Johann Dieter Wassmann, Zeit-Raum (Space-Time), 1896. 47 x 27 x 16 cm.
Earlier today, I sat in conversation with a friend. Her five-year-old daughter approached, handing us a beautiful red Easter egg she had decorated in school. She asked if she might go outside to play.
“Five minutes, that’s all,” said her mother.
“I don’t know what that is,” her daughter said in reply. “I don’t know what five minutes is.”
If only the rest of us could say the same. What do we really know of the capriciousness of time?
Here lies the great quandary the pioneering German modernist Johann Dieter Wassmann explored in his influential and far-reaching oeuvre of the late nineteenth century.
A century on, as Daniel Birnbaum approaches the 53rd Venice Biennale with his suggestive title, Fare Mondi/Making Worlds (discussed in recent posts), the question not only arises of what sort of worlds the contemporary artist envisions, but more poignantly, how did we ever come to make the world we live in today?
The Terror of History
History, it has been argued, originated with God’s call to Abraham that he should lead the ancient Hebrews from their land, setting off on a passage of faith through the desert. This one act ignited our perception of time, by creating the anticipation of a point–a moment in time–when the Israelites might return to their “promised land.”
Time itself we allow as having begun quite distinct from history, as part and parcel of creation. For the physicist, this moment arrived with the first resounding crack of the big bang; for the theologian its origin was implicit in the opening three words of Genesis: “In the beginning ...” St. Augustine of Hippo could have been endorsing either view when, in the fifth century, he wrote: “The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.”
Tony Swain, a religious studies lecturer at the University of Sydney, complicates the argument still further:
“Time... is inherently capricious; its indolent openhandedness paving the way for imperialism. Were I asked to offer a tentative typology of spatio-temporal location, I would suggest linear time was a ‘fall’ from place. History, associated quintessentially with the Hebrews, was something which intervened when the Israelites had lost their place. The covenant, God’s promise, was to reinstate place, but this was only feasible by the Godhead entering a world given over to time. From the moment God said to Abraham ‘Leave your country’, instead of their place, the Hebrews had history and a promise of a land—and Zakhor, remembrance.”
In Egypt, Moses and his band of Israelites were the fettered guests of a culture as highly developed as any on the face of this good earth, but it was a culture entrenched in place. Of the thousand gods the Egyptians worshipped, all were gods of either place or weather. When the Israelites begrudgingly heeded their own God’s call to pack up and leave Egypt, they knew theirs was a God of time, transcendent of space—one who would lead them back out into the desert without risk of losing their spirituality.
The point is mute whether this God existed as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, or whether he merely existed in the fertile imagination of Moses. Whatever the form of this strange all-knowing God, it was the freedom from place he instilled in the Israelites that gave them the strength to cope with a life void of creature comforts—indulgences like pagan idols, golden calves and physical boundaries.
Moses’ symbolic passage through the Red Sea signalled the rebirth of Israel, with one minor delay. For forty years the Israelites would be forced to wander the desert; not until they quit their grumbling would God allow them to return. Only once they truly understood the promised land was their reward for having faith, rather than a place in which to put their faith, would they be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Israel. This Judeo-Christian transcendence of place singularly freed Western man to march forth in conquest: into the annals of time, history and anyone else’s kingdom he might like.
But historical man was not just free to march; he believed he had been given the set responsibility to do so. God had created man in his image after all. This much he knew. And man’s salvation depended on his active pursuit of perfection. This he also knew. And for Christendom this pursuit covered all of mankind, not just the chosen ones. So, as he understood it, man’s salvation depended upon the conversion of the heathen and unwashed, not only so they too could know the love of Jesus, but because salvation would only come once the whole of mankind knew, and was following, The Word. Those pagans who had not yet found Jesus were not just condemning themselves to purgatory (or worse), they were jeopardizing salvation for the rest of mankind as well.
