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+‘CimeForms 
+tay 
+
+
+VICTOR GIOSCIA 
+
+
+Foreword by 
+
+
+PHILIP E “SLATER 
+
+
+AN INTERTACE BOOK 
+
+
+VICTOR GIOSCIA 
+Heis... 
+- Associate Professor of Sociology and 
+Philosophy, Adelphi University 
+Executive Director, Center for Study of 
+Social Change 
+A practicing context analyst 
+
+
+Editor of the Social Change Series and 
+Social Change, an international journal 
+
+
+Heisalso... _ 
+
+a piano player (jazz) 
+a poet 
+a professor 
+a writer 
+
+- an editor 
+a video taper 
+a theorist 
+a researcher 
+a therapist 
+a 43-year-old male 
+a heterosexual 
+a friend 
+a lover 
+a smoker 
+
+He was... 
+
+born of Italian parents 
+educated by Jesuits 
+analyzed by Freudians 
+transformed by freaks 
+loved by women 
+taught by students 
+
+and 
+
+
+befriended (reluctantly) by 
+Martin Gordon, et al. 
+
+
+TIMEFORMS 
+beyond yesterday and tomorrow 
+
+
+“SOCIAL CHANGE” SERIES, edited by Victor Gioscia 
+This series of Gordon and Breach books is edited in tandem with the 
+
+
+journal entitled Social Change. The series includes the following 
+books 
+
+
+VARIETIES OF TEMPORAL EXPERIENCE (in four volumes) by 
+Victor Gioscia Volume I—TimeForms 
+
+
+BETWEEN PARADIGMS The Mood and its Purpose by Frank 
+Gillette 
+
+
+HOW BEHAVIOR MEANS by Albert E. Scheflen 
+FOOTHOLDS by Philip Slater 
+EARTHCHILD by Warren Brodey 
+
+
+BIRTH AND DEATH AND CYBERNATION The Cybernetics of 
+the Saered by Paul Ryan 
+
+
+GALAXIES OF LIFE The Human Aura in Acupuncture and 
+Kirlian Photography edited by Stanley Krippner and Dan Rubin 
+
+
+TOWARD A RADICAL THERAPY Alternate Services for Personal 
+and Social Change by Ted Clark and Dennis T. Jaffe 
+
+
+Other books in the series will be announced as they approach 
+completion 
+
+
+TimeEForms 
+
+
+beyond yesterday and tomorrow 
+
+
+by 
+VICTOR GIOSCIA 
+
+
+Associate Professor of Sociology—Adelphi University 
+Executive Director—Center for the Study of Social Change—NY 
+
+
+AN INTERFACE BOOK 
+
+
+An INTERFACE book, published by Gordon and Breach, New York 
+
+
+Copyright © 1974 by Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Inc., One Park Ayenue, New 
+York, N.Y. 10016, U.S.A. 
+
+
+Editorial office for the United Kingdom Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Ltd., 42 
+William IV Street, London W.C.2, England 
+
+
+Editorial Office for France Gordon and Breach, 7-9 rue Emile Dubois, Paris 14e, France 
+
+
+Acknowledgement 
+
+| want to thank the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry for permission to reprint ‘‘LSD 
+Subcultures” from Vol. 43:3; Grune and Stratton for ‘’Groovin on Time”, from Psychedel- 
+ic Drugs, (1969); Plenum Press for ‘Psychedelic Myths, Metaphors, and Fantasies’’ from 
+Origin and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, 1970; and Doubleday and Co. for “On Social 
+Time” from The Future of Time (1971) 
+
+
+Victor Gioscia 
+
+
+Library of Congress catalog card number 73-87753. SBN 0-677-04850-5 (hardback edition); 
+SBN 0-677-04855-5 (paperback edition). All rights reserved on Interface books. No part of 
+this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan- 
+ical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, 
+without permission in writing from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America. 
+
+
+CONTENTS 
+
+
+Foreword Philip Slater 
+Prologue 
+1. LSD Subcultures: Acidoxy versus Orthodoxy........ 1 
+
+
+2. Groovin’ on Time: Fragments of a Sociology of the 
+Psychedelic Experience.......... 13 
+
+
+3. Time, Pathos, and Synchrony: Accelerating Alienation ..29 
+
+
+4. The Coming Synthesis: Chronetics and Cybernation—The 
+
+
+Architecture of Social Time... 45 
+5. Psychedelic Myths, Metaphors and Fantasies........ 61 
+6. Metarap: Who You Are Is How You Change........ 77 
+7. Drugs as Chronetic Agents .......--+++eeeeeeeee 89 
+8. Frequency and Form.....-...--++eeeseeeeeeeee 97 
+Metalog—On Social Time I]......-- seer reer eeee 105 
+NOTES cca die cand had 64 Soe WO6 CO TEE RERERESRS Oe HS 165 
+
+
+to Pam - for tenderness 
+
+
+Nicole - for caring 
+Eve - for joy 
+Gail - for hope 
+
+
+Lynne’ - for faith 
+Madelyne - for truth 
+and Ilene - for a time 
+
+
+vi 
+
+
+Series Preface 
+
+
+Humans are an endangered species. 
+
+
+We think the separation of fact from value is the principal 
+illusion responsible for the nearly terminal condition of our species 
+on planet earth. This series is an attempt to share the facts and values 
+of intelligent people who know valuable things that might help us 
+find, live, and experience in ways that are species enhancing, not 
+species destructive. 
+
+
+We think sharing information of this kind is as vital to humans 
+as water is to fish. 
+
+
+We think we can depollute our information environment by 
+introducing life enhancing values into the changing currents of our 
+lives. 
+
+
+We think the series should serve as a critical information 
+resource for people who are seriously trying to enhance the life of 
+the human species. 
+
+
+We will publish hard science only when we think it will help us 
+to do that. We will publish opinion, analysis, exhortation, review, 
+speculation, experiment, criticism, poetry and/or denunciations if we 
+think it is of critical human benefit. 
