The dissonance of time : the temporal heterogeneity of society

Tempus omnia vincit
In which era do we live ?

Each one envisions the future with the ideas of their past. Our minds use the materials of our experience. Even the problems we pose to ourselves are only those that our history allows us to grasp.
The oldest processes persist at the same time as science and techniques evolve. Our evolution is measured in relation to fixed ideas.

By carrying the various syntheses we have developed throughout our lives, each of us lives in multiple eras, all of which are dated. We first see the world through the eyes of our childhood, hence the success of psychoanalysis.
I analyze information with the patterns I established in the past. My tastes, my ideas are anchored in these references, which I composed with the satellites of my life back then. And in the knowledge we have of our past, perhaps the only one we have, there is a significant element of recomposition: a reconstruction that our present guides.

Society is thus composed of people who each superimpose several eras. We encounter a juxtaposition of different times. Therefore, it is not surprising to sense a "déjà vu" feeling regarding several ideas thrown into the air these days. According to Friedrich Hegel, each thing appears in two times in history, the first time as a sketch, incomplete and misunderstood, the second time as a repetition, already evident. Ideas come to fruition but often too early or too late.
Thus, each generation continues the story of its first twenty years. Someone born in the 1950s will think of May '68; born in the 1970s, the Berlin Wall or neoliberalism ; in the 1990s, the clash of civilizations, and so on.

The digital transition will mean computers for leaders born before 2000, while their younger counterparts will think of social networks. In our peaceful France, generations form a community, and the institution refers to age groups. Thus, resentment of discrimination can develop towards either the old or the young. Respect for experience and tolerance for novelty are necessary to acquire and require regular adaptation.

We are all, in one way or another, uprooted. The ability to communicate with people of other generations is a hallmark of a high civilization. Age communities are truly restricted only at the extremes of life : in school or in retirement homes.
Any project, if it wants to correspond to reality, must integrate this heterogeneity. This is, for example, what made the success of Ridley Scott's science fiction film "Blade Runner".
We cannot detach ourselves from this background, which naturally imposes itself, and which an artist must both disrupt and preserve. No one is ever ahead of their time, but perhaps ahead of the ideas of their contemporaries. We never know our future, but knowing the present is already a victory.



There is lived time and thought time: one can oppose the duration of experience and the perspective of the project. Movement, studied by Paul Virilio, is the modern response to the sensation of the loss of the passage of time.
There is also the time of progress and cyclical time; the time of waiting and the time of action. According to Lewis Mumford, the objectivity of time measurement was invented in the monasteries of the Middle Ages : this is the beginning of its separation from human time. However, the separation of days and their history forms a fundamental regularity of humanity.

Modernism has definitively turned the page on the permanence that remained from the Middle Ages : there is a force of change, even against the human.

For some, the present is only the disappearance of the past and the emergence of the future. For others, the past and the future have no substance. Losing or gaining time is a manifestation of what interests us.