As the Age of Discovery gave way to the Enlightenment, Western man woke up to realize there were a lot more souls out there requiring conversion than he once might have thought. Undaunted, he soon rose to the challenge, and with true missionary zeal he set about the task of remaking the world to his image of perfection—his image of God’s image, his image of himself, that is.
Enter stage left René Descartes, Adam Smith, et al, and again Western philosophy provided man with the means to carry out God’s will. Out of the darkness of feudal Europe came a freedom of thought and deed in keeping with Christianity’s resurrected pursuit of perfection, while providing the basis for the modern capitalist state. Where the Crusades had introduced Christianity by the sword, the free flow of goods and capital advocated by the modern state made the way clear for a modestly more benevolent flow of ideas, among them those ideas pertinent to the spread of Christianity.
The dual responsibilities of perfection and conversion pursued by Christendom were well served by the needs of the capitalist state, for both kingdoms were driven by a hunger for raw materials and new markets. Hand in hand, the industrialist and the missionary could march forth, knowing their causes were not dissimilar; and should trouble ensue, the state was there to back them up or bail them out. So march they did.
As the great evangelical push mounted steam, and mission schools were established across Africa, the Pacific islands and into New Zealand and Australia, the first thing natives were taught wasn’t the love of Jesus or the wrath of God, but how to tell time. And not just how to read a clock to make it to class on time. Rather, they were taught the conceptual notion of minutes adding up to hours, hours dividing the day, days generating weeks and months, and months culminating into years—one year following the next.
Every culture has its own explanation for why day turns into night and seasons flow into years, but they are most often perceived cyclically, so the missionary’s task was much more than just a case of filling in the gaps with these additional demarcations of time. Regardless of faith, these men of God understood the most fundamental tenant in the Judeo-Christian tradition was the linearity of time, serving as it did as a mechanism for advancing the progress of history. They knew on the most basic level—even before language was fully bridged—that efforts to instruct on the teachings of Christianity were meaningless without first conveying the linear nature of Newtonian time.
The sustenance for modern man’s faith in an infinite progress he drew from his belief in the constancy of a rapidly unfolding future—a future-as-resource serving to fuel the military and economic dreams of the present. And only a conviction that the future was infinite could keep the prophesy self-fulfilling. Although, having said that, the prophesy was never wholly fulfilled, for as Kafka said, “To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.”
Progress had become, by this point, modern man’s beloved opiate, his one true religion. The faith that nourished his restless soul lay not in the memory of yesterday, or in the relief of today, but in the promise of a new tomorrow.
What brought the modern era to its close was the overriding angst man felt in the emptiness of this promise. His angst was born out to the full on September 11, 2001, when members of a radical Islamic sect slammed the terror of their own history headlong into the terror of Western history.
The purveyors of these tandem histories—histories that had been watchfully interwoven into the fabric of modernity for some 500 years—henceforth believed that there would be only one victor and that this victor and no other would go on to consciously and voluntarily create the history of tomorrow. But what hope is left for the history of tomorrow when its only promise is a long and intractable terror? With his angst utterly realized, modern man’s chief paradigm today lies in precipitous jeopardy.
The Conceit of Time
But it did not have to be so. In 1905 Albert Einstein revolutionized the world of physics with the publication of his special theory of relativity, although its implications were slow to sink into the rest of Western human endeavour. What modern man understood Einstein to be saying was that time and space aren’t fixed or readily determinable; they are, in fact, infinitely variable. And while they do exist in a relative sense, there is nothing absolute in their nature. They are instead interwoven, making one quite inseparable from the other. So time exists for me in the space I occupy, and time exists for you in the space you occupy, but there were no grounds for the then-held belief that time existed commonly and universally for the both of us.
That which modern man had known and thought of as time for so long was certainly no less real than the printing press or the motor car, but nor was it any less a product of his own invention. What time was not was some universal law governing the even flow of our physical world.