+
+
+We are not naive. We don’t think publishing a few truths will set 
+us free, We are not optimists. We don’t think the chances for human 
+survival are very good. We are not elitists. We don’t think that 
+showers of wisdom from Olympus will illumine the simple man’s 
+
+
+Vii 
+
+
+darkened awareness. 
+
+
+We believe that human consciousness both guides and responds 
+to human interaction, and that most contemporary interaction 
+proceeds from and perpetuates assumptions about human life that 
+are no longer valid. We believe that these assumptions can be changed 
+if/when we want to. 
+
+
+Some of our fondest assumptions have already been unmasked, 
+revealing blind commitments to short values. The most glaring 
+example—we once believed technology made interaction “easier”. 
+Now we know that when our technologies violate ecological laws, we 
+murder each other. 
+
+
+Some new forms of interaction (and some old ones) are 
+currently being touted as the way. We don’t think there is, or can be, 
+any one way. How to sort out the promising ones from the blind 
+alleys constitutes our principal aim. 
+
+
+We therefore deliberately adopt a post-disciplinary stance, 
+believing that no one view, be it philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, 
+political, clinical, what have you, has the answer. 
+
+
+We do this simply because we believe that we are living in an era 
+of hurtling social change, which we cannot experience with worn out 
+categories. We are thus in danger of trying to live without experience 
+(surely a suicidal venture) or with the illusion of experience (usually 
+a homicidal venture). 
+
+
+If we must experience to live, but cannot do so without terror, 
+we shall surely perish. Whether by suicide or homicide won’t matter. 
+
+
+Is it really the case that experience itself has become nearly 
+impossible? We think so. Because we become human by learning a set 
+
+
+Vili 
+
+
+of values, feeling, perspectives and assumptions when we are young, 
+helpless, and uncritical. When that set of values and feelings is no 
+longer adaptive to the world we later inherit, we experience a crisis, 
+which commands on the one hand that we interpret the world as we 
+originally learned to do, and on the other that we realize that the 
+world which gave birth to our first philosophy is no longer what it 
+was. When we must simultaneously trust and mistrust our most 
+fundamental values, it is hard to know what being human means. 
+
+
+We think a “long hard march” through the assumptions that 
+presently imperil us can only be undertaken if we do it caring about 
+each other, whether mandarin or peasant, star or clown, master or 
+disciple. We think new ways must be crafted and built, not simply 
+found or borrowed. Together. 
+
+
+We intend to be a sort of whole earth catalogue for people who 
+think that thinking about the human predicament might help its own 
+evolution, for the first time. 
+
+
+As editors, we will select and publish things we value as 
+attempts to foster that kind of voluntary humanity. 
+
+
+Therefore, we invite anyone, whether clinical, social, behavioral 
+scientist (or fan) student, faculty (or interested person) young or old 
+(or in the middle) to join us in the attempt to make a joyful human 
+future not only possible but likely. 
+
+
+So—if you think “Science” is the way, we’re not for you, and 
+you probably won’t like us. If you think radicals are mad (nee crazy, 
+disturbed, insane, deviant, misguided, etc.) we’re not for you, and 
+you'll probably loathe us. If you think the world will not be safe ’till 
+sociologists are kings, we think you're mad. Ditto for politicians. 
+
+
+Every day, changes race into our world like mad floodwaters, 
+undermining all we hold sacred and sure. 
+
+
+ix 
+
+
+Change is called for. 
+Yet, change is crisis. 
+What to do in such times. 
+How to live. Feel. Know. Experience. 
+That’s what this series is about. 
+Victor Gioscia 
+Executive Director 
+
+
+Center for the Study of Social Change 
+
+
+Foreword Philip E. Slater 
+
+
+Despite the anarchic confusion of change rates in the various 
+segments of our lumbering, creaking, and gear-grinding behemoth of 
+a society, few people, as Victor Gioscia points out with some 
+astonishment, have sought to understand and control its mechanisms 
+of acceleration and deceleration. Most people feel themselves to be 
+prisoners of time and in that darkness find it difficult to say anything 
+intelligent about it. This book attempts to order our contemporary 
+chaos in temporal terms. It is an essential work for anyone trying to 
+understand our era, its changes, the counterculture, the future. 
+
+
+The fascination of TimeForms for me is not merely the 
+arresting ideas, such as that psychedelic drugs serve to enable people 
+to handle and even enjoy the information overloads characteristic of 
+contemporary society. Nor is it Gioscia’s bold effort to construct a 
+temporal conceptual framework, a framework that forces us to bend 
+and stretch our rigid linear ways of thinking about time. Even more 
+significant for me is the character of Gioscia’s thought processes: a 
+restless questing, a nibbling and clawing at the boundaries of the 
+presently unknowable. Without this questing, which is unfortunately 
+almost totally missing from academic productions today, in either 
+their scholarly, .scientific or polemical manifestations, I find it 
+difficult to maintain interest in the written word. 
+
+
+This is not to say I have no quarrels with TimeForms. Gioscia 
+and I have several chronic intellectual differences. I am hyper- 
+sensitive, for example, to the slightest lapse into the kind of 
+progress-infatuated boosterism that characterizes Toffler and Bucky 
+Fuller. All my life, and that of my father and my grandfather, people 
+have been telling us enthusiastically that the next scientific break- 
+
+
+xi 
+
+
+through would really do it, would erase the ravages of the previous 
+ones and bring health, wealth, and happiness to us all if we would 
+just open ourselves to it and adapt. The demand I make on all such 
+arguments is proof that their spokesmen are not traditional futur- 
+ists—that they have successfully routed out of their psyches those 
+tendencies that have propelled us into our current pathological 
+condition, for it is characteristic of neurotic thought patterns to 
+imagine that their only error lies in quantitative insufficiency of 
+application. 
