In his reflections on symbolic revolutions, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu drew attention to a problem that becomes particularly acute when dealing with the topic of time. Upheavals in worldviews subsequently become self-evident, obscuring the view back through the perspective of hindsight. A complex, albeit perhaps more intuitive than mastered, modern understanding of time obstructs access to living conditions that have remained untouched by them. Life without standardized, coordinated clocks is difficult to imagine in our globally connected world. The inscrutable diversity of local time measurements before the introduction of railway timetables seems so bizarre today because it is inevitably always assessed against the backdrop of a self-evident global time zone system. We are only able to ignore the synchronous/asynchronous distinction with great effort. The chaos of time that we recognize today had no equivalent back then. Where synchronization is hardly necessary due to comparatively low mobility, there is simply no chaos of missed connection opportunities, neither practically nor theoretically.

Literature:

Pierre und Marie-Claire Bourdieu, Manet der Häresiarch. Entstehung der Felder der Kunst und der Kritik, in Pierre Bourdieu, Manet (2015), S. 651

Keywords:

Perspective of Hindsight, Synchronization

Kommentare