a geometrical locus were fundamental
to the Scientific Revolution, which projected Galileo's dictum to measure all
that is measurable and make measurable that which is not. Mathematically divisible
time is necessary for the conquest of nature, and for even the rudiments of
modern technology.
From this point on, number-based symbolic time became crushingly real, an abstract
construction ``removed from and even contrary to every internal and external
human experience'' (Syzamosi 1986). Under its pressure, money and language,
merchandise and information have become steadily less distinguishable, and division
of labor more extreme.
To symbolize is to express time consciousness, for the symbol embodies the structure
of time (Darby 1982). Clearer still is Meerloo's formulation: ``To understand
a symbol and its development is to grasp human history in a nutshell.'' The
contrast is the life of the non-civilized, lived in a capacious present that
cannot be reduced to the single moment of the mathematical present. As the continual
now gave way to increasing reliance upon systems of significant symbols (language,
number, art, ritual, myth) dislodged from the now, the further abstraction,
history, began to develop. Historical time is no more inherent in reality, no
less an imposition on it, than the earlier, less choate forms of time.
In a slowly more synthetic context, astronomical observation is invested with
new meanings. Once pursued for its own sake, it comes to provide the vehicle
for scheduling rituals and coordinating the activities of complex society. With
the help of the stars, the year and its divisions exist as instruments of organizational
authority (Leach 1954). The formation of a calendar is basic to the formation
of a civilization. The calendar was the first symbolic artifact that regulated
social behavior by keeping track of time. And what is involved is not the control
of time but its opposite: enclosure by time in a world of very real alienation.
One recalls that our word comes from the Latin calends, the first day of the
month, when business accounts had to be settled.
Time to Pray, Time to Work
``No time is entirely present,'' said the Stoic Chrysippus, and meanwhile the
concept of time was being further advanced by the underlying Judeo-Christian
tenet of a linear, irreversible path between creation and salvation. This essentially
historical view of time is the very core of Christianity; all the basic notions
of measurable, one-way time can be found in St. Augustine's (fifth- century)
writings. With the spread of the new religion the strict regulation of time,
on a practical plane, was needed to help maintain the discipline of monastic
life. Bells summoning the monks to prayer eight times daily were heard far beyond
the confines of the cloister, and thus a measure of time regulation was imposed
on society at large. The population continued to exhibit ``une vaste indiffrance
au temps'' throughout the feudal era, according to Marc Bloch (1940), but it
is no accident that the first public clocks adorned cathedrals in the West.
Worth noting in this regard is the fact that the calling of precise prayer times
became the chief externalization of medieval Islamic belief.
The invention of the mechanical clock was one of the most important turning
points in the history of science and technology; indeed of all human art and
culture (Synge 1959). The improvement in accuracy presented authority with enhanced
opportunities for oppression. An early devotee of elaborate mechanical clocks,
for example, was Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti, described in 1381 as ``a sedate
but crafty ruler with a great love of order and precision'' (Fraser 1988). As
Weizenbaum (1976) wrote, the clock began to create ``literally a new reality...that
was and remains an impoverished version of the old one.''
A qualitative change was introduced. Even when nothing was happening, time did
not cease to flow. Events, from this era on, are put into this homogeneous,
objectively measured, moving envelope--and this unilinear progression incited
resistance. The most extreme were the chiliast, or millenarian, movements, which
appeared in various parts of Europe from the 14th into the 17th centuries. These
generally took the form of peasant risings which aimed at recreating the primal
egalitarian state of nature and were explicitly opposed to historical time.
These utopian explosions were quelled, but remnants of earlier time concepts
persisted as a ``lower'' stratum of folk consciousness in many areas.
During the Renaissance, domination by time reached a new level as public clocks
now tolled all twenty-four hours of the day and added new hands to mark the
passing seconds. A keen sense of time's all- consuming presence is the great
discovery of the age, and nothing portrays this more graphically than the figure
of Father Time. Renaissance art fused the Greek god Kronos with the Roman god
Saturn to form the familiar grim deity representing the power of Time, armed
with a fatal scythe signifying his association with agriculture/domestication.
The Dance of Death and other medieval memento mori artifacts preceded Father
Time, but the subject is now time rather than death.