+
+
+Like many contemporary theorists, myself included, Gioscia 
+sees humanity enmeshed in a process which will force a transforma- 
+tion of some of these thought patterns more or less inevitably. The 
+only question is whether his system specifically encompasses those 
+that have wrought the destruction. For me, linearity and chronic 
+accelerative growth are the defining symptoms of social sickness, as 
+are discontinuity and lack of temporal harmony. I would therefore 
+raise the following questions about his theses: 
+
+
+(1) Does not his position take the ego-driven, achievement- 
+oriented, power-infatuated ethic of modern humanity for granted in 
+the very process of explaining recent changes in our attitudes toward 
+it? Is it mere pleasure-seeking that leads us to desire a portable 
+computer the size of a shoe box, a 500-volume library on a wallet 
+size piece of paper, energy to send a thousand rockets to the moon, 
+or the ability to dial China on a wrist-phone? 
+
+
+(2) I am far convinced that generalization is what produced 
+achrony in the first place—that the fantasy of transcendance is the 
+origin and root of modern social pathology. Synchrony is, after all, a 
+commonplace of uncontaminated nonliterate societies. 
+
+
+(3) Can the complexity of future communication technology 
+by itself restore the automatic sense of connectedness that the 
+ravages of individualism have destroyed? Like Gioscia and other 
+social analysts, I place a certain amount of hope in the young, who 
+have been spared the inculcation of certain deplorable motivational 
+
+
+Xii 
+
+
+structures, At the same time, despite their impulse toward communi- 
+ty, and its accompanying ideology, it is my strong impression that at 
+a gut, mMoment-to-moment level social responsivity in the young has 
+atrophied even further than in their parents. Gioscia explicitly 
+disclaims any view of the young as especially enlightened, but I 
+would like to see him turn their own eyes on themselves with the 
+same brilliance that he exposes the occupational neuroses of 
+traditional psychotherapists. Hope is a precious commodity and 
+Americans have centered it in their offspring since the earliest 
+settlers, a habit the results of which oppress us on every side. The 
+logic of change processes would lead us to expect the young both to 
+evolve cures for our diseases and to exhibit them in their most 
+extreme form, and this is the way it appears to me. I confess to a 
+personal bias here, however. Although I am fond of the young and 
+approve of them in a general way, I must admit that one of my 
+reasons for leaving university life was the profound boredom aroused 
+by having to spend a great deal of time with people who haven’t lived 
+very much. 
+
+
+(4) I am suspicious of analyses which stress discontinuity and 
+shucking the past. Most of the achrony of which Gioscia speaks 
+comes from our living in a mammoth junkheap of discarded 
+novelties. The only discontinuity that would impress me favorably 
+would be the rejection of our national commitment to transitoriness. 
+The most radical change possible in our society would be the 
+establishment of environmental stability and conservatism. In the 
+same vein, it seems important to distinguish between media-defined 
+social revolutions and real ones. Not all of our culture or population 
+is plugged into the media circuitry, and while a 5-year old ideology 
+may be regarded as “‘hopelessly irrelevant” the same is not true of a 
+500-year old one. Academics fall into the same trap:—most intellec- 
+tual history is like the universe seen through the eyes of a company 
+house organ. The fact that flower children, Woodstock, campus 
+protest, psychedelic culture, and so on, seem hopelessly passe today 
+is often used to argue the meaninglessness of those events, rather 
+than, as I would argue, the meaninglessness of our ways of defining 
+
+
+our experience. 
+
+
+xili 
+
+
+I don’t know how these issues are to be resolved, for Gioscia’s 
+vision of the future cannot lightly be dismissed, and may hold a 
+monopoly on hope. For me, in any case, our wrangling over the 
+future is of less interest than his effort to transform our spatial 
+thought patterns into temporal ones, an enterprise at one with the 
+redefinition of matter as energy, product as process, thing as long 
+event, 
+
+
+Clearly this is the direction in which the exploration of ultimate 
+concerns must go. All events which seem mysterious to us—psychic 
+phenomena, unexplainable forms of communication, transcendental 
+experiences—lend themselves to explanation in temporal terms. As 
+Gioscia points out, “some frequencies, after million year evolution- 
+ary periods of interacting dyssynchronously, have come into a 
+harmony which we call sensation. Air waves and ear vibrations in 
+synch result in our experience of sound.” Once we abandon our 
+“thing” orientation and begin to pay attention to the coordination 
+of frequencies all sense of weirdness disappears from these phenome- 
+na. 
+
+
+One specific question that this book raised in my mind was the 
+issue or “readiness”. Why do people suddenly take action after 
+avoiding it for long periods? Pay a debt, break off an unhappy 
+relationship, perform a task, go on a journey. How does a person 
+achieve sufficient synchrony within himself and between himself and 
+his environment to act with grace, effectiveness, and meaning? These 
+issues are at least recognized in the East, but Westerners (with the 
+exception of a few athletes and performers) are largely out of touch 
+with them. Most acts are performed mechanically by Westerners, in 
+accordance with clock time or some other bureaucratic compulsion. 
+This perhaps accounts for the harsh, chaotic, discordant, and 
+Oppressive quality of our urban life. The sense of the interconnected- 
+ness of all living things, of the exquisite timing necessary to maintain 
+and express this harmony, has largely atrophied. Hopefully this 
+volume will assist its reawakening. 
+
+
+XIV 
+
+
+Prolog 
+
+
+Print is a kind of delayed music, playing now words composed 
+in another time, a process in which the reader confers a temporary 
+immortality on the author’s once private thoughts and experiences. 
+You have before you the scores of compositions written in the last 
+five years for various occasions and performances. One is never sure 
+it is the best one could have done, and so, perhaps too late, one tries 
+to add a few grace notes. It would please me, as you read these 
+pieces, if you heard the music you remember hearing and enjoying in 
+the past half-decade, beginning just before “hippies” became news, 
+and ending in August, 1971. 
