TIME AGENCY

PREMODE Natural cycles Subjected to external socio-

RN historically sanctioned authority
Triumph over Time
Rational or ecstatic Contexts which permit the
participation in formation of narratives that in an
noetic essence, intersubjectively binding fashion
through salvation, can generate both individual and
unification with collective meaning.
immutable being.
Transcendence. Historical Vacuum. Archetypical
Metaphysics. return, repetition.

Slowness, Sacred Wertrational action directed

bonds, towards affirming an overriding
ideal, recognizing no other
Distinction between considerations- faith, duty, honor,
sub-lunar change devotion to a cause - the outcome
and heavenly of the action is subordinate to the
eternity interest in affirming the ideal
through ones action. Highly
Ritual: retrieval of reflective and undertaken out of
the past explicit allegiance to the ideal or
value in question. There is a
Structures of coherent and defined
collective historical understanding of value within an
understanding. established framework of
symbolic value.
Periodicity of the
Creation affective action like value-
Continuous rational action the basis for an
Regeneration of adequate assessment of the
Time action is not located in the
instrumentality of means to ends
but in whether or not the act is
carried out for its own sake. The
act is autotelic. Its purpose or
telos is inherent to the action
itself.

traditional action which is

carried out under the influence of
custom and habit. unreflective
and presupposes an established
framework of symbolic value,
MODERN Clocks Dissatisfaction, disintegration,
Chronometric Time, disenchantment,
Empty and uniform
devoid of any Skepticism.
intrinsic sense of
significance. Protestant work ethic involved
Homogenous, the institutionalization and
empty time endorsement of purposive-
(Taylor, 2007) rational action as the dominant
form of social action. Rationalistic
Secular, Speed work ethic of capitalism spread to
other spheres besides the
Disenchanted time- economic (e.g. law, politics,
consciousness, science)
succession of
homogeneous Key concepts ; dominance of the
irreversible now commodity form = purposive
points, calculated, rational action
commodified.
Quantification, Human relations via the market;
neutralization of calculating costs; (means) and the
time, likelihood of generating specific
commodification of benefits (ends). they can be fully
time (Lukacs, Marx) rational only in so far as they
accept the need to act purposive-
Time is not only rationally.
strictly quantified;
it is viewed as a Rational behavior in a market is
scarce resource, geared towards maximizing
easily lost, to be efficiency (in order to lower the
fervently seized costs) seeking ends that satisfy
upon and subjective ants and desires;
conquered. specialized labor force geared
towards dealing exclusively with
Progress linked to only fragments of the complete
Providence, Linear process of production and
conception of time. exchange.
Rise of the exact
sciences, industrial Waste of time deadliest sin
technology,
technological Meta-narratives of progress,
innovation. innovation, emancipation.
Physicalist,
objectivist Temporal experience, transient
naturalist clock- and repetitive.
based
understanding, Horizon of expectation; a function
conception, of the narratives we construct
interpretation of regarding historical development
time. and change.

Natural scientific Historicity, historical time.