The seventeenth century was the first in which people thought of themselves
as inhabiting a particular century. One now needed to take one's bearings within
time. Francis Bacon's The Masculine Birth of Time (1603) and A Discourse Concerning
a New Planet (1605) embraced the deepening dimension and revealed how a heightened
sense of time could serve the new scientific spirit. "To choose time is
to save time,'' he wrote, and "Truth is the daughter of time.'' Descartes
followed, introducing the idea of time as limitless. He was one of the first
advocates of the modern idea of progress, closely related to that of unbounded
linear time, and characteristically expressing itself in his famous invitation
that we become "masters and possessors of nature.''
Newton's clockwork universe was the crowning achievement of the Scientific Revolution
in the seventeenth century, and was grounded in his conception of "Absolute,
true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flowing equably
without relation to anything eternal.'' Time is now the grand ruler, answering
to no one, influenced by nothing, completely independent of the environment:
the model of unassailable authority and perfect guarantor of unchanging alienation.
Classical Newtonian physics in fact remains, despite changes in science, the
dominant, everyday conception of time.
The appearance of independent, abstract time found its parallel in the emergence
of a growing, formally free working class forced to sell its labor power as
an abstract commodity on the market. Prior to the coming of the factory system
but already subject to time's disciplinary power, this labor force was the inverse
of the monarch Time: free and independent in name only. In Foucault's judgment
(1973), the West had become a ``carceral society'' from this point on. Perhaps
more directly to the point is the Balkan proverb, ``A clock is a lock.''
In 1749 Rousseau threw away his watch, a symbolic rejection of modern science
and civilization. Somewhat more in the dominant spirit of the age, however,
were the gifts of fifty-one watches to Marie Antoinette upon her engagement.
The word is certainly appropriate, as people had to "watch'' the time more
and more; watches would soon become one of the first consumer durables of the
industrial era.
William Blake and Goethe both attacked Newton, the symbol of the new time and
science, for his distancing of life from the sensual, his reduction of the natural
to the measurable. Capitalist ideologue Adam Smith, on the other hand, echoed
and extended Newton, by calling for greater rationalization and routinization.
Smith, like Newton, labored under the spell of an increasingly powerful and
remorseless time in promoting further division of labor as objective and absolute
progress.
The Puritans had proclaimed waste of time the first and in principle the deadliest
of sins (Weber 1921); this became, about a century later, Ben Franklin's "Time
is money.'' The factory system was initiated by clockmakers and the clock was
the symbol and fountainhead of the order, discipline and repression required
to create an industrial proletariat.
Hegel's grand system in the early 19th century heralded the "push into
time'' that is History's momentum; time is our "destiny and necessity,''
he declared. Postone (1993) noted that the "progress'' of abstract time
is closely tied to the ``progress'' of capitalism as a way of life. Waves of
industrialism drowned the resistance of the Luddites; appraising this general
period, Lyotard (1988) decided that "the illness of time was now incurable.''
An increasingly complex class society requires an ever larger array of time
signals. Fights against time, as Thompson (1967) and Hohn (1984) have pointed
out, gave way to struggles over time; resistance to being yoked to time and
its inherent demands was defeated in general, replaced, typically, by disputes
over the fair determination of time schedules or the length of the work day.
(In an address to the First International (July 28, 1868), Karl Marx advocated,
by the way, age nine as the time to begin work.)
The clock descended from the cathedral, to court and courthouse, next to the
bank and railway station, and finally to the wrist and pocket of each decent
citizen. Time had to become more ``democratic'' in order to truly colonize subjectivity.
The subjection of outer nature, as Adorno and others have understood, is successful
only in the measure of the conquest of inner nature. The unleashing of the forces
of production, to put it another way, depended on time's victory in its long-waged
war on freer consciousness. Industrialism brought with it a more complete commodification
of time, time in its most predatory form yet. It was this that Giddens (1981)
saw as "the key to the deepest transformations of day-to-day social life
that are brought about by the emergence of capitalism.''
"Time marches on,'' as the saying goes, in a world increasingly dependent
on time and a time increasingly unified. A single giant clock hangs over the
world and dominates. It pervades all; in its court there is no appeal. The standardization
of world time marks a victory for the efficient/machine society, a universalism
that undoes particularity as surely as computers lead to homogenization of thought.
Paul Virilio (1986) has gone so far as to foresee that ``the loss of material
space leads to the government of nothing but time.'' A further provocative notion
posits a reversal of the birth of history out of maturing time. Virilio (1991),
in fact, finds us already living within a system of technological temporality
where history has been eclipsed. "...the primary question becomes less
one of relations to history than one of relations to time.''
