The recent global computer outage reminds us how impatient progress has made us. Narcissistic time is time that drags on when it shouldn’t.
What really changes with progress is not the fact of being able to go faster. What changes is the fact of finding yourself at a standstill when you should be going faster. The breakdown that occurred a few days ago is a masterful illustration of this point. But the time of the big vacation departures perhaps produces a more interesting image of this frustrated relationship with time. You are in your vehicle, your foot caressing the accelerator pedal… stuck in a traffic jam. Narcissistic time is that which lasts when it should not.
And if the time that has passed seems so long to us, it is because it has been ordered to pass more quickly, but it fails. A wait made unbearable not by its duration, but by what progress is deprived of. Because if this progress had not equipped us with the means to go faster, we would never have felt so strongly the fact of not being able to use them. Thus, time stretches out as technologies disappoint our expectations. It is the disappointed expectation that makes the wait unbearable. A kind of torture of Tantalus, where Man, enticed by the prospect of going faster, ultimately finds himself deprived of speed.
It occurs as a form of negative freedom. Progress gives us the right to go faster, but the conditions are not always right for this right to be exercised. Thus, progress cannot do anything about traffic jams. Nor can progress do anything about the guy who crosses without looking or a bus that stops without anyone getting on or off. Absurd. Imagine Superman stuck to the ground by the control tower.
Certainly, the idea of a new relationship with time has already been widely popularized by great contemporary thinkers. Paul Virilio and Hartmut Rosa, for example, spoke of compressed time, petrified by progress. “The faster we go, the less time we have.” All our technological innovations do indeed make it possible to reduce the temporal distance between point A and point B. All we have to do is press the pedal or click the mouse. But on one condition. That is, nothing gets in the way, such as the extent of congestion on the road or on the network, for example.
No advantage
Narcissistic time is much longer, as if the present lasted longer. And of all times, it must be said that this narcissistic time is also the most difficult to bear. With the relative time of the scientist Albert Einstein, we did not understand anything, but at least we had the feeling of rising a notch, at least intellectually. With the felt time of the philosopher Henri Bergson, we did not advance any faster either, but at least we had the feeling that this time belonged to us, each one experiencing it in his own way, subjective time. But narcissistic time seems to have no advantage, and it is unfortunately the one that best suits our times. One more narcissistic wound for Man at high speed, after the wound of Man who believed himself to be at the center of the universe, then at the center of the living, and finally at the center of his thoughts. Man is therefore not at the centre of the Clock either, except that of Salvador Dalí’s soft watches.
As for Narcissus, he is probably the one who will be most susceptible to this insult of time that lasts too long. We must imagine him too on board his racing car, stuck in a traffic jam. An unbearable wait for someone who finds himself condemned to the unvarnished vision of his reflection in the rearview mirror. He does not recognize himself. Usually, he had his eyes on the windshield, too busy watching the road pass before his eyes. At times, he would then perceive his imperfect reflection, but ideally combining the realization of his fantasy with the vision he had of it. We too have probably fantasized our relationship with time, in the light of progress. Man at high speed believed he had deprived time of its duration, but he was caught red-handed. The temporal theft went badly. Progress condemns us to frustration at every red light, traffic jam or other contingency of an environment hostile to Men in a hurry. Progress has gone faster than us, in a way, because we have not been able to think about the conditions of its expression.
Yet, it all started with a good intention. It was just about going faster from point A to point B in order to have more time to imagine a more peaceful point C, zenitude and coconut trees. Except that this point C has probably become a corrupted idea, progress no longer being a means of reaching it faster, but the cause justifying the existence of a point C. Progress as a cause, and point C as a consequence. As if the nose had been invented so that we could put glasses on it.