EL CONTROL INTERNO COMO INSTRUMENTO PARA

The temporal shifts held to come about in a period of time-space compression, and the responses such shifts arguably engender, are now easier to explain. As capitalism is a revolutionary mode of production so is it always liable to revolutions in its dominant mode of time consciousness (Harvey, 1989a, 1991). From the mid-to-late nineteenth century, driven by a need to overcome a crisis of over-accumulation, and enabled by developments in new communications and technology, the industrialised world saw a new and dramatic 'annihilation of space by time' (Marx, 1857/1973). The effect of these movements - expressed in the work of the modernists - was to lead to an overwhelming

experience of transience and insecurity, as the social world attempted to adapt to a new and terrifying rate of change.

For Harvey (1989a) the contemporary experience of time-space compression may also be explained in much the same way. Moving out of the over-accumulation crisis of the 1960s and early 1970s, and taking advantage (amongst other things) of still more developments in communication technology, capital moved to the faster turnover times of a new regime of accumulation, one based on the 'flexible' production regimes of post- Fordism (Aglietta, 1979; Gertler, 1988; Piore & Sabel, 1984; Schoenberger, 1989; Storper & Scott, 1989).

Once again the social experience is argued to be one of overwhelming change, or temporal 'speed-up', as daily life seems to be going too fast, and such descriptions strike a chord with many of our daily experiences. From the ever increasing pace of urban life (the never ending creative destruction of familiar places and landscapes), the 'Hurry-Up Time' of the Moonies, through to the very terminology of the 'new' work practices - 'flexi-time', 'part-time', 'short-time' - for many daily life seems to be getting faster. As time speeds-up so too a less than reassuring Future seems to be rushing towards us, out of control.

A sense of transience, and a destruction of the old, is therefore arguably even more pronounced in the contemporary period than at the turn of the last century. Adding to such feelings a postmodern aesthetic has reduced the past to a 'cultural scrapbook', a resource to be mixed and matched at will (Chambers, 1987), such that even the certainties of history have been destroyed. The overwhelming sense is thus one of insecurity, as the future is seen to hold little hope, and a belief in the past as a discrete, atomised moment is itself harder to sustain.

Stephen Kern (1983) takes such arguments a stage further. As developments in communications and transport technology at the turn of the century revolutionised conceptions of space, so too was a traditional and linear sense of time irrevocably undermined. As time and space became separated from each other, and relativised (Giddens, 1991) so a new wave of thinkers emerged who questioned traditional notions of temporality. With the simultaneity of the new communication technologies (the radio, telegraph and telephone, for example, all emerged in this period), a movement across space no longer made inevitable a movement through time. As the traditional opposition of presence and absence was divorced so too, argues Kern, was the present, in effect, 'spatially extended'.

Moreover, the same technologies raised the possibility even of talking to someone at a time 'behind' yours - though it might be 2.00pm in London, for example, it may be

only 12.00 noon in the place of you co-respondent. Where time could, in effect, now be

reversed a new and powerful sense of temporal dislocation emerged. Perhaps most

important was the impact this new 'reversible' time had upon conceptions of memory. Where there could no longer be sustained a secure belief in a discrete past, present and future the fiction of memory, so central to constructions of 'who w e are', became more problematic. In important ways, therefore, Kern's thesis prefigures those accounts concerning the emergence of a schizophrenic identity in the contemporary period, one whose fragmentation has commonly been described in exactly this 'atemporal' manner (Jameson, 1984, 1991).

Though Kem can be criticised for a certain technological determinism (Entrikin, 1985) his arguments are important because from a position of simple temporal speed-up (that maintains the central structures of a unidirectional and linear time) the contemporary unbinding of presence and absence may be having a more profound impact. A problematic for thinkers at the turn of the last century was that these developments made people aware of the central contradictions between a public, universal and standard clock time (tied to the linear time of thermodynamics), the 'simultaneous time' of the new communication technologies, and the relative nature of a personal and subjective temporality within which time could seem to move in any direction, and at any rate.

As the pace, and everyday awareness of globalisation has increased in the contemporary period so, arguably, are these contradictions liable to emerge even more powerfully. N ot least, the cultural heterogeneity of contemporary life may also be making people more aware of the very different constructions of time and temporality articulated in other societies. Paine (1992), for example, suggests that rather than singular, the contemporary experience of time must resemble more a situation of 'cultural scrambling' within which people must deal not only with the contradictory temporal shapes of clock, thermodynamic and simultaneous time, but an awareness of entirely different temporal constructs. Surrounded daily by a whole host of contradictory temporal shapes - from the micro-second timing of the computer chip, through the 'reversible time' of time zones, foreign travel and 'live television', to the long durations of a popular environmental movement - it might seem that time itself has become deeply unreliable (or at least impossible to 'pin down'). In turn it is easy to understand those arguments that suggest that time has become a source of deep anxiety.

In the face of such uncertainty people are argued to attempt a move towards a number of more comforting temporal structures (Harvey, 1989a, 1991). In effect these

arguments identify a series of 'temporal retreats', an understanding based on that earlier recognition that there can be identified qualitatively different senses of time, or temporal shapes, each to be found within different experiential arenas. But if such retreats are easy to describe, within a space of such temporal fluidity, none is easy to achieve.

For example, the 'heritage industry' has been interpreted as an attempt to reinscribe a nostalgic sense of the past and tradition (Lowenthal, 1985). Harvey (1989a), of course, explicitly posits a local heritage movement as a strong source of place identity and temporal retreat (chapter 2.1b). But, as postmodernism plays with a sense of the past and calls into question the linear and continuous nature of time itself, so such retreats become more problematic. Within this sense of speed-up, for example, not only is nostalgia itself discounted into the present (the cycles of fashion seem to come around ever more quickly) but a postmodern aesthetic has made it more difficult to secure any clear sense of historical 'authenticity' (Hopkins, 1991; Jameson, 1984,1991; Shields, 1989).

In the same way, in the face of an uncertain linear time, people may move towards the comforts of cyclical time found within traditional understandings of nature, and ones that have gained prominence with the emergence of a popular environmental movement (Harvey, 1991). But the same movement may often provide for that less comforting sense of temporal speed-up people are attempting to escape, as it articulates its concerns through a series of metaphors based around a discourse of extinction and death (Burgess, 1993).

Finally, for Harvey (1989a) at least, the overwhelming source of temporal retreat is to be found as people move away from social insecurities, to the deeply held traditions and values of home and the slower moving rhythms of 'family time'. Based on older notions of 'cyclic' time (originally of the harvest, but also connected to the gendered cycles of generational and 'female time') such a structure has long been recognized as a way through which people have sought to control the demands of 'industrial time' (Hareven, 1982). For Harvey, therefore, the home is a source of reassuring values and rhythms. It may also be the site of those treasured personal objects that, in contrast to the meaningless goods of consumer society, are a deep repository of memory, and thus do much to hold the passage of time itself at bay (cf Lasch, 1984). "Photographs, particular objects ... and events ... become the focus of a contemplative memory, and hence a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of a consumerist culture and fashion. The home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-