+
+It was a time of many changes, some deep and anguished, some 
+sweet and enduring. For me, it was a dialectical time, of birth, death, 
+and transformation. I learned, and in learning, died, and in dying, 
+learned. I was always surprised when I sat down to write, to find 
+myself as terrified as before to form the words the wisps of 
+awareness that serve as my understanding. 
+
+Once, it was possible to read leisurely and ponder long on the 
+eternal mysteries—who are we—why are we here—where are we 
+going—and transmit the results of these ruminations to classrooms 
+full of bright, eager, beautiful young people. That time is steadily 
+disappearing, as the young navigate through oceans of novelty more 
+freshly, more innocently, and let it be said, more perilously, than the 
+professors who presume to teach them. Deprived of time to reflect, 
+the young cannot gain perspective: deprived of innocence, professors 
+cannot learn. The era of rapid social changes blinds us all, blindly. 
+
+So too it was once possible to attend the meetings of learned 
+societies, to hear papers of significance and meaning, and even once 
+in a while to deliver them. 
+
+But we live in strange times, when nothing is as deadas 
+yesterday’s news, and nothing more difficult than tomorrow’s vision. 
+
+These are things which everyone knows, except perhaps those 
+so tossed and wrung that they must cling to views no longer adaptive. 
+They are recorded here partly to insure myself against the reader’s 
+anger when I stridently demand newer bolder imaginations, and 
+partly to explain the very ordinary circumstances in which this book 
+
+
+XV 
+
+
+was composed. For there are two ways to read it, depending on who 
+you are. 
+
+
+If you are literate, if your primary way of learning is through 
+the printed word, and have sampled the philosophers, the sociolo- 
+gists, the psychoanalysts, etc, that is, if you are an educated 
+academic person, you will probably want to begin with the metalog, 
+On Social Time IJ, since, in académic terms, it is the paradigm, or set 
+of hypotheses the other pieces “test”. It was written first, and 
+gradually expanded, patched, modified, changed. It will show you 
+what is written between the lines in the pieces that appear before it. 
+
+
+J€ on the other hand, you derive your principal education not 
+from books, but from experiences with friends and lovers, and if you 
+are already familiar with the psychedelic experience, you will 
+probably be able to trace my own psychedelic evolution through the 
+chapters. 
+
+
+In either case, I want to tell you why I have assembled them 
+here, in book form, though each was originally a paper spoken to an 
+audience. I have several reasons. 
+
+
+First, it is the first of four books on the nature of time, which I 
+want to do because I believe that time is to us what water is to fish: 
+it is dangerous to ignore. 
+
+
+Second, the psychedelic era too often naively divided us into 
+pros and cons, often parents against their own children. I want to 
+stop that war, if even only a little. 
+
+
+Third, I am, God help me, a teacher, and without an audience, I 
+am nothing. 
+
+
+Fourth, timidly, I think some of the ideas might be useful to 
+others who, like me, believe that we are in the midst of an 
+evolutionary crisis, and who believe, with mie, that a good theory 
+sometimes helps. 
+
+
+Finally, I wrote these words in joy, which I would like to share. 
+
+
+XVI 
+
+
+TimeEForms 1 
+
+
+LSD SUBCULTURES: ACIDOXY VERSUS ORTHODOXY 
+
+
+There is no need to document what everyone knows — there are a 
+lot of young people whose special use of psychedelic substances is 
+part of their special relation to contemporary culture. The special 
+set of values, attitudes, and opinions of this LSD subculture were 
+the focus of my participant observations in London, New York, 
+and San Francisco during the last ten years. “Interviews” with 
+hundreds of users revealed that an acid subculture is comparably to 
+be found in many other world cities, e.g. Copenhagen, Jerusalem, 
+Tokyo, Paris, Berlin. 
+
+
+Less well known is the fact that there is a growing tension 
+between the subculture of LSD users and what might be called the 
+subculture of therapists. The following paragraphs describe some 
+aspects of this tension, written as much to solicit as to share 
+insight into a phenomenon which increasingly troubles profes- 
+sionals in the therapeutic community. 
+
+
+VALUE CONFLICTS 
+
+In addition to their use of psychedelic substances which 
+precipitate experiences of a sort radically different from those with 
+which the midrange of therapeutic personnel are familiar, hippies 
+(and yippies and many others) are outspokenly antifamilial (drop- 
+outs), antipsychiatric (pro-paranoid), and anti-bureaucracy (radical 
+politics). They deplore wealth as alienating (the Digger Free Store), 
+cleanliness as neuroticism (clean is a hang-up), and prefer free sex 
+to the marital practices sanctioned by society. They refuse the 
+counsel of rationality (the bomb is rational, the Pentagon is 
+rational) and they insist that ‘‘doing my thing” is healthier and 
+saner than going to war or programming computers. They regard 
+the “‘trip’’ as a unique experience, communes as better than 
+
+
+2 TimeForms 
+
+
+traditional family life, and look forward to the replacement of 
+“violence” with “‘love,” and ‘‘education” with ‘‘ecstasy.” 
+
+
+They are increasingly regarded as social pariahs, public health 
+menaces, political pests, and as a degenerate generation, labels 
+which are said to earn them the right to “treatment”. Yet, 
+treatment programs face a number of very practical problems in 
+addition to the value differences described above when they try to 
+offer service to this population. Few are willing to become patients 
+voluntarily. Even if a given therapist has attempted to manage his 
+countertransferences to a patient who regards him as ignorant of 
+the trip experience, biased in favor of family life, militaristic 
+because he offers therapy instead of politics, an impersonal bureau- 
+crat because he is an agent of an agency, “hung-up on loot” 
+because he works for a living, and a puritan because he’s clean, 
+relatively monagamous and heterosexual, a therapist must still 
+confront a number of perplexing problems. For example, in 
+attempting to cope with a patient experiencing a bad trip which 
+may last from 10 to 12 hours, what is to be done about 
+scheduling? When the patient is a 16 year old who has run away 
+from home and does not wish to speak to his or her parents, of 
+what use is family therapy? Or, if one wants to treat the natural 
+group (or social network)” of significant others, does one suggest 
+that the whole commune come in? Is a bad trip an “emergency?” 