Such theoretical flights aside, however, there is ample evidence and testimony
as to time's central role in society. In "Time-- The Next Source of Competitive
Advantage'' (July-August, 1988 Harvard Business Review), George Stark, Jr. discusses
it as pivotal in the positioning of capital: "As a strategic weapon, time
is the equivalent of money, productivity, quality, even innovation.'' Time management
is certainly not confined to the corporations; Levine's 1985 study of publicly
accessible clocks in six countries demonstrated that their accuracy was an exact
gauge of the relative industrialization of national life. Paul Adler's January-February,
1993 Harvard Business Review offering, "Time-and-Motion Regained,'' nakedly
champions the neo-Taylorist standardization and regimentation of work: behind
the well-publicized "workplace democracy'' window dressing in some factories
remains the "time- and-motion discipline and formal bureaucratic structures
essential for efficiency and quality in routine operations.''
Time in Literature
It is clear that the advent of writing facilitated the fixation of time concepts
and the beginning of history. But as the anthropologist Goody (1991) points
out, "oral cultures are often only too prepared to accept these innovations.''
They have already been conditioned, after all, by language itself. McLuhan (1962)
discussed how the coming of the printed book, and mass literacy, reinforced
the logic of linear time.
Life was steadily forced to adapt. "For now hath time made me his numbering
clock,'' wrote Shakespeare in Richard II. "Time'', like "rich'', was
one of the favorite words of the Bard, a time-haunted figure. A hundred years
later, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe reflected how little escape from time seemed
possible. Marooned on a desert island, Crusoe is deeply concerned with the passage
of time; keeping close track of his affairs, even in such a setting, meant above
all keeping track of the time, especially as long as his pen and ink lasted.
Northrop Frye (1950) saw the "alliance of time and Western man'' as the
defining characteristic of the novel. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957)
likewise focused on the new concern with time that stimulated the novel's emergence
in the eighteenth century. As Jonathan Swift told it in Gulliver's Travels (1726),
his protagonist never did anything without looking at his watch. "He called
it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.''
The Lilliputians concluded that the watch was Gulliver's god. Sterne's Tristram
Shandy (1760), on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, begins with the mother
of Tristram interrupting his father at the moment of their monthly coitus: "`Pray,
my dear,' quoth my mother, `have you not forgot to wind up the clock?'''
In the nineteenth century Poe satirized the authority of clocks, linking them
to bourgeois superficiality and obsession with order. Time is the real subject
of Flaubert's novels, according to Hauser (1956), as Walter Pater (1901) sought
in literature the "wholly concrete moment'' which would "absorb past
and future in an intense consciousness of the present,'' similar to Joyce's
celebration of ``epiphanies''. In Marius the Epicurean (1909), Pater depicts
Marius suddenly realizing "the possibility of a real world beyond time.''
Meanwhile Swinburne looked for a respite beyond "time-stricken lands''
and Baudelaire declared his fear and hatred of chronological time, the devouring
foe.
The disorientation of an age wracked by time and subject to the acceleration
of history has led modern writers to deal with time from new and extreme points
of view. Proust delineated interrelationships among events that transcended
conventional temporal order and thus violated Newtonian conceptions of causation.
His thirteen-volume A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1925), usually rendered in
English as Remembrance of Things Past, is more literally and accurately translated
as Searching for Lost Time. In it he judges that ``a minute freed from the order
of time has recreated in us...the individual freed from the order of time,''
and recognizes ``the only environment in which one could live and enjoy the
essence of things, that is to say, entirely outside time.''
Philosophy in the twentieth century has been largely preoccupied with time.
Consider the misguided attempts to locate authentic time by thinkers as different
as Bergson and Heidegger, or the latter's virtual deification of time. A.A.
Mendilow's Time and the Novel (1952) reveals how the same intense interest has
dominated the novels of the century, in particular those of Joyce, Woolf, Conrad,
James, Gide, Mann, and of course, Proust. Other studies, such as Church's Time
and Reality (1962), have expanded this list of novelists to include, among others,
Kafka, Sartre, Faulkner, and Vonnegut.
And of course time-struck literature cannot be confined to the novel. T.S. Eliot's
poetry often expressed a yearning to escape time-bound, time-ridden conventionality.
``Burnt Norton'' (1941) is a good example, with these lines:
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time.` Samuel Beckett, early in his career (1931),
wrote pointedly of ``the poisonous ingenuity of Time in the science of affliction.''
