Geoffrey Glass, 2005-12-06
Time and space are central to our individual sense of meaning and significance in the world. Since the Enlightenment, we have developed the technologies which mediate our relationship to these concepts; they – and the idea of individuality itself – have undergone great changes. Our attempt to conquer time has led us to dominate space, to exult and suppress the individual, and paradoxically has set in motion ideas which have spun time itself beyond our control.
The concepts of time and space, of individual and collective are strangely connected. In The Bias of Communication, Innis tells us that some media dominate space. Space is not only a function of distance, but of people: when we speak of the size of a country, we often mean its population. When Innis places space in opposition to time, we might expect space to correspond to the collective or the mass and time to the individual. Yet as society came to focus on the individual, it loosened its grasp on time and strengthened its domination of space.
The concept of “mass” does not necessarily correspond to space; neither does it match with the idea of the collective. The sermon of the medieval priest was collective, but it was not a mass communication. Hitler's amplified voice at a Nuremburg rally, on the other hand, could fairly be considered mass communication, hardly different from the radio of Goebbels – even though the space it dominated (directly at least) was much less.
A transcendent perspective of time – as something that exceeds the life of an individual – may provide an answer. Richard K. Fenn connects the rise of secularism to the individual's loss of time. His secular society is essentially incoherent – there is no “transcendent vantage point”, no “values that represent and yet transcend the individual” (Time Exposure 20). But the Enlightenment project did espouse a transcendent vantage point and values: the belief in human perfectibility and human progress.
Horkheimer and Adorno have linked the modern horrors of the twentieth century to this transcendent progress (Harvey 13). We can see the fruits of this progress in the changing relationship between the individual and society; we can also see it in the relationship between the individual and time.
The momentum of progress overpowers the individual. Religion provides a choice between God and Satan; progress offers none. Whether one participates or not, history rolls on. Society becomes the embodiment of time, of eternity, and of the future. Kumar (77) explains how “the history of collective humanity was compared [by Enlightenment philosophers] to the development of a single individual, growing from infancy into adulthood”. The life of one person becomes only a fragment of history: like the worker in the factory, the individual was only a small part of the process. Mass time was utopian; it saved – or lost – everyone together. Medieval time, for all its social pressures and implications, was individual time: it saved the world one soul at a time.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are blessed with eternal life in the Garden of Eden. When they eat the apple of knowledge, God expels them from the garden into the wider world, where they will grow old and die. They have won space but the price is mortality.
The people of the medieval world made an accommodation with time. Through faith and submission on Earth, the pious could again enter eternal Heaven. It was an era of feudal hierarchy and collective identity. Davies says that people had the conviction that they were “the helpless pawns of Providence” (473). Nevertheless his was a very personal act. Salvation was something which benefited the individual; it neither required nor influenced the salvation of others. When people won time back, they did it for themselves.
It had to be time. People have always had spiritual yearnings. Why, they ask, is this the world? Why was it made and why is it hard and what does it mean? More than anything else, they desire the answer to that last: what does it mean – to me. People try to find significance for themselves in a larger world. For emperors and kings, one way has always been to conquer space. Perhaps if they control more of it, change more of it, own (as they believe) more of it, their existence will not seem so small. Often it seems not to be enough, and they wish to conquer time as well, with statues and pyramids and their attempts to rewrite history.
Harold Innis writes about empires of time and space, and the trade-offs in media which tend to support one or the other (Empire). For the common people space was not an option. They could never be big in space: even travel was difficult. But eternity could not be denied; the Kingdom of God was available to all1.
Time is a funny thing. The less we have of it, more brief and brutal our lives, the more we look to eternity. Our experience of eternity is likewise something brief. Over generations, the people of Medieval Europe built cathedrals in attempts to communicate with their God. When we enter these monuments, immortalized in stone, our experience of the eternal is like a moment that lasts forever – a mote of light in dust and glass fragmented into kaleidescopes of color.
So the medieval people strove for salvation. While that salvation was personal, the means to it was collective: prayer and worship were necessarily so in a structured society where the path to God was through the ritual and speech of a priest literate in Latin. He in turn depended on the Book – a collective medium, but not a mass one: copies were created painstakingly by hand. Such a society, like Ong's primary oral cultures, is conservative, traditional, and resistant to change.
The Europeans of the Middle Ages lived in a world of tradition and natural cycles. That world was shaken by the drive of another people to conquer space: the Mongols rode across Fernández-Armesto's “highway of civilizations”. They left behind the silk road, binding Europe to the inventions of China. Those inventions – chief among them printing – set the stage for the Reformation.
The Reformation swept in an individual relationship with God, a change made possible by the printed Bible. Personal salvation remained, but now it was mediated not by a community, but by a book. The change shattered the Christian world, to the point where Davies says, “people stopped talking about Christendom, and began talking instead about 'Europe'” (Davies 496). The language of time gave way to the language of space. As the Catholic monopoly collapsed, reason rose to challenge religion.
