Social science has operated
with an inappropriate conception of time in the natural sciences, an almost
non-temporal time, which can be described as Newtonian and Cartesian.
It is Newtonian because it is
based on the notion of absolute time, that from `its own nature, [it] flows
equably without relation to anything eternal ...the flowing of absolute time is
not liable to change' (quoted in Adam 1990: 50).
Such absolute time is
unchangeable, infinitely divisible into space-like units, measurable in length,
expressible as a number and crucially reversible…time moves along a time line.
It is time seen essentially as space, as unchangeable measurable
lengths which can be moved along, forwards and backwards.
And it is Cartesian space
because it is premised upon the dualisms of mind and body, repetition and
process, quantity and quality, form and content, subject and object and so on.
Coveney and Highfield note
that the `great edifices of science would all appear to work equally well with
time running in reverse' (1991: 23).
However, the notion of
time in nature has now been transformed.
It is no longer viewed as Newtonian and Cartesian.
The social sciences have
failed to see this change.
Four such major
scientific `discoveries' of the
twentieth century have transformed the understanding of time in nature.
First, Einstein demonstrated that there is no fixed
time which is independent of the system to which it is refers - time is a
local, internal feature of the system of observation of the person.
Second, again Einstein showed that time and space are
fused into four-dimensional space-time entities and that such a fused
space-time is curved under the influence of mass.
Third, chronobiologists (biologists studying life cycles)
have demonstrated that rhythmicity is the crucial principle of nature,
and in particular that humans are not just affected by clock-time but are
themselves clocks. Living things are composed of internal clocks entrained to
work in coordination with the rhythms of the external physical world
(circadian, lunar, circannual and life-cycle).
Fourth, evolutionary writers have emphasized that the
time of one's body should be extended to include the entire evolutionary
history of humans - that `the time of our body is not exhausted by our finitude
but arrives within it our entire evolutionary history' (Adam 1990: 166,
as well as chs 2, 3, 7; Rifkin 1987: ch 2; Hawking 1988).
The implication of all of
this is that nature is intrinsically chronological; and that there are many
different times in nature and an infinite number of times based on each
person’s notion of time.
Especially important is the way that physical time is now
conceptualized as irreversible and directional - as Eddington says: `The great
thing about time is that it goes on' (quoted in Coveney and Highfield 1991:
83).
The clearest example of this
can be seen in the process by which the universe has expanded - through the
cosmological arrow of time following the extraordinary singularity of a `big
bang' (see Coveney and Highfield 1991).
Laws of nature should thus
be viewed as historical and hence it is incorrect to construct a simple
dichotomy between nature as time-free or time-less or having a reversible
concept of time, and society as being fundamentally temporal.
Moreover, biologists have
shown that it is false to assert that only human beings experience time or
organize their lives through time. Biological time is not confined to ageing
but expresses the nature of biological beings as temporal, dynamic and cyclical
- humans as having a life-cycle. And of course, even `dead things' like
machines, buildings or physical landscapes are not merely `natural' and
time-free but are constructed through time processes of change, order and
decay.
We have thus summarized a
notion of time which is non-spatialized, non-reversible, multi-faceted, and
where no strong distinction is drawn between the times of nature and those of
humans.
What we will now consider is
how some of these considerations relate to one of the most intractable issues
in social science; that is, how does the past, a previous `time', impact
upon the present? How does a society incorporate the past? How do societies
remember?
This is not an issue that
many social scientists have really developed.
Often, they have relied on
the contributions of Marx on the role of `past generations' or of Freud on the
significance of `the unconscious'.
In each case the account does not provide detailed analysis of the
social mechanisms by which the past is repressed or is remembered in the
present.
This will be discussed
further in the next section when we analyse the development of collective
memory through heritage. For the moment we will briefly consider how memories
are in part biological or bodily and are not entirely social.
Bergson called into question
the spatialized conception of time and maintained that time or `duration' must
be seen as temporal (1950; Game
First, science and technology have resulted from a very long,
imperceptibly changing process, occurring over thousands of years, and
involving various forms of evolutionary adaptation.
The `mastery of nature' has been a centuries-long process. It was
not planned or designed but has happened as the outcome of millions of small
changes and tiny advances, which in a non-deterministic fashion resulted in
massive transformations of the relationship of humans and `nature' (as we now
are able to appreciate; see Adam 1990: 86-7).