The play Waiting for Godot (1955) is an obvious candidate in this regard, and
so is his Murphy (1957), in which time becomes reversible in the mind of the
main character. When the clock may go either way, our sense of time, and time
itself, vanishes.
The Psychology of Time
Turning to what is commonly called psychology, we again come upon one of the
most fundamental questions: Is there really a phenomenon of time that exists
apart from any individual, or does it reside only in one's perceptions of it?
Husserl, for example, failed to show why consciousness in the modern world seems
to inevitably constitute itself in time. We know that experiences, like events
of every other kind, are neither past, present nor future in themselves.
Whereas there was little sociological interest in time until the 1970s, the
number of studies of time in the literature of psychology has increased rapidly
since 1930 (Lauer 1988). Time is perhaps hardest of all to define ``psychologically''.
What is time? What is the experience of time? What is alienation? What is the
experience of alienation? If the latter subject were not so neglected the obvious
interrelationship would be made clear.
Davies (1977) termed time's passage ``a psychological phenomenon of mysterious
origin'' and concluded (1983), ``the secret of mind will only be solved when
we understand the secret of time.'' Given the artificial separation of the individual
from society, which defines their field, it is inevitable that such psychologists
and psychoanalysts as Eissler (1955), Loewald (1962), Namnum (1972), and Morris
(1983) have encountered ``great difficulties'' in studying time!
At least a few partial insights have been achieved, however. Hartcollis (1983),
for instance, noted that time is not only an abstraction but a feeling, while
Korzybski (1948) had already taken this further with his observation that ```time'
is a feeling, produced by conditions of this world....'' In all our lives we
are ``waiting for Godot,'' according to Arlow (1986), who believed that our
experience of time arises out of unfulfilled emotional needs. Similarly, Reichenbach
(1956) had termed anti-time philosophies, like religion, ``documents of emotional
dissatisfaction.'' In Freudian terms, Bergler and Roheim (1946) saw the passage
of time as symbolizing separation periods originating in early infancy. ``The
calendar is an ultimate materialization of separation anxiety.'' If informed
by a critical interest in the social and historical context, the implications
of these undeveloped points could become serious contributions. Confined to
psychology, however, they remain limited and even misleading.
In the world of alienation no adult can contrive or decree the freedom from
time that the child habitually enjoys--and must be made to lose. Time training,
the essence of schooling, is vitally important to society. This training, as
Fraser (1984) very cogently puts it, ``bears in almost paradigmatic form the
features of a civilizing process.'' A patient of Joost Meerlo (1966) ``expressed
it sarcastically: `Time is civilization,' by which she meant that scheduling
and meticulousness were the great weapons used by adults to force the youngsters
into submission and servility.'' Piaget's studies (1946, 1952) could detect
no innate sense of time. Rather, the abstract notion of ``time'' is of considerable
difficulty to the young. It is not something they learn automatically; there
is no spontaneous orientation toward time (Hermelin and O'Connor 1971, Voyat
1977).
Time and tidy are related etymologically, and our Newtonian idea of time represents
perfect and universal ordering. The cumulative weight of this ever more pervasive
pressure shows up in the increasing number of patients with time anxiety symptoms
(Lawson 1990). Dooley (1941) referred to ``the observed fact that people who
are obsessive in character, whatever their type of neurosis, are those who make
most extensive use of the sense of time....'' Pettit's ``Anality and Time''
(1969) argued convincingly for the close connection between the two, as Meerloo
(1966), citing the character and achievements of Mussolini and Eichmann, found
``a definite connection between time compulsion and fascistic aggression.''
Capek (1961) called time ``a huge and chronic hallucination of the human mind'';
there are few experiences indeed that can be said to be timeless. Orgasm, LSD,
a life ``flashing before one's eyes'' in a moment of extreme danger...these
are some of the rare, evanescent situations intense enough to escape from time's
insistence.
Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure, wrote Marcuse (1955). The passage of
time, on the other hand, fosters the forgetting of what was and what can be.
It is the enemy of eros and deep ally of the order of repression. The mental
processes of the unconscious are in fact timeless, decided Freud (1920). ``...time
does not change them in any way and the idea of time cannot be applied to them.''
Thus desire is already outside of time. As Freud said in 1932: ``There is nothing
in the Id that corresponds to the notion of time; there is no recognition of
the passage of time.''
Marie Bonaparte (1939) argued that time becomes ever more plastic and obedient
to the pleasure principle insofar as we loosen the bonds of full ego control.