This was the age of Newton. He had sought truth, and found it. His interest in alchemy (Pesic 130), his foreshadowing Einstein by linking time and space (Pesic 125), hint at a pursuit of the mystery of time. And his Laws gave the Enlightenment philosophes their idea.
Newton had found laws which existed beyond the pleasure of God. He could say that when he released an apple it would fall – not because God willed it but because of laws it obeyed and forces which acted upon it. If Newton could find laws of Nature, could we not find laws of Man?
The philosophes believed that the individual of the Reformation could exercise reason to analyze history; understanding history he (it was nearly always he) could achieve progress. They sought universal laws of history. And by universal, not only did the philosophes mean true everywhere: they also meant true for all time.
Their Enlightenment project offered the recovery of salvation. John Keane echoes Genesis, but this time the loss of Eden offers a new path to eternity: “God loaned individuals reason and, hence, the capacity to read and to choose, according to the dictates of conscience, between good and evil” (12). Just as humanity lost eternity in the Fall, but recovered in with Christ's coming, we could conquer time not only in Heaven, but also here on Earth (see also Kumar 69). Marshall Berman argues that Marx would later make a similar comparison – between the loss of a false history concealed by clothes and the discovery of the naked truth of class oppression (106).
The project was doomed to fail. It assumed too much: it assumed that what was true for the physical world was true for society. It assumed that there are no fundamental differences of opinion; that with reason we can all work toward one end (Harvey 27). It was blind to the inherent biases of the people who proposed it.
The project also forged a new relationship with time. Progress exceeds the scope of a single human life: it demands a collective effort. The Reformation accommodation with time, like the medieval one, was personal. This new arrangement would have to be collective. Further, as Harvey notes, “by treating certain idealized conceptions of space and time as real, Enlightenment thinkers ran the danger of confining the free flow of human experience and practice to rationalized configurations” (253). They laid the groundwork for “instrumental rationality” (Bernstein in Harvey 15).
Already, before the project was even conceived, Enlightenment reason was having other effects. Hand-in-invisible-hand with Smith's market, capital, science and technology had been united in the first stages of Schumpeter's cycles of creative destruction.
Since Gutenberg's press, commercial printing had produced a flood of pamphlets, newspapers, and books. In the nineteenth century, two new printed forms emerged. The first of these – the newspaper – accelerated the change with its narrow focus on now, overwhelming the historic sense of the past one might find in a handwritten manuscript. Its readers had the world brought to them – it shrank, and their time horizons with it.
Other industries followed. As imperial powers formed corporations to colonize the world, commerce turned science and reason to material ends. Networks of small craft workshops gave way to industrial factories. Employment shifted from the countryside to the cities, leaving behind the rural rhythms of sunrise and sunset, of the moon, of the seasons, of close proximity to natural cycles and life and death. In their place was the clockwork time of the cities – arbitrary time, dictated by profit.
Walter Benjamin's called this “homogeneous empty time” (quoted in Lekan 251). For McLuhan, it is this mechanization which shattered our understanding of time:
. . . the paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet, as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following except change. (11-12)
If human history was like Kumar's growth from childhood into adulthood, then the individual human life was similarly broken down futher into fragments of time.
Change became its own objective. It replaced progress for the sake of humanity; in so doing it came to control us. Capitalism – which had built the metropolis – pushed and pulled the people from creation to destruction. Schumpeter described the cycle of innovation that replaced the natural cycles: the market drives businesses to ever greater efficiencies in attempts to out-compete one another; as their profits shrink they are forced to seek out new technological innovation and start the cycle of competition anew (Hall 297).
In response, people tried to find connections to the past – in ruins, museums, and in history (Harvey 272). They sought other narratives, alternatives to the harsh new pattern, and found them in the new form of the novel; like the printed Bible, these offered reading as a personal act. Poetry, a holdover from a time of collective oral communication, gazed romantically back on the green world its authors imagined they had left behind. In Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, the narrator leaves the “fretful stir / unprofitable, and fever of the world” for a wistful fleeting stroll through the countryside, who “never did betray / The heart that loved her”. Like the memory, the “half-extinguished thought” of nature, poetry itself – so vital in Shakespeare's London in an earlier stage of urbanization – was to fade before the onslaught of the media of a new age.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw the acceleration of change. For many, the Great War brought final disillusion with the laws of progress and reason. The sense of loss – of time, of the natural world, of the connection of people to each other, to life – was pervasive. Although Einsten, like Newton and the philosophes, “adhered to perfect and complete determinism in physics” (Pesic 144), his relativity broke the clockwork laws of Newton's universe. The Russian revolution struck at the capitalist system, just as the French revolution had threatened monarchy a century before.
