| Doors of Perception 4 S P E E D - S P E A K E R T R A N S C R I P T -
John Wood: Temporal Alienation and Speed
Design & Time
The Western concept of design would become meaningless without a confident, predictive sense of 'future'. It uses a technique refined during the Enlightenment in which the critical observer becomes separated from the 'time' of his/her actative present. The Western idea of time can be polarised, with some important exceptions, into two general categories. Clock-time evolved from Aristotle's idea of astronomical time? and led to Newton's disembodied concept of 'absolute time'. By contrast, St. Augustine's concept of 'lived time' puts human subjective experience at the centre of temporality. When we play 'catch the ball' with someone else we create a negotiated form of 'lived time', or 'social time'.
Embodying 'clock-time'
In technological terms, 'clock-time' can be regarded as a form of temporal data which has yet to be embodied in the form of 'lived-time'. Just as data is embodied as information by technologists, so clock-time becomes embodied as lived-time. The athlete who glances at her stop-watch whilst running is choosing to embody clock-time as a pace-pusher in place of a human competitor. Mostly, we choose how often to look at our clocks and wrist watches, and therefore how much we embody it as information. Some clock technologies do not offer this choice because they use intrusive images or sounds (e.g. audible pendula, cuckoo clocks and church bells). Most of us work within a networked communication system which mixes social time with clock-time via pagers, telephones, faxes, computers, Walkmen, and broadcast signals. We embody clock-time in many ways: e.g. at a cognitive level which may lead to conscious or unconscious knowledge, or at a more metabolic level which regulates our less voluntary actions.
The erosion of 'lived time'
Although many advertisements present the consumer as an individual who asserts her own 'lived time', or 'social time' to enjoy, say, a chocolate bar or a hot bath, our technological culture encourages us to put our faith in instruments and systems rather than our own subjective judgement. This is why we invariably trust mechanical time (i.e. 'clock-time') in preference to our personal sense of duration. We are temporally confused by these disparate views of time. This confusion is similar to Marx's idea of 'alienation', and is a by-product of industrialised capitalism. Clocks are built into virtually all the new technologies, and play a key role in creating speed.
Overworking
Globalisation of capital and the advent of digital, clock-driven technologies have brought about new conditions:
- increasing national and international competition
- automation of information and communication systems
- down-sizing of workforces
These factors have led to a self-organizing mode of Taylorism. In public emergencies, or in subsistence ecologies/economies, it is not surprising to find human beings 'working through without stopping?' to overcome a serious, emergent problem. By contrast, overworking for competitive success in the economically developed world is often more an operational imperative of the consumerist system, even where there is no imminent threat to our survival, or to the production of essential supplies.
The clash between rational and experiential understanding can be seen as a form of cognitive dissonance which can lead, in extreme cases, to alienation. Temporal Alienation occurs when the denial, or repression, of beneficial sensory experiences is outweighed by the 'yet-to-be-embodied' data of clock-time. A form of temporal alienation is the conflict in pace between our cognitive and metabolic 'clocks'.
Examples of temporal alienation?
- living in a virtual immediate future (e.g. always accelerating towards red traffic lights...you tend to crash into the back of cars)
- living in a virtual immediate past (e.g. always missing buses...your car tends to get run into from behind)
- fast-food retailing encourages eating without noticing you are doing so
- unspecified expectations of hardship in the future e.g. hoarding food when there is no indication of shortage
- euphoric loss-of-the-present? can be exhilarating, but may be symptomatic of damaging and avoidable conditions......shopping for the next 'hit' (there are few clocks in Shopping Malls)
- living in a competitive, multi-temporal environment: a stockbroker who sits at the computer screen 'surfing' different time zones and whose body routinely works at a high adrenalin level.
- displacement activities; i.e. 'killing time'
- "all days the same"...i.e. repetitive, predictable & boring schedules (e.g. factory week)
Temporal alienation
In temporal terms we can represent alienation as:
A = Tc __ Te
where:
A represents the temporal effects of alienation
Te is 'lived', or experienced time
Tc is clock-time Psysiologically speaking, 'lived time' includes many sub-agencies and 'clocks' which include metabolic time and cognitive time. As we have suggested, it may also include an embodied component of clock time. We may suggest that a form of temporal alienation is when these two modes get uncomfortably out of phase and cause health or environment problems.
Temporal Glow
Arne Naess? coined the term "deep ecology". He was inspired by Ghandi's and Spinoza's ideas. In developing his ideas, Naess retreated to a hut in the Norwegian mountains where he found "contraries indistinguishably blended"?. Importantly, his equation takes the highly subjective idea of 'glow' as an index for wellbeing, implying that wellbeing does not always necessitate comfort. Alienation can be understood as the rational denial of direct sensory experiences (e.g. bodily pain) in the situated and changing present. It can be seen as opposite to the 'glow' of presence and well-being.
Green design
Green Design often tends to rely for its calculations on clock-time, rather than upon lived time. Perhaps the most damaging feature of this perspective is the perception of Nature as a resource which must be quantified as:
MATERIALS X ENERGY X CLOCK TIME
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), although it represents a relatively helpful tendency in commercial life, can be seen to concern itself with the noumenal effects of a given product's duration (in 'clock time' or 'calendar time'), rather than with the phenomenal aspects of its temporal presence (in 'lived time').
In Erlich's famous equation for environmental impact, for example, collective human actions are expressed in a mechanical time form as: I X P X C X T
where:
I is environmental impact
P is population
C is consumption per head
T is 'environmental intensity', or environmental impact per unit of consumption
Using Erlich's equation, many green designers assume that we can define sustainability as the ability to keep 'I' (environmental impact) at a constant over (calendar) time.
A Temporal (phenomenal) Audit
Rather than quantifying the environmental aspect of products as noumenal entities 'in themselves', a 'temporal audit' would help us to become more 'phenomenally' aware of our quality of life. It would sanction the idea of 'Being', or 'well-being', within the notion of living for, or living within, the present tense. It would make for a more convivial society, and we would become more alive.In a long term process of ecological planning, the collective aim would be to permit optimum human coexistence with the maximum number of other species by rethinking how we achieve our sense of wellbeing with a minimised dependency upon complicated technological mechanisms. (a more regimented mode of Astronomical time, or Calendar time.) Freud used the term: 'Durcharbeiten'.
We may feel, for instance, that we are expected to be in two places at once, or that there are an insufficient number of hours in the day. The implications of these suppositions has been explored in two films by Harold Ramis.
- ('Groundhog Day' 1994?), a TV journalist finds himself trapped in a repetitive 're-run' of a particular day's events. After a while he learns to focus upon many of the nuances and opportunities which he would otherwise have missed, and to exploit them to unique advantage.
- ('Multiplicity', 1996) an overworked site manager is given the chance to clone himself as a matching set of specialist individuals; i.e. loving husband, attentive father, exemplary employee, DIY consumer, and avid follower of leisure pursuits. Ramis' films allude to two forms of temporal alienation which can occur when the experiential sovereignty of 'lived time' is displaced by the everyday pressures of (speed) 'clock-time'.
Notes
Wood, J., "Situated criticism and the experiential present", Journal of Design History, editor Prof. Nigel Whitely
Naess, A., "Ecology, Community and Lifestyle", Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 15?from Chuang Tzu
Naess, A., "Ecology, Community and Lifestyle", Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 41 |