+Does Thorazine mollify a bad trip? Does Niacinamide? 
+
+
+Faced with these kinds of questions, an increasing number of 
+therapists are reexamining their treatment rationales, so that con- 
+victions developed: over long years of experience are now some 
+times regarded as value assumptions which may require modifica- 
+tion. 
+
+
+In our interviews we explored five areas. We did not structure 
+the interviews, so that often other areas cropped up to the 
+exclusion of our principal concerns. If we could comfortably 
+
+
+*I use the term in the sense conveyed by Dr. Ross Speck’s work. cf. Family Networks, 
+Ross Speck and Carolyn Attneave, New York, Pantheon, 1973. 
+
+
+TimEForms 3 
+
+
+squeeze a question in, we did. If we couldn’t, we didn’t. Our 
+interests were: 
+
+
+1. Subcultural differentiation: we wanted to know what 
+trippers and therapists thought of each other 
+
+
+2. Status: we wanted to know whether the avant-garde na- 
+ture of the acid scene threatened orthodox therapists 
+
+
+3, Relevant experience: we wanted to know whether the trip 
+is a unique experience 
+
+
+4. Sex: we wanted to know if traditional family sex and trip 
+sex differed 
+
+
+5. Religion: we wanted to know whether tripping involved 
+religious experiences 
+
+
+SUBCULTURAL DIFFERENTIATION 
+
+With respect to the subcultural differentiation, we found a 
+continuum of attitudes which rendered our dichotomy of trippers- 
+versus-therapists useless. Although we spoke with trippers who 
+regard therapists who have not “dropped” acid as hopelessly “‘out 
+of it”, we also spoke with trippers in therapy with nonusing- 
+therapists who felt that the course of therapy contained learning 
+experiences for both parties. However, trippers whose therapists 
+had had an LSD experience were uniformly envied by trippers 
+whose therapists had not.* 
+
+
+Self-administered massive dosages may result in good or bad 
+trips. Good trips induced in this way will ordinarily not send a 
+tripper to a therapist. Bad trips might, if the tripper panics and has 
+no one else to “talk him down.” The acid-experienced therapist 
+will know how to talk his patient down, if he has a number of 
+
+
+*Here it is necessary to distinguish, as Leuner does, between psychedelic therapy, which 
+involves massive doses of LSD in one or two breakthrough sessions, and psycholytic 
+therapy, which involves repeated lower dosages at regular intervals as adjuncts to the 
+therapeutic process. It is additionally necessary to distinguish the self-administered from the 
+professionally administered trip, since they may differ markedly. 
+
+
+4 TimeForMs 
+
+
+hours available. The acid-inexperienced therapist usually doesn’t 
+know that a patient in a bad trip can be talked down, and may 
+resort to medication (Thorazine, Niacinamide). When he does, in 
+the words of one respondent, ‘‘Then you have both the Thorazine 
+and the bum trip to handle.” A particular danger is the possibility 
+that the bad trip is due not to LSD but to STP, for the 
+combination of STP and Thorazine is believed to be fatal. The role 
+of the inexperienced therapist who fails to make this crucial 
+distinction is not an enviable one. 
+
+
+It is not surprising therefore that therapists who have had 
+relevant experiences are preferred by trippers. Like the heroin 
+addicts of yesteryear,’ acid “heads” know that there is no sure 
+way of knowing the strength of a “cap” of acid when they buy it 
+(or are given it free). Nor is it surprising that trippers feel confined 
+to their own resources and not a little disdainful of the therapist 
+subculture, which by and large, but especially in the United States, 
+is an acid-inexperienced subculture. 
+
+
+Perhaps the most important finding which emerged from our 
+interviews is the fact that the experienced trippers regard inex- 
+perienced trippers who seek help of acid-inexperienced therapists as 
+fools because of the high likelihood that acid-inexperienced thera- 
+pists are not only not able to help but are not willing to help, due 
+as much to their alleged moralistic alliance with an anti-acid 
+society as to their fear that acid is better than analysis (a fear 
+expressed to us by a number of therapists). More often, therapists 
+said that they’d like to try some but legal concerns prevented 
+them. A few therapists said they were able to learn a good deal 
+about LSD from patients who began treatment with them before 
+they began experimenting with LSD, but felt limited in their 
+ability to empathize with the experience. 
+
+
+It should be noted that many of the interviewed protagonists 
+of the LSD experience, both trippers and therapists, do not regard 
+the experience as fitting in neatly with psychoanalytic paradigms, 
+so that, in their view, LSD should not be regarded simply either as 
+
+
+TimeForms 5 
+
+
+a defense dissolver or as an ego builder, because such views are 
+uncomfortably psychologistic. The social nature of the experience 
+has also been noted by many investigators, notably by Becker? and 
+Cheek?, who have shown that social groups selectively define 
+aspects of the drug experience as real and unreal. Our respondents 
+repeatedly referred to the sociopolitical dimensions of the experi- 
+ence, reminding us, in the words of one young girl, that “dropping 
+acid and dropping out are really very similar, because, you know, 
+in an insane world, counterinsanity is saner than plain insanity.” 
+Thus, many users inquire more deeply into the therapist’s political 
+views than into his therapeutic credo, often believing them to be 
+more intimately related than the therapist himself does. We have 
+interviewed therapists who do this with patients. 
+
+
+STATUS 
+
+With regard to the relative status of the acid subculture, a 
+number of conclusions emerged from our interviews. First, as 
+reported above, many therapists felt that sooner or later they 
+would have to learn more about the LSD experience since they 
+believed the number of, users to be increasing and expected them 
+to need help eventually. Some therapists thought that they would 
+eventually try it, and others (usually the younger ones) eagerly 
+looked forward to the experience. 