People knew time had escaped them. Artists tried to express their loss and recapture it, the “eternal and immutable” (Baudelaire in Harvey 10). Nowhere was more affected than Berlin, credited by Hall with the “invention of the twentieth century”. There, “all values were changed . . . no tradition, no moral code was respected. Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world” (Stefan Zweig in Hall 242). Competing values of individualism and collectivism clashed as communists and freikorps roamed the streets.
Berlin theater attempted to address “the community rather than the individual” (Hall 244). Christopher Innes says it was liberated “from the old temporal and spiritual constraints” (Hall 251). Brecht's play Mahogannay was “based on nothing except human estrangement. It is a mirage-city where the hunted will easily flock because they believe in a happiness which is not earned but stolen in an instant” (Weideli quoted in Hall 271). Piscator mixed film, audio, and performance in a simultaneous assault on the senses in an attempt to achive a “wider reality” (Hall 254); like McLuhan's description of cubism as the “instant sensory awareness of the whole” (McLuhan 13), which appears fragmented, and it is that very fragmentation that captures a larger image. The masses were divided by their own numbers, kept in “perpetual flux” by the forces of capitalism (Berman 104). The only connection to the eternal is by “freezing time” (Harvey 21). The kaleidescope of the cathedral has become the fragmented experience of ourselves in the crowds of our cities.
The logic of modernity's constant change had produced this sense of loss, a disconnect between people and time – something Fenn argues leads societies to turn to Fascism (Death of Time). Technologies of transportation and communication gave them some dominion over space, but as the emperors of old had found, space may not be enough when one is adrift in time. The Enlightenment project had produced progress, a drive which demanded collective effort. The cataclysm of the Great War broke decisively with the past. Technology leapt forward, as it often does in war. The hereditary aristocracies of Europe gave way to young democracies. At the height of the dislocation, two ideas of the previous century gave birth to new dominions in Russia and Germany. Each attempted to find a new accommodation with time.
Soviet philosophy was inspired by Marx's dialectical analysis, designed for dealing with dynamic phenomena, promised a solution grounded in the reason of the Enlightenment and faith in the force of History. Milosz says of socialist philosophy in Soviet Poland:
The Method exerts a magnetic influence on contemporary man because it alone emphasizes, as has never before been done, the fluidity and interdependence of phenomena. Since the people of the twentieth century find themselves in social circumstances where even the dullest mind can see that “naturalness” is being replaced by fluidity and interdependence, thinking in categories of motion seems to be the surest means of seizing reality in the act. (51)
Marxism, “illumining the past”, could “change the terms by which we accept the present, and thereby change our ability to shape the future” (Heilbruner 80). It was a rational attempt to reconquer time after the collapse of the medieval accommodation and the modern exchange for space. But it too was an accommodation, based on the Enlightenment model: it was collective.
The accommodation was this: individuals in society surrendered their freedom of conscience. The theory then gave “its holders an unchallengeable right to determine action” (Heilbruner 88). The people had to accept instead the values of socialism – in politics, in philosophy, in art; indeed in all things. In return, they would gain a role in time, but like that of Horkheimer and Adorno, it would be subservient to the system: “Let us admit that a man is no more than an instrument in an orchestra directed by the muse of History. It is only in this context that the notes he produces have any significance” (Milosz 11).
The Soviets controlled religion – their state absorbed it and became it (Innis Bias 88). And they applied Marx's doctrine – “from each according to his ability” – literally and early; exceptional children were soon trained on the work of their lives. The state became a substitute family.
Hitler, with his utopian vision of corrupted Darwinism, dreamed of conquering time another way: through race and nation, “Blood and Soil”. “The German countryside must be preserved under all circumstances, for it is and has forever been the source of strength and greatness for our people” (Hitler quoted in Lekan 153).
In the previous century nationalism had proved it could conquer space; the Nazis would harness it also to conquer time. Himmler's terrible fantastic Ahnenerbe applied the language of reason to imagined histories of Aryan Vikings and Atlantis. To this “race” Hitler applied his own historical laws of survival of the fittest, placing nature above the human progress of the Enlightenment: “human beings . . . owe their higher existence . . . to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature's stern and rigid laws” (quoted in Lekan 158). The Nazis looked to the future as well as the past – “wars come and go, the works of human culture remain” (Hitler quoted in Hermand 285). Hitler opposed modernity, from art to the “chaos of the modern metropolis” (Lekan 159).
Hitler spread this vision through the media – the fleeting voice of the radio carried the faithful beyond their own lives to the life of the imagined race. His mass choreography produced mass rapture, captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl. Standing in the throngs of the huge Zeppelin Field in Nuremburg, this “'Messianic' [Benjamin] time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (Lekan 251) must have felt like a moment of transcendence in a gothic cathedral. And, even after the Reich's thousand years, according to Albert Speer's theory of “ruin value”, the rubble would “resemble Roman models” (Holtorf).