world view possible Autonomous reason-giving.
through the
temporal concepts Post-conventional. Incessant
and their objective erosion of pre-given authority and
reality. value-patterns. Destruction of
contexts that grant existential
Representation of meaning and form. Lack of
time according to a meaning, crisis of subjectivity.
principle of
successive instants Instrumental pursuits, rational
with a similar and calculative behavior. Ends are
weight. subjectivized. Pursuit of
Autonomy and technological
Irretrievable past mastery. Purposive-rational
the future an open action, autonomous technological
horizon - A past or instrumental rationality.
that is gone forever
to a not yet Orientation towards the future,
actualized future with a lessening of influence and
authority of the past as a source
Experience of of guidance.
transitoriness.
Disenchanted Contingency, measurement,
temporality. control, conquest of time.
Increase in discipline, efficiency,
Modernity is the social speed
transient, the
fleeting, the Effective system for precisely
contingent coordinating social interaction
Baudelaire factory, office environment, urban
space, private life, transportation,
the present a business, the flow of information-
simple portion of
time that passes Philosophical alternatives:
and throws us Kantian rationally endorsed
mercilessly into the projects projects initiated by an
future. agent capable of rational self
determination
Time like space
becomes Aristotelian - praxis the activity is
something like a its own end, rather than being
container understood within an instrumental
indifferent to what framework, is theorized as being
fills it. Modern time an enabling medium in which
can emerge as a meaningful action action that
time of repetition, a draws on historically binding,
perpetual traditional patterns of action and
reproduction of interpretation can occur.
identical temporal
units, that, with the Hegel time is the unfolding of a
invention of the necessary rational process,
chronometer, embodied in institutions. Hegels
calculation, Geist is a self determining rational
coordination, structure whose development is
exactitude, inherently meaningful.
technological
development, Schopenhauer rejects the notion
research as well as of rationality as an immanent
in our orientation in process of self realization. instead
and to nature in offering an account of
general. transcendence. Melancholic
response to time. In refusing to
Seventeenth accept finitude and transitoriness,
century scientific it exemplifies a resistance to
revolution come to terms with loss and
universalized a thereby to mourn.
homogeneous
conception of time Nietzsche critique of
to be valid for all Enlightenment rationalism,
being. embedded in an account of Greek
tragedy, leads to the advocacy of
History seen as the a pre modern cyclical
progressively understanding of time opposed to
unfolding of events the contingency and irreversibility
leading into the of linear time. Criticizes all
present. attempts to negate transient life
Teleological associating them with nihilism.
account of Accepting transience becomes a
progress, matter of affirming the past as
determinism; irretrievably gone; Non
Towards a fixed attachment to the lost object.
utopian state in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
future; historical The appeal to myth is regressive.
master narrative; bermensch active nihilism, the
The present is an redirecting of desire towards the
accumulation of the transient world becomes a
past and the future narcissistic game incapable of
the necessary overcoming the problem of
result of all the nihilism.
accumulated
moments of history. Heidegger establishes a link
(Marx, Comte). between rationalized modernity
Non-teleological and boredom. Modern
account; History is technological environments are
advancing without structured such as to preclude the
a final destination; possibility of meaningful
history becomes an engagement, quite simply boring.
endless interlacing Appeal to the notions of
of the repetitive commitment and authenticity.
and the irreversible
a permanent Futurity, sense of openness,
renewal. uncertainty and contingency.
Greater speed in social, political
Italian Renaissance and technological processes of
German transformation.
Reformation
French Revolution the disenchantment of the world,
the loss of inter-subjectively
validated and instituted forms of
Neuzeit permanent value and interpretation,
renewal, drastically expressed in acts of ancestor
accelerated the worship and religious practices
tempo of change. and experienced as an openness
Change becomes to cosmic forces and pressures to
more rapid and the which one is indebted and before
present as what which one is both fragile and
distinguishes the responsible.
past from the
future becomes Permeated with a sense of risk
progressively requiring the kind of strategic
condensed. calculation of uncertainty that is
being undertaken in capitalist
Conception of lived investment and technological
everyday time as innovation. In markets,
inherently democracies and scientific-
quantifiable- that is technological environments. we
as essentially an must and indeed can take
indefinite repetition ourselves to be engaged in
of commensurable conduct oriented towards
unities prediction, where the effort to
calculate, control and dominate
Time understood by goes hand in hand with an
analogy with or awareness of risk.
even becomes a
function of, space; Expectations of change and a
for just as physical heightened acceptance of
space is abstract transience.
and measurable a
container Zweckrational - Purposive rational
indifferent to its action, for Weber, is action
content so now is oriented towards the realization of
time, and duration a given end. The action is rational
becomes a matter in so far as the agent manages to
of mere identify and make use of the most
quantifiable length, effective means available to
with the length of secure it. Weber emphasizes that
time being from the purposive-rational
understood in standpoint no end can be
terms of rationally adopted. The end is set
standardized on the basis of an appeal either to
temporal absolute value or to given
succession. subjective desires. It is only when
a given end is viewed as a means
Thus time sheds to secure a further end that it can
its qualitative, be rationally adopted.
variable, flowing Weighing the alternative efficacy
nature; it freezes of each of the possible means of
into an exactly, attaining the end. To maximize