And second, such
transformations have resulted in a contemporary science and technology based
upon time-frames that lie beyond conscious human experience: If telephones, telex and fax machines have
reduced the response time from months, weeks and days to seconds, the
computer has contracted them down to nanoseconds. The time-frame of a
computer relates to event times of a billionth of a second. (Adam 1990)
.
Nearly 50 per cent of
American workers use electronic equipment based on such nanoseconds while at
work (1987: 14).
It follows that when many important activities take place below
the threshold of human consciousness, then social time as structured by the
clock becomes progressively less relevant to the contemporary organization
of human society.
Never before has time been organized at a speed beyond the
realm of human consciousness.
Rifkin talks of how
computers in the next century will be able to make decisions in nanosecond
time.
Hence: The events being
processed in the computer world exist in a time realm that we will never be
able to experience. The new 'computer time' represents the final abstraction
of time and its complete separation from human experience and rhythms of
nature. (Rifkin 1987: 15)
So there are two
transformations of time which have taken place: the realization of an
immensely long, imperceptibly changing, evolutionary or glacial time;
and of a time so brief, so instantaneous that it cannot be experienced or
observed. Clock-time lies in the middle and it is clock-time that has been
the organizing principle of modernity.
To the extent that we are
passing into the post-modern, to disorganized capitalism, then we are moving to
time as glacial or evolutionary and to a time that is instantaneous.
Notions of reflexivity are
specifically linked to various aspects of time and to their transformations
under disorganized capitalism. Both instantaneous time and glacial time are
centrally important to the emergence of reflexive subjects, particularly in
their aesthetic and expressive moments.
In the case of the former
the instantaneous character of contemporary time certainly facilitates its use
by powerful organizations which often result in a flattening and a disembedding
of social relations (see Blade Runner).
But the use of instantaneous time can also be enabling for
ordinary subjects (chat rooms are instantaneous). They can view and evaluate
different cultures at the flick of a switch, or via high speed (or almost
instantaneous) transport(the Internet, see Neuromancer). This
enables the rapid collection and comparison between, different cultures and
places and symbols.
And this in turn facilitates
people's ability to manipulate these different cultures and their
symbolization. Part then of contemporary reflexivity involves time- and
space-travel in a variety of `real' and simulated forms via the media and the
Internet.
Such reflexivity is made
possible by a person’s reflection of time and its instantaneity.
But a second element of contemporary
culture is a reflexive awareness of the long-term relationship between humans,
animals and the rest of `nature'.
In such a reflexive
consciousness it is held, first, that humans are no longer simply
superior to all elements of `nature';
second, that humans have an especial responsibility for
ensuring the long-term survival not only of themselves but also of many other
species;
third, that there is and should be a long-term historical
relationship between humans and nature;
and fourth, that how this relationship develops in the future
is something that can only be evaluated after many generations, when for
example it is seen what the effects are of ozone depletion (see Yearley 1991).
Thus this glacial notion of time is one in which the relation between humans
and nature is very long-term and evolutionary. It moves back out of immediate
human history and forwards into a unsure future.
We will now elaborate on
these two kinds of post-modern time, time under disorganized capitalism,
beginning with instantaneous time. We will consider the many ways in
which it seems that the future is dissolving into the present, that `we
want the future now' has become emblematic of a panic about the `future'
and a search for the instantaneous (see Adam 1990: 140). Subsequently
evolutionary time will be examined.
A useful starting point is
Giddens' discussion of the transformations brought about in the modern world by
the development of its media, initially printing and then the electronic signal
(1991a: 24-7).
Printing was enormously
significant because such materials could cover space much more easily than
hand-written materials. Printing enabled the increasingly simultaneous
consumption of the same item (beginning with the Gutenberg Bible in 1450) and
has led to the stunning proliferation of cultural forms and their increasing
disposability.
The quantity of printed
materials has doubled every fifteen years or so since Gutenberg first appeared
(Giddens 1991a: 25).
But Giddens also notes the
important interdependence between mass printed media and electronic
communication. From very early on, the former was dependent on the latter,
especially with the growth of newspapers and their conception of `news'.
Although early newspapers
played a significant role in separating space from place, this process only
became nationally and then globally important with the integration of
printed and electronic media by the 1920’s.