The Nazis sought Lebensraum, and their vision soon collapsed, followed half a century later by the Soviet one. In the end, through whatever combination of the accidental historical strength of its champions and the wealth of its capitalist philosophy, the West prevailed. That other great and terrible experiment, China, where Mao once called for endless revolution and the disposal of the “four olds” – old custom, old culture, old habits, old ideas – has also been seduced by capitalist wealth.
Are we still living in an era of modern time? Progress, under the name “growth”, is still a guiding principle in the West. The dictatorships of the past century were the product of many forces. It is surely no accident that Hall's first twentieth century city, Berlin, was the focus of so much of the struggle. While the contradictions of the Enlightenment surely played a role in the horror and collapse, the concept of time can only be one factor, one point of view for tracing the tragedy.
Today the pace of change is slower. Electric lighting, the telephone, plastics, radio, the automobile, and flight all preceeded the Great War. Then came the collapse of Europe and its aristocracy, the rise of democracy, fascism and of communism. Today's great movements – globalization, the cell phone, computers and the Internet, the terrorism of 9/11 – seem minor by comparison.
McLuhan seems positive. He sees a new understanding of time and structures which surround us. Mechanization brought serialization, but that gave way when electric media allowed us to recapture the whole, as in film and cubism (12-13). Perhaps this is Ong's secondary orality, a less fragmented view of time.
Or perhaps it is that capitalism has succeeded where the Soviet Union failed. In Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno describe how the techniques once used to critique the system are taken up by capitalist mass culture. They lose their authenticity, their ability to comment on the society that surrounds them. Instead, they reinforce the very loss of time they were originally intended to combat. For Horkheimer and Adorno , sound film is “so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend . . . yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts” (126-127). Mass culture moves so fast the audience cannot keep up; yet still it repeats profitable patterns over and over; it “excludes the new” (134), so denying the possibility of a future. It denies its audience a sense of the whole: “developments must follow from the immediately preceeding situation and never from the idea of the whole” (137). In so far as individuals might contribute to society's progress, rationality dictates that “anyone might become an engineer or a manager . . . chance and planning become the same thing” (146). In an eerie echo of Milosz's orchestra of history, those dominated by capitalism find that their role in time, if they can find one, is only minor and accidental in the context of the system.
Where Horkheimer and Adorno see us advancing past the Enlightenment concept of time, Neil Postman suggests that we have reverted to pre-Enlightenment beliefs. He suggests that with literacy, time changed on a personal level. Before the Enlightenment the concept of childhood did not exist. Once children had mastered the oral language, they were considered full members of society. Literacy changed this, for in order to participate in society they required not only facility with the spoken language, but also the ability to read and write: “Locke's metaphor of the mind as a tablet depicts precisely the connection between childhood and the printed word . . . illiteracy and childhood were inseperable, adulthood being defined as total linguistic competence.” (121). So adulthood came later, and the idea of childhood was born. He suggests that with the dominance of television and other electronic media, and their emphasis on visual and oral communication, we have reverted. Children on television, like those in the portraits of old, look and act like miniature adults (116-135).
Himanen also sees the gap between generations collapsing – but he suggests that in modern society adults are treated like children: “The culture of work-time supervision is a culture that regards grown-up persons as too immature to be in charge of their lives” (39). What he calls the “hacker ethic” is the vanguard of an attempt for individuals to take back control of time from a mechanized society.
Whatever the case, our uneasy relationship remains. Time pressures and time management are taught to school children, to executives, to soccer moms. Phone calls interrupt us at dinner. Television is a quick succession of cuts – a commercial might last for thirty seconds, but have a dozen shots and scenes lasting mere moments. Schedules dictate our movements: when we clock in to work, when we clock out, how long we sleep, how long we talk to our children. When we do talk to them (despite the theories of Himanen and Postman), or to our parents, we find a gap, as if time moved so quickly in a generation. In all of this, we can sympathize with Marx when he said, “all that is solid melts into air” (quoted in Harvey 11).
We have not given up on the conquest of time. With film, popular music, and television came the idea of fame – Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes (and the blogosphere's fifteen people) is evidence enough of that. Fame inverts the personal investment in the group characterizing collective time, and opposes the personal relationship with God of the medieval era. More generally fame is one path to success; success and its symbols are attempts at transcendence. Those who pursue this new accommodation overthrow both religions. Maybe for them – for the entrepreneurs with two cars, two kids, and a house in the burbs, and for the survivors of reality TV – there is a new accommodation. Or maybe they only only think so; unlike religious eternity or progress, success is not transcendent: it is achievable. What then remains?
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1An economist might say that salvation is non-rival and non-excludable.