Dreams are a form of thinking among non-civilized peoples (Kracke 1987); this
faculty must have once been much more accessible to us. The Surrealists believed
that reality could be much more fully understood if we could make the connection
to our instinctive, subconscious experiences; Breton (1924), for example, proclaimed
the radical goal of a resolution of dream and conscious reality.
When we dream the sense of time is virtually nonexistent, replaced by a sensation
of presentness. It should come as no surprise that dreams, which ignore the
rules of time, would attract the notice of those searching for liberatory clues,
or that the unconscious, with its ``storms of impulse'' (Stern 1977), frightens
those with a stake in the neurosis we call civilization. Norman O. Brown (1959)
saw the sense of time or history as a function of repression; if repression
were abolished, he reasoned, we would be released from time. Similarly, Coleridge
(1801) recognized in the man of ``methodical industry'' the origin and creator
of time.
In his Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), Peter Sloterdijk called for the ``radical
recognition of the Id without reservation,'' a narcissistic self-affirmation
that would laugh in the face of morose society. Narcissism has of course traditionally
been cast as wicked, the ``heresy of self-love.'' In reality that meant it was
reserved for the ruling classes, while all others (workers, women, slaves) had
to practice submission and self-effacement (Fine 1986). The narcissist symptoms
are feelings of emptiness, unreality, alienation, life as no more than a succession
of moments, accompanied by a longing for powerful autonomy and self-esteem (Alford
1988, Grunberger 1979). Given the appropriateness of these ``symptoms'' and
desires it is little wonder that narcissism can be seen as a potentially emancipatory
force (Zweig 1980). Its demand for total satisfaction is obviously a subversive
individualism, at a minimum.
The narcissist ``hates time, denies time'' (letter to author, Alford 1993) and
this, as always, provokes a severe reaction from the defenders of time and authority.
Psychiatrist E. Mark Stern (1977), for instance: ``Since time begins beyond
one's control one must correspond to its demands.... Courage is the antithesis
of narcissism.'' This condition, which certainly may include negative aspects,
contains the germ of a different reality principle, aiming at the non-time of
perfection wherein being and becoming are one and including, implicitly, a halt
to time.
Time in ScienceI'm not a scientist but I do know that all things begin and end
in eternity. -The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter TevisScience, for our purposes,
does not comment on time and estrangement with anywhere near the directness
of, say, psychology. But science can be re-construed to shed light on the topic
at hand, because of the many parallels between scientific theory and human affairs.
``Time,'' decided N.A. Kozyrev (1971), ``is the most important and the most
mysterious phenomenon of Nature. Its notion is beyond the grasp of imagination.''
Some scientists, in fact, have felt (e.g. Dingle 1966) that ``all the real problems
associated with the notion of time are independent of physics.'' Science, and
physics in particular, may indeed not have the last word; it is another source
of commentary, however, though itself alienated and generally indirect.
Is ``physical time'' the same as the time of which we are conscious; if not,
how does it differ? In physics, time seems to be an undefined basic dimension,
as much a taken-for- granted given as it is outside the realm of science. This
is one way to remind ourselves that, as with every other kind of thinking, scientific
ideas are meaningless outside their cultural context. They are symptoms of and
symbol for the ways of living that give rise to them. According to Nietzsche,
all writing is inherently metaphorical, even though science is rarely looked
at this way. Science has developed by drawing an increasingly sharp separation
between inner and outer worlds, between dream and ``reality''. This has been
accomplished by the mathematization of nature, which has largely meant that
the scientist proceeds by a method that debars him or her from the larger context,
including the origins and significance of his/her projects. Nonetheless, as
H.P. Robinson (1964) stated, ``the cosmologies which humanity has set up at
various times and in various localities inevitably reflect the physical and
intellectual environment, including above all the interests and culture of each
society.''
Subjective time, as P.C.W. Davies pointed out (1981), ``possesses apparent qualities
that are absent from the `outside' world and which are fundamental to our conception
of reality''--principally the ``passing'' of time. Our sense of separation from
the world owes largely to this discrepancy. We exist in time (and alienation),
but time is not found in the physical world. The time variable, though useful
to science, is a theoretical construct. ``The laws of science,'' Stephen Hawking
(1988) explained, ``do not distinguish between past and future.'' Einstein had
gone further than this some thirty years earlier; in one of his last letters,
he wrote that ``People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction
between past, present and future is only a stubborn, persistent illusion.''