Before then `news'
stories described events which were close-at-hand. The more distant an event, the later it would
appear, especially if the `news' had to be carried across oceans by slow-moving
ships.
It
was the telegraph (1850’s), later the telephone(1880’s), radio(1920’s), and
then the computer(1970’s), which meant that it was the `event' that governed
inclusion, rather than the place in which it occurred.
Newspapers
thus came to consist of the reporting of very many events, chosen
principally in terms of their newsworthy value and not their location.
There are thus two
dramatically distinct features of contemporary media.
One is what Giddens calls the collage effect,
that once events have become more important than location, then the
presentation in the media takes the form of the combination and placing of
stories and items that share nothing in common except that they are
`newsworthy' (1991a: 26). Stories from many different places occur alongside
each other in a chaotic and arbitrary fashion, such stories serving to abstract
events from context and narrative.
The experience of news is
thus a temporally and spatially confused collage - a collage in which time as
instantaneous is paramount.
Second, the media of disorganized capitalism involves the
`intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness' (Giddens 1991a: 27).
Events often of an appallingly tragic character are dramatically brought into
people's everyday experience. Such as
massacres in Bosnia, famine in Africa, etc.
There is thus a literal
time-space compression as this collage of disconnected stories intrude
and shape everyday life.
And instantaneously people
are `transported' from one tragedy to another in ways which seem out of
control.
This then appears to be a world full of risks and where there
is little likelihood of even understanding the newsworthy tragedies that are
routinely represented every day.
The collage and compression
effects are in turn connected to the development of the so-called three-minute
culture (or even three-second culture if nothing is on cable),
that those watching TV or the VCR tend to hop,from channel to channel and that
they rarely spend time in completely watching a lengthy programme.
The average news stories on
TV network news average about 20 seconds and then move to another story.
Indeed many programmes are
now made to mimic such a pattern, being made up of a collage of visual and
aural images, a stream of `sound bites', each lasting a very short time and
having no particular connection with those coming before and after. CNN TV news does this.
This instantaneous
conception of time can be characterized as `video-time'.
Another way of expressing
this is in terms of the changing attitude to waiting.
For example, Medicine can be though of as a `waiting
culture' - in order to maintain social order and restore natural order, patients
are removed from their normal space and time and placed within a new space
where the time organization of others can be easily imposed upon them (1988:
148).
And it is patients who wait,
often hours, while the medical staff do not (although interestingly medical
staff have little time that is not itself regulated partly by subordinates).
But we can generalize
from this and suggest that the capacity to wait is an integral part of growing
up and becoming human (Adam 1990:
124-5).
Young adults must develop
a certain trust in the future - that there is a `future' and that it has
some `reality', that it is worth waiting for.
Deferred gratification then
is most likely when future rewards are reasonably certain and partly under a
person's control.
Deferred gratification
involves people having a trusting relationship to the future and this will
characterize those whose position is powerful within the social structure (see
Adam 1990: 124-5).
However, various kinds of evidence suggest that there may have
been a decline in the significance of such deferred gratification, even amongst
those who are in a structurally strong position.
Instantaneous time dissolves the future - `I want the future now'
as the T-shirt expresses it, although interestingly hunting and gathering
societies may exhibit a similar orientation to immediate gratification.
Nowotny writes: we are about to abolish the category of
the future and replace it with that of the extended present . . .
The category of the future is shrinking towards becoming a mere extension of
the present because science and technology have successfully reduced the
distance that is needed to accommodate their own products. (1985: 14-15)
Thus as a result of the need
for instantaneous responses, particularly because of the telephone, telex, fax,
electronic signals and so on, the future appears to dissolve and it no longer
functions as something in which people appear to trust.
How many images, cartoon,
movies, focus on the impending doom of the earth. Also this is prevalent in news reports on environmental
disasters, nuclear disasters, over-population of the earth, global warming,
etc. The media spectacularizes these
events and makes them “real” in people’s minds. Thus, it is hard to believe in a future to trust.
There are two
consequences. First, as we discussed, the objective time of modernity
(1880’s-1970) gradually gives way to a set of personalized, subjective times
which are self-generated and involve people constantly recreating biographical
narratives for them to make sense out their time and lives.
Trust and commitment over time are less geared to institutions and
more to how individuals create their own subjective time of life narratives.
