Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience

by Helga Nowotny, Neville Plaice (Translator)

"Helga Nowotny's exploration of the forms and meaning of time in contemporary life is panoramic without in any way partaking of the blandness of a survey. From the artificial time of the scientific laboratory to the distinctively modern yearning for one’s own time, she regards every topic in this wide-ranging book from a fresh angle of vision, one which reveals unsuspected affinities between the bravest, newest worlds of global technology and the most ancient worlds of myth."
-- Lorraine Daston, University of Chicago
This book represents a major contribution to the understanding of time, giving particular attention to time in relation to modernity. The development of industrialism, the author points out, was based upon a linear and abstract conception of time. Today we see that form of production, and the social institutions associated with it, supplanted by flexible specialization and just-in-time production systems. New information and communication technologies have made a fundamental impact here. But what does all this mean for temporal regimes? How can we understand the transformation of time and space involved in the bewildering variety of options on offer in a postmodern world?
The author provides an incisive analysis of the temporal implications of modern communication. She considers the implications of worldwide simultaneous experience, made possible by satellite technologies, and considers the reorganization of time involved in the continuous technological innovation that marks our era. In this puzzling universe of action, how does one achieve a 'time of one's own'? The discovery of a specific time perspective centred in the individual, she shows, expresses a yearning for forms of experience that are subversive of established institutional patterns.
This brilliant study, became a classic in Germany, will be of interest to students and professionals working in the areas of social theory, sociology, politics and anthropology.

Genres: Academic

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Helga Nowotny is President and a founding member of the ERC, the European Research Council. She is Professor emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich. In 2007 she was elected ERC Vice President and in March 2010 succeeded Fotis Kafatos as President of the ERC. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, NY. and a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Vienna.
Her current host institution is the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). Helga Nowotny is a member of the University Council of the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and member of many other international Advisory Boards and selection committees.

Reviews

[Ari Stillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I often wonder when reading translations how much of the author's voice is lost to interpretations of the translator. In the case of Nowotny's book, which sometimes reads like a mystical meditation, there is much I fear I did not apprehend for this reason. Even so, the book is packed with cultural, scientific, and historical context to explain how time and its iterations (proper time, social time, etc.) have come to function and be experienced in the way they are. Importantly, Nowotny expounds upon what she calls the 'extended present' – the eclipse of a hopeful future orientation toward progress and betterment by resignation to both a long-term future entailing more of the same and fulfilling immediate needs to subsist in newfound time pressure. The currency of time changes with the times – increasingly commodified not just by the production and reproduction of Capital, but its consumption as well. This leads to a longing for the moment – for more time – whether for work or leisure as one experiences deficiently. Through her feminist lens, at times she makes sweeping gendered statements that detract from an otherwise erudite exposé of the phenomenology of time. This is a book better read as a review than spending more *time* going in depth trying to decipher a difficult text made more difficult through translation.

[Ed Parke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a head-scratcher.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid and fascinating work on political and social time.

[Quynh Anh]

While reading "Lost Modernities":
It has been said that thirteenth-century Europe began to witness the supersession of God’s time by the humanly calculated time scales of traders. 29 It could be added that the supersession of natural time by bureaucratic time had also begun in the mandarinates, pluralistic as they were, and not excluding those polities small enough for refeudalization to continue to seem a realistic option.
Woodside, Alexander. Lost Modernities : China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History, Harvard University Press, 2006

- Eigenzeit = time in German
- Eigen = belonging to the self => Eigenzeit = self-time

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