But science partakes of society in other ways concerning time, and very deeply.
The more ``rational'' it becomes, the more variations in time are suppressed.
Theoretical physics geometrizes time by conceiving it as a straight line, for
example. Science does not stand apart form the cultural history of time.
As implied above, however, physics does not contain the idea of a present instant
of time that passes (Park 1972). Furthermore, the fundamental laws are not only
completely reversible as to the `arrow of time'--as Hawking noted--but ``irreversible
phenomena appear as the result of the particular nature of our human cognition,''
according to Watanabe (1953). Once again we find human experience playing a
decisive role, even in this most ``objective'' realm. Zee (1992) put it this
way: ``Time is that one concept in physics we can't talk about without dragging
in, at some level, consciousness.''
Even in seemingly straightforward areas ambiguities exist where time is concerned.
While the complexity of the most complex species may increase, for example,
not all species become more complex, prompting J.M. Smith (1972) to conclude
that it is ``difficult to say whether evolution as a whole has a direction.''
In terms of the cosmos, it is argued, ``time's arrow'' is automatically indicated
by the fact that the galaxies are receding away from each other. But there seems
to be virtual unanimity that as far as the basics of physics are concerned,
the ``flow'' of time is irrelevant and makes no sense; fundamental physical
laws are completely neutral with regard to the direction of time (Mehlberg 1961,
1971, Landsberg 1982, Squires 1986, Watanabe 1953, 1956, Swinburne 1986, Morris
1984, Mallove 1987, D'Espagnant 1989, etc.). Modern physics even provides scenarios
in which time ceases to exist and, in reverse, comes into existence. So why
is our world asymmetric in time? Why can't it go backward as well as forward?
This is a paradox, inasmuch as the individual molecular dynamics are all reversible.
The main point, to which I will return later, is that time's arrow reveals itself
as complexity develops, in striking parallel with the social world.
The flow of time manifests itself in the context of future and past, and they
in turn depend on a referent known as the now. With Einstein and relativity,
it is clear that there is no universal present: we cannot say it is ``now''
throughout the universe. There is no fixed interval at all that is independent
of the system to which it refers, just as alienation is dependent on its context.
Time is thus robbed of the autonomy and objectivity it enjoyed in the Newtonian
world. It is definitely more individually delineated, in Einstein's revelations,
than the absolute and universal monarch it had been. Time is relative to specific
conditions and varies according to such factors as speed and gravitation. But
if time has become more ``decentralized'', it has also colonized subjectivity
more than ever before. As time and alienation have become the rule throughout
the world, there is little solace in knowing that they are dependent on varying
circumstances. The relief comes in acting on this understanding; it is the invariance
of alienation that causes the Newtonian model of independently flowing time
to hold sway within us, long after its theoretical foundations were eliminated
by relativity.
Quantum theory, dealing with the smallest parts of the universe, is known as
the fundamental theory of matter. The core of quantum theory follows other fundamental
physical theories, like relativity, in making no distinction in the direction
of time (Coveny and Highfield 1990). A basic premise is indeterminism, in which
the movement of particles at this level is a matter of probabilities. Along
with such elements as positrons, which can be regarded as electrons moving backward
in time, and tachyons, faster-than-light particles that generate effects and
contexts reversing the temporal order (Gribbin 1979, Lindley 1993), quantum
physics has raised fundamental questions about time and causality. In the quantum
microworld common acausal relationships have been discovered that transcend
time and put into question the very notion of the ordering of events in time.
There can be ``connections and correlations between very distant events in the
absence of any intermediary force or signal'' which occur instantaneously (Zohar
1982, Aspect 1982). The eminent American physicist John Wheeler has called attention
(1977, 1980, 1986) to phenomena in which action taken now affects the course
of events that have already happened.
Gleick (1992) summed up the situation as follows: ``With simultaneity gone,
sequentiality was foundering, causality was under pressure, and scientists generally
felt themselves free to consider temporal possibilities that would have seemed
far-fetched a generation before.'' At least one approach in quantum physics
has attempted to remove the notion of time altogether (J.G. Taylor 1972); D.
Park (1972), for instance, said, ``I prefer the atemporal representation to
the temporal one.''
The bewildering situation in science finds its match in the extremity of the
social world. Alienation, like time, produces ever greater oddities and pressures:
the most fundamental questions finally, almost necessarily, emerge in both cases.