Second, the lack of trust in the future means that it is increasingly
likely that gratification will not be deferred. I want it now is the cry
of consumers and due to credit they can have it now.
Clearly though there are
here marked differences between Western economies, with the Anglo-Saxon
countries, (rather than Japan or Germany), placing a stronger emphasis upon
instantaneous time.
The following are some
indicators that disorganized capitalism, especially in north America and parts
of Europe, does indeed involve a collapse of a waiting culture and the permeation
of instantaneous time.
There are the increased
rates of divorce and other forms of household dissolution as well as the marked
rise in the willingness of especially women to undertake affairs within
marriage (see Lawson 1989).
Likewise conservative
critics have suggested that there is a reduced sense of trust, loyalty and
commitment of families over generations, that family relationships are much
more disposable (see Lasch 1980).
And more generally, products
and images are increasingly disposable in a `throwaway society' in which there
is a strong emphasis upon the volatility and ephemerality in fashions,
products, labour processes, ideas and images (D. Harvey 1989: 285-6; Toffier
1970).
There is a heightened
'temporariness' of products, values and personal relationships, where the
`temporary contract' is everything (Lyotard 1984: 66; D. Harvey 1989: 113,
286).
This in turn relates to an accelerating turnover-time and the
proliferation of new products and of flexible forms of technology (Piore and
Sabel 1984).
Except in Japanese plants
there is the decline in long-term jobs and careers and an increased tendency
for short-term labour contracts (D. Harvey 1989: 287).
There is the growth of 24-hour trading so that investors and
dealers never have to wait for the buying and selling of securities and foreign
exchange (see chapter 11 below). WalMart is open 24 hours.
There are extraordinary
increases in the availability of products so that one does not have to wait to
travel anywhere in order to consume some new style or fashion (see D. Harvey
1989: 299 on the `emporium of styles' in US cities).
Or rather `there is no
fashion, only fashions' since there
are `no rules, only choices' (see Featherstone 1991: 83).
Political preferences are
increasingly volatile, so that in Britain up to two-fifths of the electorate
change who they vote for between elections (Sarlvik and Crewe 1983).
And as economies become
sign-based the turnover-time of such signs (brand names and styles) and hence
of such products is extraordinarily rapid, and in cases almost instantaneous
(D. Harvey 1989: 288).
More generally, there is an
increased sense of speed in social life which at least for Virilio replaces the
clear distances of time and space that
transcends and destroys the notion of being in a place (1986).
This constitutes a striking
set of changes, which in turn have significant implications for the nature of
people’s perceptions.
The profound emphasis upon
instantaneous time means that the time-space paths of individuals are
desynchronized. People of the same age
are often in different states of growth and development in terms of personality
and especially career.
There is a greatly increased
variation in different people's times.
They are less collectively
organized and structured as mass consumption patterns are replaced by more
varied and segmented and individualized
patterns of choice and consumption.
There
are a number of indicators of such time-space desynchronization which
again is more marked in the UK and USA: the increased significance of grazing,
that is not eating at fixed meal times in the same place in the company of
one's family or workmates; the growth of `free and independent
travellers' who specifically resist mass travel in a group where everyone has
to engage in common activities at fixed times; the development of flex-time,
so that groups of employees no longer start and stop work at the same time;
and the growth of the VCR which means that TV programmes can be stored,
repeated and broken up, so that no sense remains of the authentic, shared
watching of a particular programme.
This in turn may well be
linked to the emphasis placed on so-called quality time by those whose lives
demonstrate exceptionally complex time-space paths.
It is precisely because of
the very high levels of time-space desynchronization between two or more people
that efforts are made to ensure short but sweet moments of uninterrupted
`presence-availability'.
We have so far connected
instantaneous time to a lack of confidence about the future.
But there is another side to
this which we have not yet discussed and that is the remarkable appeal of the
past. Once upon a time such nostalgia was formally confined to
particular times and places.
Some have warned how an excess of remembrance can smother
creativity.
Likewise in the first half of nineteenth-century France there was
much medical dissection of the pathology of `nostalgia'. This was taken
to be an excess of desire for the past and a refusal to live in the present as
that time which anticipates the future (see Roth 1992).
Gradually over the century
such a nostalgia was turned into a thing of the past, as progress, mobility and
science transformed the contours of industrial society.