To remove Einstein’s theory from the theoretical and prove it, of course, meant doing things like sending a twenty-year-old identical twin off in a space ship at very nearly the speed of light for two years (in his time), and have him return to find his brother a very old man living comfortably in Tucson, Arizona with the rest of the feeble old scientists who had shot him off into the ether seventy years earlier (in their time) in the first place. So, in lieu of such an experiment taking place, it was easier for non-physicists to put Einstein and his theories on the back burner for the time being.
Three years after the publication of Einstein’s seminal paper, his mentor and one-time teacher, Hermann Minkowski, gave a lecture in Cologne elaborating on his former student’s findings, beginning with the proclamation that,
“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
What Minkowski couldn’t predict was how painfully long it would take for our Newtonian belief in fixed time to actually fade into mere shadows.
For Johann Dieter Wassmann, these winds of change arrived some years earlier, in September of 1889 to be exact. On the 18th of the month, he had chance to travel north from Leipzig to Potsdam for a joint conference with colleagues from the University of Berlin. There he met the newly appointed 31-year-old physics lecturer Max Planck, who would go on to originate quantum theory, winning him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. Planck was presenting a paper at the conference on the second law of thermodynamics, which had been the subject of his doctoral thesis. Planck’s appointment had raised many an eyebrow, as he was reputed to shun all laboratory, clinical or field research in favor of something he was calling theoretical physics.
According to Johann’s diaries, Planck opened the lecture by addressing this very issue. Planck expressed that his “original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery... that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world about us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the mechanism of the world.”
This was sounding more like philosophy than science, which appealed to Johann, given the penchant of most of his colleagues for wholly distancing themselves from the arts. In explaining why he had chosen to pursue the theoretical, Planck argued that the very existence of physical laws allows us to presuppose that the “outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared... as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” Could it be, a romantic with an eye on the future? Johann was at once intrigued with the prospect.
If he had uncovered anything in his reading in recent months, it was that his constant anxiety stemmed from an unease with the surgical precision with which man had learned to separate time from his perception of space, a conviction having its roots in the same Enlightenment Johann had so long idealized. He also came to appreciate that modern man’s Newtonian perception of a clockwork universe was rapidly merging with the uglier side of social Darwinism, giving rise to a grossly deterministic revelation of progress. Might makes right was now the watch-cry of presidents, foreign ministers and industrialists alike. The resultant restructuring of individual societies, political systems and world trading patterns based on the availability of labour, resources and capital, placed a premium on time at the very expense of space, while in the same breath commodifying space at the expense of the natural environment. And no one knew better what atrocities the duopoly of industrialization and urbanization wrought on the environment and the human condition than the man made responsible for sanitizing these conditions—Johann Dieter Wassmann—one of Europe’s most respected sewerage engineers.
His reading earlier in the year had led him to suspect the answers he was looking for might well rest somewhere or somewhen in the indeterminate future, rather than where and when he had been looking—in the fictive past. He spoke briefly with Planck after the lecture, outlining his concerns, asking Planck whether the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law—the law which argues that every closed system tends toward a state of total disorder or chaos—might equally apply to societal systems.
Societal systems aren’t closed, was Planck’s terse reply, but he was nonetheless intrigued by Johann’s suggestion. Planck proposed they begin a correspondence to explore this issue further, but advised Johann to first read Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics (1883), as well as his more controversial Analysis of Sensations (1886). While the latter stands in conflict with many of Planck’s own arguments about the role of the theoretical in science, he felt its excellent refutation of Newtonian physics might help Johann overcome the hurdles he was currently struggling with.
Johann soon found that Mach argues all knowledge is derived from sensation. Consequently, all scientific investigation is beholden to the experience, or “sensations,” of the observer in his encounters with phenomena. Further elaboration on this point allowed Mach to categorically reject the Newtonian notion of absolute space and time, laying the groundwork for Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Johann was ecstatic; not only did Mach provide the means by which he might restore the unity of space and time—at least within his own thinking—but he could do so without relying on the past and without abandoning his faith in the universal power of sensation.
“I don’t know what five minutes is,” says the child with her beautiful red Easter egg.
If only the rest of us could understand this, we might not have made the world we’re now stuck with.
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