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Title: Time and its Discontents Author: John Zerzan Language: en Topics: alienation, anti-civ Source: Retrieved on February 11th, 2009 from http://www.primitivism.com/time.htm
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 a concept 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 so well. “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 20^(th) 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 German proverb. 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 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 Valéry (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 contributes 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.
“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 14^(th) into the 17^(th) 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 19^(th) 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.”
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.
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.
I’m not a scientist but I do know that all things begin and end in
eternity.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter Tevis
Science, 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 19^(th) 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
intimately 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.”