+
+
+A paradoxical finding is the following. Before acid, therapists 
+who preferred the organic viewpoint to the psychogenic one were 
+regarded by many as old fashioned. Some smiled knowingly at 
+those who did not employ the then fashionable terms derived from 
+psychoanalytic theory. Now, the shoe seems to be on the other 
+foot. Those who attempt to reduce the acid-induced experience to 
+psychoanalytic terms are regarded as conservatives resisting the new 
+orthodoxy. Terms like “synaesthesia” are in; interpretations like 
+‘Gdentifying with the object” are out, at least among those we 
+interviewed, This should not be taken to mean that psychoanalytic 
+investigators are not researching the acid scene, Dr. Dahlberg at the 
+William Alanson White Institute in New York is among those 
+
+
+6 TimeForMs 
+
+
+highly regarded, although he is seen as cautious in both method 
+and dosage levels.* 
+
+
+Some who resort to LSD find their particular pathologies 
+temporarily. masked or even alleviated by the experience, but acid 
+is no leveler. In fact, the contrary seems often true, which is 
+recognized by experienced users in their ability to distinguish what 
+is generically due to acid and what is specifically due to idiosyn- 
+cracies of the individual. Again, we found our initial dichotomy to 
+be naive. The question is not whether acid dethrones orthodox 
+diagnostic categories; the real question seems to be which person- 
+ality types respond to acid in which ways. The work of Linton and 
+Lang® is particularly instructive in this regard, as is the work of 
+Blum® and his associates. They find different personality patterns 
+at varying dosage levels. 
+
+
+It should be noted that psycholytic therapy is gaining in 
+popularity in Europe as a professionally administered modality. In 
+the United States, in the absence of legal availability, it must be 
+reported that self-administered massive dosages are on the increase, 
+especially now that incidents of chromosome damage have been 
+reported, then contradicted, then re-reported, so that even profes- 
+sionals in touch with the literature state that the controversy has 
+not yet been resolved.” 
+
+
+The. status of the LSD subculture is in rapid flux. Hippies in 
+the East Village, in the Haight, in Soho now avoid the harsh glare 
+of publicity because they know that publicity, for them, leads to 
+ridicule and persecution. They resent the commercialization of 
+their way of life, their music, and their art, because it serves as a 
+vehicle for cheap imitation by faddists. Nor do they wish to be put 
+in the mobility race and competed with for status. Many of our 
+respondents were very seriously concerned with freedom, both 
+inner and outer, and would be much happier if they weren't cast 
+in the role of criminal violators of the American way of life; 
+bucolic emigration for those who are is becoming increasingly 
+attractive. 
+
+
+TimeForms 7 
+
+
+RELEVANT EXPERIENCE 
+
+From the point of view of relevant experience there is almost 
+uniform agreement — the trip is unique. This is not to say that 
+LSD is the only psychedelic drug, for there are many. Mescaline 
+and Peyote are favorites, as are Psilocybin and Psilocin. Other 
+psychedelics have been in use for centuries, but they are not 
+ordinarily found in the training experiences of therapists, and there 
+are few if any comparable experiences in the orthodox psycho- 
+analytic encounter. Alcohol is simply not comparable, nor are the 
+tranquilizers, sedatives, depressants, and stimulants found in the 
+psychiatric arsenal. William James’ famous experience with nitrous 
+oxide (laughing gas) is well known and his reaction was very much 
+his own. Others find this chemical quite delightful. One of our 
+respondents prefers it to LSD. But acid, like sex, is hard to 
+compare with other experiences. 
+
+
+SEX 
+
+In a much quoted interview in Playboy, Timothy Leary stated 
+that the real secret behind the acid scene was LSD’s fantastic 
+aphrodisiacal properties, which, for example, enabled women to 
+have “hundreds” of orgasms during a trip. If one takes the term 
+orgasm literally (that is, biologically), our respondents contradict 
+Leary’s assertions. However, if one takes a more metaphorical 
+meaning, our respondents indicate that the statement is true, by 
+which they seem to mean that moment after moment is filled with 
+delights of the most sensuous and rapturous sort, and that, for 
+hours on end, in what seem to be vastly extended spans of time, 
+wholly satisfying releases of ecstatic bliss are attained with magnifi- 
+cent ease. 
+
+
+It has been claimed that LSD is not specifically aphrodisiacal 
+but has that effect because it heightens the exquisiteness of 
+perception across the entire sensorium, so that, if sex is what one 
+is experiencing, it is a heightened and exquisitized sex one will 
+experience under LSD. Our respondents told us that there were 
+three ways in which LSD “heightened” the sexual experi- 
+ence: 1) It dissolves defensiveness and anxiety, thus enabling one 
+
+
+8 TimeForms 
+
+
+to enter fully into the experience. 2) It extends the sensations 
+associated with sex so that stroking and orgasm are spread over 
+large regions of the body. 3) It extends experienced time (as 
+opposed to clock time) so that one seems to have more time in 
+which to “luxuriate.” Thus, even though the clock is running, one 
+can play at one’s own pace. “Since a short time seems to last a 
+long time, it’s better,” is the way one of our respondents put it. 
+
+‘We were also specifically interested in another aspect of 
+psychedelic sexual behavior, namely, what one of our respondents 
+called the “group grope”’, in which a number of individuals of both 
+sexes participate in what might be termed an orgy. We were told 
+that group sex does not derive its impetus mainly from LSD but 
+from political rejection of the notion of private property and from 
+the practical unattainability of privacy in the urban com- 
+mune — that acid only served to disinhibit those who already had 
+the wish to “love together.” 
