In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

402 CODES COLLAPSED
Wave the blood-red flags, and
howling victory your squadrons cut through the night
like rifts of flames. A light
burst scarlet-large.
Shooting sparks strangle
the world-horror dancing.
(Becher, 116)
Precariousness leading to an ultimate loss of temporal structure: this
is the key experience associated with the impression of accelerated
change. Unstructured time, however-time as matter (or substance of
time), as one may say-seems to offer itself as a medium ready to be
inscribed, structured, and manipulated (Luhmann, 45-69). This situation
facilitates images of the expansion or contraction of time through
new ways of organizing labor. Although these different images all point
to the same kind of process-namely, to a gain in the efficiency with
which labor is performed-it appears as an extension of time from the
perspective of productivity, and as a reduction of time from the perspective
of the workers' schedule. [see Assembly Lines, Strikes, Timepieces]
A similar oscillation accounts for the public's fascination with athletic
performance. An athlete who breaks the record of a predecessor can be
seen either as covering a longer distance in the same amount of time, or
as taking less time to cover the same distance. [see Six-Day Races,
Endurance] Slow-motion and time-lapse photography emphasize the impression
that time can be retarded or accelerated according to different
economic, technical, or scientific needs. This impression forms the basis
for a popular concept of relativity which, although it is different from
Einstein's theory, is used for didactic purposes even by such eminent
scholars as the astronomer A. S. Eddington: "The motions of the electrons
are as harmonious as those of the stars but in a different scale of
space and time, and the music of the spheres is being played on a
keyboard fifty octaves higher. To discover this elegance we must slow
down the action, or alternatively accelerate our own wits, just as the
slow-motion film resolves the lusty blows of the prize-fighter into movements
of extreme grace and insipidity" (Eddington, 20). Since such
analogies confirm the belief that it is possible to gain, lose, spend, or save
time, they generate a discourse in which time appears as a commodity.
While the slogan "Time is money" merely conceptualizes this perspec-