St. Augustine's fifth century complaint was that he didn't understand what the
measurement of time really consisted of. Einstein, admitting the inadequacy
of his comment, often defined time as ``what a clock measures.'' Quantum physics,
for its part, posits the inseparability of measurer and what is measured. Via
a process physicists don't claim to understand fully, the act of observation
or measurement not only reveals a particle's condition but actually determines
it (Pagels 1983). This has prompted Wheeler (1984) to ask, ``Is everything--including
time--built from nothingness by acts of observer-participancy?'' Again a striking
parallel, for alienation, at every level and from its origin, requires exactly
such participation, virtually as a matter of definition.
Time's arrow--irrevocable, one-direction-only time--is the monster that has
proven itself more terrifying than any physical projectile. Directionless time
is not time at all, and Cambel(1993) identifies time directionality as ``a primary
characteristic of complex systems.'' The time-reversible behavior of atomic
particles is ``generally commuted into behavior of the system that is irreversible,''
concluded Schlegel (1961). If not rooted in the micro world, where does time
come from? Where does our time-bound world come from? It is here that we encounter
a provocative analogy. The small scale world described by physics, with its
mysterious change into the macro world of complex systems, is analogous to the
``primitive'' social world and the origins of division of labor, leading to
complex, class-divided society with its apparently irreversible ``progress''.
A generally held tenet of physical theory is that the arrow of time is dependent
on the Second Law of Thermodynamics (e.g. Reichenbach 1956), which asserts that
all systems tend toward ever greater disorder or entropy. The past is thus more
orderly than the future. Some proponents of the Second Law (e.g. Boltzmann 1866)
have found in entropic increase the very meaning of the past-future distinction.
This general principle of irreversibility was developed in the middle decades
of the 19th century, beginning with Carnot in 1824, when industrial capitalism
itself reached its apparent non- reversible point. If evolution was the century's
optimistic application of irreversible time, the Second Law of Thermodynamics
was its pessimistic one. In its original terms, it pictured a universe as an
enormous heat engine running down, where work became increasingly subject to
inefficiency and disorder. But nature, as Toda (1978) noticed, is not an engine,
does not work, and is not concerned with ``order'' or ``disorder''. The cultural
aspect of this theory--namely, capital's fear for its future--is hard to miss.
One hundred and fifty years later, theoretical physicists realize that the Second
Law and its supposed explanation of the arrow of time cannot be considered a
solved problem (N‚eman 1982). Many supporters of reversible time in nature
consider the Second Law too superficial, a secondary law not a primary one (e.g.
Haken 1988, Penrose 1989). Others (e.g. Sklar 1985) find the very concept of
entropy ill-defined and problematic, and, related to the charge of superficiality,
it is argued that the phenomena described by the Second Law can be ascribed
to particular initial conditions and do not represent the workings of a general
principle (Davies 1981, Barrow 1991). Furthermore, not every pair of events
that bear the ``afterward'' relation the one to the other bear an entropic difference.
The science of complexity (with a wider scope than chaos theory) has discovered
that not all systems tend toward disorder (Lewin 1992), also contrary to the
Second Law. Moreover, isolated systems, in which no exchanges with the environment
are allowed, display the Second Law's irreversible trend; even the universe
may not be such a closed system. Sklar (1974) points out that we don't know
whether the total entropy of the universe is increasing, decreasing, or remaining
stationary.
Despite such aporias and objections, a movement toward an ``irreversible physics''
based on the Second Law is underway, with quite interesting implications. 1977
Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine seems to be the most tireless and public advocate
of the view that there is an innate unidirectional time at all levels of existence.
Whereas the fundamentals of every major scientific theory, as noted, are neutral
with respect to time, Prigogine gives time a primary emphasis in the universe.
Irreversibility is for him and his like-minded fellow believers an over-arching
primal axiom. In supposedly nonpartisan science, the question of time has clearly
become a political matter.