+
+
+It is instructive to observe that psychedelic sex differs mark- 
+edly, however, from the narcotically disinhibited sexuality, since 
+the latter becomes increasingly impossible as dosages climb. Hence, 
+a sharp distinction should be drawn between the psychedelic sex, 
+which is improved, and narcotic sex, which is depressed. Neverthe- 
+less, LSD users said that group sex is part of the new political 
+philosophy of community with which they are attempting to 
+replace older political philosophies of proprietary (commodity) 
+sexuality. Actually, we were told that acid and group sex, in 
+combination, are both aspects of a new political philosophy which 
+is emerging in the youthful acid subcultures around the globe, and 
+
+
+that proper initiation into this subculture involves far more than 
+acid and group sex. 
+
+
+Of interest to us was the relation between the “communes” in 
+which group sex is often practiced and the “family processes” 
+characteristic of the more permanent of these communes. If, for 
+example, a certain girl functioned as the mother of a given 
+commune, did she also function as a group sex partner? If so, what 
+about incest taboos, and if not, why not? We were told that roles 
+
+
+TIMEForRMS 9 
+
+
+were frequently reallocated within communes, so thdt this month’s 
+mother might be next month’s daughter, etc., and that there were 
+major differences to be found among rural versus urban communes, 
+the latter experiencing a more rapid change of personnel. We were 
+further informed that group sex was not the rule but was not 
+precluded by rule either, so that, if the spirit happened to move 
+them on any given occasion, it might occur. The fact is that dyadic 
+pairings are by far the more common occurrence. We were. 
+repeatedly told that LSD was not the sine qua non of group 
+sexuality, One of our informants reminded us that several accounts 
+existed in anthropological literature describing similar practices 
+among adolescents in preliterate societies, and that ‘drugs weren’t 
+prerequisites there either.” 
+
+
+Hypothesizing that there might be some relation between the 
+antifamilial values of the LSD subculture and anticonformist sex 
+roles, we asked dropout users whether they were consciously and 
+deliberately engaging in sexual behaviors that were specifically 
+opposite to the kinds of sex practiced in their families of 
+orientation. Again, we were given responses which accused us of 
+psychologistic reductionism, suggesting that we were hopelessly out 
+of touch with the generational nature of contemporary youthful 
+rebellion, which did not consist exclusively or even principally of 
+an antifamilial revolt but of a rebellion against all the major 
+institutions of urban-industrial societies. We were politely informed 
+that it was not simply with the family that youth was unhappy, 
+but with schools, jobs, wars, governments, businesses, and bureauc- 
+racies, indeed, the whole complex of cultural institutions of which 
+urban-industrial societies are comprised. “This”, we were forcibly 
+reminded, “is a cultural revolution, not simply an antifamily 
+experiment.” In this way, our hypothesis of reaction-formation 
+received its demise. We concluded that the acid subculture may not 
+solely be understood in psychological terms and that newer models 
+for its comprehension need to be devised. 
+
+
+RELIGION 
+We have already alluded to William James’ masterpiece, The 
+
+
+10 TimeForms 
+
+
+Varities of Religious Experience. Masters and Huston have written 
+what may be a minor masterpiece, The Varieties of Psychedelic 
+Experience,® in which they address themselves to the relation of 
+psychedelic and religious experience. Their orientation is explora- 
+tory, and they attempt to make sense out of the religious 
+statements made by subjects who report on their LSD sessions. 
+Some of their subjects report theistic experiences, some do not, 
+but many report feelings which they regard as religious. 
+
+
+We inquired of our respondents whether they had had reli- 
+gious experiences under LSD. Some responded that they had had 
+experiences which they would call religious if they were religious, 
+but they were not religious. Others said that the trip was the 
+“most profound experience” they had ever had, and, like Masters’ 
+and Huston’s subjects, described the experience in aesthetic terms. 
+Still others described the experience as one of the “immense 
+unity” and “in touch with All.” That Tibetan, Hindu, and other 
+religious vocabularies are widely employed by LSD users is also 
+well known. Such languages describe what Paul Tillich must have 
+had in mind when he spoke of “ultimate concern,” or what John 
+Dewey described as a “genuine religious experience.” That such 
+experiences were not commonly described by our respondents in 
+theistic terms should thus not be surprising. 
+
+
+We were interested in the extent to which acid serves as 4 
+ritual initiation into a subculture, having investigated this hypoth- 
+esis in the narcotic scene.® In the present study, we wanted to 
+know whether the “profound” nature of the LSD experience might 
+serve as a ritual initiation into what may legitimately be termed a 
+cult, that is, a band of believers united in common observance of 
+religious ritual. It is difficult to classify the responses we were 
+given to the questions we asked in this area. Some respondents 
+pooh-poohed the idea of religious ritual, others said it was 
+“convenient” to share a Tibetan or Hindu language. Others (a 
+Feurbachian proletariat?) said that what was once called religion is 
+“what they were into.” We regarded this latter response as the 
+least defensively given, and found no reason to doubt its veracity. 
+
+
+TimMEForms. 11 
+
+
+As with narcotics, acid users almost instantly strike up a 
+rapport with each other. It is as if there were a “‘community of the 
+alienated.”* For example, ‘‘heads” who read Laing’s Politics of 
+Experience'® insist that the final chapter, “The Bird of Paradise,” 
+is a trip, and that Laing must have dropped some acid to write it. 
+Thus, acid may well serve to initiate members into a mystical cult 
+which promises deliverance from an age gone mad by suggesting 
+that there is a realm of peace above and beyond the falterings of 
+an imperfect civilization. It is not necessary that those to whom 
+such deliverance is given also be required to have an acceptable 
+academic theory of it. 