quantifiable the desired outcome.
continuum filled
with quantifiable Are there alternatives to the
things (the reified, dominance of purposive-rational
mechanically action associated with
objectified commodification and capitalism?
performance of the
worker, wholly Purposive-rational action is
separated from his undertaken in order to satisfy a
total human particular desire, and its
personality): in purported end is its satisfaction.
short it becomes in the modern demise of subject-
space. Lukacs transcendent authority the end is
a product of the individual will
dead or and as such arbitrary. On the
meaningless time, basis of the conceptual resources
a time to be available to the purposive-rational
overcome in order agent, the only relevant rational
to achieve the constraint is the ends liability to
actualization of the function as a means to procuring
end to arrive at the further ends. infinite regress; our
moment of end becomes the next means, but
satisfaction. only because there is a new end
demanding a new justification,
Clock-time linear, and so on and so forth ad
homogenous and infinitum.
irreversible; any The rationality of purposive-
given moment of rational action consists solely in
time is gone the ability to maximize
forever, being effectiveness. Beyond the
unremittingly consideration of effectiveness
replaced by new which is performed by applying
identical moments technical criteria to a problem or
that themselves a situation, there can be no other
disappear. rational estimates of worth. The
Calculated time decision to employ a particular
according to the set of means may have all sorts of
planning, moral and political consequences,
quantitatively yet these are of no intrinsic
reckoned. Time is relevance to the purposively
money. a rational agent. The end is what is
commodified time. to be realized- it is the future the
Linear conception agent wants to put at her
of time, a time disposal; the means are justified
frame in which the by being shown to be the best
future can be way to achieve the realization of
understood as an the end.
open horizon.
Progress geared Utility, technical control,
towards purposive rational orientation.
technological Looking at the world as composed
production. of possible means. The world
tends to be reduced to a set of
Transient world resources Bestand (Heidegger).
generating anxiety Ends are disconnected from
Clock time traditional contexts of meaning
repetitive and made to be a function of
perpetually repeats individual will.
moments of time
that are identical The purposive-rational agent is
with another. seeking to conquer time. Attempt
However unlike to control or even perhaps to
forms of repetition deny finitude. future-oriented.
such as for Adopting an end and using past
example rituals, experience and accumulated
that retrieve the information to gain technical-
past, the individual pragmatic insight into the law like
moment of clock- relations.
based time is a
mere passing and For the proponent of progress, the
therefore also a world is never settled; on the
form of loss: this contrary ones relation to it is
individual moment marked by a fundamental
will never return. restlessness that drives one from
one action to the next.
Time provides an
essential condition On the one hand accepting
of possibility for uncertainty and contingency and
every being; time is on the other to try to bring them
also destructive. under ones control by employing
Things suffer a well-functioning procedure.
through time Speed, saving time in order to
Aristotle, time eliminate dead, meaningless time
wastes things between the action and the
away, andthere is realization of the intended end.
oblivion oqing to
the lapse of time Purposive-rational action is not
just the kind of action we find in
Time when technology and science but, if we
understood as the are to believe Koselleck, Weber,
steady Lukacs, Heidegger, and Adorno,
transformation of the dominant form of action in a
potential future into modern society organized around
actual past by the imperatives of bureaucratic
reference to a management and economic
dynamic human calculation. It is not the only type
perspective fixated of action that modern agents
on the present, dispose of; the claim is just that it
time brings is the dominant one, that it is the
everything to an form of action corresponding to a
end in every single highly technicized, bureaucratized
moment; it may and economically rationalized
seem to dissolve everyday life, and that other
the world into an forms of action tend to be
infinite dust of marginalized as the process of
instants. modernization inexorably moves
forward.
Fragmented
isolated contingent The time of the purposive-rational
now points, linked action does not have any intrinsic
together not via the value; rather, through the
configuration of a implementation of apparatuses of
meaningful acceleration and speed, we seek
narrative, but in to pass through chunks of time in
infinite linear order to arrive at our goals. On
progression the one hand, time becomes
towards an open something that should pass, and
future. Partial as quickly as possible, yet on the
disintegration of other, we fear the brevity of life
the thick web of as it is interpreted in the light of
inferences that projects aiming to master and
weave past, future, conquer time; there is never
and present enough of it. Loss of meaning.
together in a The moments of time to which the
dynamic unity. purposive-rational agent is
relating are empty. History and
 religion can no longer anchor
identity in the fabric of collective
meaning. No sacred bonds no
constitutive attachments, pursuit
of the ever new super-subjective
temporal schema of clock time
(Simmel). Fragmentation,
depersonalization a disaffection
that typically takes the form of
boredom, melancholy, ennui,
sense of existential emptiness.
democratization of skepticism if
rationality is the sustaining myth
of modernity, boredom, as an
everyday experience of
universalized skepticism,
constitutes its existential reality.
(Goodstein).

POSTMOD Protracted, Horizon of expectation a function

ERN prolonged now of the more immediate demands
Fragmentation and desires of individual agents.
Contingency
Discourse mechanism the
narrative mode conditions and
structures action, experience and
selves. Ultimately these can
appear intelligible only against
the background of narratives that
bring about temporal synthesis
thereby creating order and unity
among their various elements.