Prigogine (1985), in a symposium sponsored by Honda and promoting such projects
as Artificial Intelligence: ``Questions such as the origin of life, the origin
of the universe, or the origin of matter, can no longer be discussed without
recourse to irreversibility.'' It is no coincidence that non-scientist Alvin
Toffler, America's leading cheerleader for a high-tech world, provided an enthusiastic
forward for one of the basic texts of the pro-time campaign, Prigogine and Stenger's
Order Out of Chaos (1984). Prigogine disciple Ervin Laszlo, in a bid to legitimate
and extend the dogma of universally irreversible time, asks whether the laws
of nature are applicable to the human world. He soon answers, in effect, his
own disingenuous question (1985): ``The general irreversibility of technological
innovation overrides the indeterminacy of individual points of bifurcation and
drives the processes of history in the observed direction from primitive tribes
to modern techno-industrial states.'' How ``scientific''! This transposition
from the ``laws of nature'' to the social world could hardly be improved on
as a description of time, division of labor, and the mega-machine crushing the
autonomy or ``reversibility'' of human decision. Leggett (1987) expressed this
perfectly: ``So it would seem that the arrow of time which appears in the apparently
impersonal subject of thermodynamics is inti- mately related to what we, as
human agents, can or cannot do.''
It is deliverance from ``chaos'' which Prigogine and others promise the ruling
system, using the model of irreversible time. Capital has always reigned in
fear of entropy or disorder. Resistance, especially resistance to work, is the
real entropy, which time, history, and progress constantly seek to banish. Prigogine
and Stenger (1984) wrote: ``Irreversibility is either true on all levels or
none.'' All or nothing, always the ultimate stakes of the game.
Since civilization subjugated humanity we have had to live with the melancholy
idea that our highest aspirations are perhaps impossible in a world of steadily
mounting time. The more that pleasure and understanding are deferred, moved
out of reach--and this is the essence of civilization--the more palpable is
the dimension of time. Nostalgia for the past, fascination with the idea of
time travel, and the heated quest for increased longevity are some of the symptoms
of time sickness, and there seems to be no ready cure. ``What does not elapse
in time is the lapse of time itself,'' as Merleau-Ponty (1945) realized.
In addition to the general antipathy at large, however, it is possible to point
out some recent specifics of opposition. The Society for the Retardation of
Time was established in 1990 and has a few hundred members in four European
countries. Less whimsical than it may sound, its members are committed to reversing
the contemporary acceleration of time in everyday life, toward the aim of being
allowed to live more satisfying lives. Michael Theunissen's Negative Theology
of Time appeared in 1991, aimed explicitly at what it sees as the ultimate human
enemy. This work has engendered a very lively debate in philosophical circles
(Penta 1993), due to its demand for a negative reconsideration of time.
``Time is the one single movement appropriate to itself in all its parts,''
wrote Merleau-Ponty (1962). Here we see the fullness of alienation in the separated
world of capital. Time is thought of by us before its parts; it thus reveals
the totality. The crisis of time is the crisis of the whole. Its triumph, apparently
well established, was in fact never complete as long as anyone could question
the first premises of its being.
Above Lake Silviplana, Nietzsche found the inspiration for Thus Spake Zarathustra.
``Six thousand feet above men and time...,'' he wrote in his journal. But time
cannot be transcended by means of a lofty contempt for humanity, because overcoming
the alienation that it generates is not a solitary project. In this sense I
prefer Rexroth's (1968) formulation: ``the only Absolute is the Community of
Love with which Time ends.''
Can we put an end to time? Its movement can be seen as the master and measure
of a social existence that has become increasingly empty and technicized. Averse
to all that is spontaneous and immediate, time more and more clearly reveals
its bond with alienation. The scope of our project of renewal must include the
entire length of this joint domination. Divided life will be replaced by the
possibility of living completely and wholly-- timelessly--only when we erase
the primary causes of that division.
We have gone along with the substantiation of time so that it seems a fact of
nature, a power existing in its own right. The growth of a sense of time--the
acceptance of time--is a process of adaptation to an ever more reified world.
It is a constructed dimension, the most elemental aspect of culture. Time's
inexorable nature provides the ultimate model of domination.
All ritual is an attempt, through symbolism, to return to the timeless state.
Ritual is a gesture of abstraction from that state, however, a false step that
only leads further away. The ``timelessness'' of number is part of this trajectory,
and contributes much to time as a fixed concept.
With the help of the stars, the year and its divisions exist as instruments
of organizational authority (Leach 1954). The formation of a calendar is basic
to the formation of a civilization. The calendar was the first symbolic artifact
that regulated social behavior by keeping track of time. And what is involved
is not the control of time but its opposite: enclosure by time in a world of
very real alienation.
In the world of alienation no adult can contrive or decree the freedom from
time that the child habitually enjoys--and must be made to lose. Time training,
the essence of schooling, is vitally important to society. This training, as
Fraser (1984) very cogently puts it, ``bears in almost paradigmatic form the
features of a civilizing process.''
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