Now again it seems nostalgia
is everywhere, engulfing almost
every experience and artefact from the past, even the `dark satanic mills' of
the industrial revolution or 1950s juke boxes, cars, retro-everything,
antiques, fashion, etc.
Lowenthal characterizes such
nostalgia as `memory with the pain taken out' (1985: 8).
And Hewison has argued that
Britain has come to specialize not on manufacturing goods but rather on
manufacturing nostalgia or heritage (1987).
And such institutionalized
heritage functions to deflect attention in a systematic way from the forms of
social deprivation and inequality in the present (see Urry 1990c: ch 8 for a
review of this argument). This nostalgia is for an idealized past, for a
sanitized version not of history but of heritage.
Once the menace or the
solace of a small elite, nostalgia now attracts or afflicts most levels of
society. Ancestor-hunters search archives for their roots; millions throng to
historic houses; antiques engross the middle class; souvenirs flood consumer
markets . . . `A growing rebellion against the present, and an increased
longing for the past', are said to exemplify the post-war mood. (1985: 11)
Michael Wood likewise
suggests that until the 1970s nostalgia trips were `surreptitious and
ambivalent' because people did not want to lose their hold on the present and a
modernist belief in the future. But:
Now that the present seems so full of woe . . . the profusion and
frankness of our nostalgia [suggests] . . . a general abdication, an actual
desertion from the present. (1974: 346)
There are a number of
aspects identifiable here: the loss
of trust in the future as it is undermined by instantaneous time and the
proliferation of incalculable risks;
The belief that social
life in the present is profoundly disappointing and that in important ways the past was preferable
to the present - there really was a golden age;
The increased aesthetic
sensibility to old places, crafts, houses, countryside and so on, so that
almost everything that is old is thought to be valuable whether it is an old
master or an old cake tin;
The need nevertheless for a certain re-presentation of the past -
to construct a cleaned-up heritage look suitable for the gaze of tourists; the
interpretation of history through artefacts - an artefactual history - which in
part conceals what the underlying social relations were and may write out the
history of struggle which is often how social groups do remember socially (such
as British miners and 1926); Museum addiction, and the proliferation of
musems
An increased significance of
pastiche (collection) rather than understanding as the past is sought through
images and stereotypes which render the `real' past unobtainable and replace
narrative by spectacle;
The belief that once
history is `heritage', that once the
past has been commodified,(something that can be bought, sold and/or
packaged) it is made safe, sterile and shorn of its capacity to generate risk
and danger, subversion and seduction;
Some preservers believe they
save the real past by preventing it from being made over.
But we cannot avoid
remaking our heritage, for every act of recognition alters what survives.
We can use the past
fruitfully only when we realise that to inherit is also to transform . . .
Finally here, in the
analysis of instantaneous time humans come to understand themselves and their
position in the world through metaphor.
In pre-modern times the
predominant metaphor was that of the animal, which was both familiar and
distinct.
In modern times the predominant metaphors have been the clock and
various kinds of machinery and equipment.
In the last few decades it
is two metaphors, the instantaneous time of the computer, and the hologram.
(see Rifkin 1987 on the former).
We have already considered
the former but the latter is perhaps less obvious. Holography is
based on the principles of non-sequentiality, (reality does not occur in a
sequence) the individual-whole relationship and a multi-perspective focus.
The information stored is
not located in the individual parts but in how all the particles interact with
each other in a matrix:
`Any one part of a hologram
contains, implies, and resonates information of the whole. The focus here is
not on individual particles in motion, crossing time and space in
succession, but on all of the information gathered up simultaneously'
(Adam 1990: 159). The word hologram means `writing the whole'. This
makes the language of causal determinism inappropriate (things and causes
happening in sequence are wrong).
The connections within a
hologram are simultaneous and everything implies everything else. Holographic principles are particularly well-suited
to a theory of instantaneous time.
Thus, reality is constructed
like a matrix and the slightest change in one part affects all the parts which
in turn affect the entire matrix…this is similar to chaos theory
in Math.
This suggests that causality
(what causes what to happen in terms of history) is not uni-linear, fashioned like a time-line but rather composed
of intersecting planes of reality within a matrix…thus great causes that effect
history are as important as historical accidents that change history.
From: Scott Lash and John Urry (eds.). The Economies of Signs and Space. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994:
223-241.