+
+
+CONCLUSIONS 
+
+Our conclusions from this exploratory study were the follow- 
+ing: 
+
+1. There is an LSD subculture. It is sharply critical of 
+orthodox therapy, and places itself in a “paranoid” opposition to 
+it simply because there is a uniqueness to the trip experience with 
+which many inexperienced therapists nonetheless claim professional 
+familiarity. Such therapists are often cast, albeit sometimes unde- 
+servedly, into the role of middle-class police whose duty it is to 
+eliminate an allegedly monstrous drug from the scene. Not a few 
+therapists refuse this role. Others experiment with LSD in both 
+their private and professional lives, but they are, at present, 
+especially in the United States, a decided minority. Those thera- 
+pists who do not regard a bad trip as a moral outrage, do not 
+quickly reach for tranquilizers when confronting a bad trip, since 
+they see it as an experience with which they can deal empathetical- 
+ly and, hence, effectively. Among users, professional or not, there 
+exists a bond of empathy which many regard as a prerequisite for 
+effective treatment, not of acid, but perhaps, even with it. 
+
+2. LSD-related attitudes represent in many ways only the 
+surface of a new emergent ideology, and therefore enjoy the status 
+that all new and promising things are accorded in a world in need 
+of miracles, It may not be unlikely that in the near future the drug 
+
+
+*I am indebted'to Prof. H. Silverstein for this phrase. 
+
+
+12 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+aspects of this ideology will be abandoned (the experience of the 
+Beatles in this regard might have been prophetic). For, in our view, 
+what is new about acid is mot its ideology of the absolute dignity 
+of the individual’s experience, nor its conviction that love is the 
+only sane response to a violently destructive world. What is new 
+about acid is its centrality to a generation of people who will not 
+mouth beliefs they do not actually live. With this experience, 
+hopefully, the professional therapist can feel a kinship. 
+
+3. It was Freud who taught us that sex is not always sex. The 
+LSD subculture seems to be trying to teach us that lesson again, 
+since we seem to have forgotten it. Perhaps polymorphous per- 
+versity is an infantile and unsociological creed. Perhaps it is a stage 
+of development which is better transcended. But perhaps, as with 
+play, it incarnates values which are less destructive than wars of 
+another sort, and perhaps, for the young who occasionally ex- 
+perience group sex in experimental communes, it is a necessary 
+experiment seeking new answers to old questions. 
+
+4. In an age where conscience permits the napalm flames of 
+war to engulf civilian women and children scarcely two decades 
+after millions were burned in ovens throughout Europe, the 
+suspicion that terms such as “neurosis” and “psychosis” may 
+become political weapons cannot be regarded as outrageous. Per- 
+haps, in such an age, some of those who seek some form of 
+ultimacy in mind-changing chemicals deserve neither to be 
+“treated” nor to be subjected to “criminal” processes. 
+
+
+TimeForms 13 
+
+
+GROOVIN’ ON TIME: Fragments of a Sociology of the Psychedelic 
+Experience 
+
+
+INTRODUCTION 
+
+The task of this essay is to focus the sociological imagination on 
+data derived from participant observation of the psychedelic scene. 
+What is attempted is an examination of processes in society which 
+help to account for the emergence of what many call a drug 
+subculture. It will be argued that the consumption of LSD and 
+related substances is an epiphenomenon, i.e., “‘symptomatic” of 
+deeper changes occurring in contemporary post-industrial society. 
+The hypothesis uniting the pages that follow is that psychedelics are 
+primitive psychochemical machines by which a new generation seeks 
+to master a range of new societal forces. Thus, the new drug 
+technology is produced by, hence does not by itself produce, a new 
+kind of societal agony. 
+
+
+PROLEGOMENON ON METHOD 
+
+Participant observation is a form of scientific experience which 
+escapes the trap of fragmented overspecialization because it necessar- 
+ily confronts the full plenum and contextual variety of its chosen 
+subject. It enables the observer to experience the interconnections 
+which controlled experimentation often defines out of the way. It 
+reduces the social distance between subjective and objective data, by 
+defining the observer as less unlike his subjects than laboratory 
+research defines him. It makes it possible for the observer to observe 
+his own experience as well as the experiences of his subjects, creating 
+an empathy which facilitates candid disclosure while reducing the 
+potential of paranoid reaction in the observational field. These and 
+other qualities of the technique of participant observation make it a 
+
+
+14. TrmelormMs 
+
+
+particularly useful method for one who chooses to focus his 
+attention on the contemporary drug scene. 
+
+
+But participant observation is not without traps of its own. 
+Vivid description is open to the charge of over-identification. 
+Empathy may be construed as loss of objectivity. Generalization 
+becomes more difficult as the number and range of particulars 
+increases. Cooptation and one-dimensionalization become increasing- 
+ly possible to the extent that the observer penetrates the universe of 
+inquiry. Further, the drug scene creates the danger of arrest for 
+felonious complicity as one more closely “observes” the behavior in 
+question. 
+
+
+Nevertheless, it may be argued that participant observation is 
+the method of choice when the universe to be observed is not yet 
+sufficiently defined to warrant the use of those sampling techniques 
+which lend themselves to more precise and exact statistical quantifi- 
+cation. In the absence of a census of drug-related behaviors, 
+participant observation yields up an array of data which make it a 
+valuable method, its shortcomings notwithstanding. The datum that 
+it is the method preferred by the observed adds to the value of its 
+adoption. The fact that it provides ethnographic concreteness is no 
+less a value in its favor. 
+
+
+One spells out the above criteria in order to confront the 
+increasingly met criticism that scientific exactitude is especially 
+needful in the matter of societal problems, an arena laden with 
+values, biases, and political choices. Agreed. One should confront as 
+well the critique which holds that we should aspire to no more 
+exactitude than is genuinely possible, and that if, indeed it is the 
+experience surrounding psychedelic substances on which we focus 
+our inquiry, then we should seek no more exactitude than such 
+experiences warrant. This is especially the case when we focus 
+sociological attention on the culturdl, social, and personal sources 
+and outcomes of the psychedelic experience, as in the paragraphs 
+that follow. 
+
+
+TimEForms 15 
+
+
+HISTORY AS INQUIRY 
+
+Being there (Dasein), Heidegger tells us, engenders a feeling of 
+having been thrown (geworfenbeit), as if one suddenly awakens to 
+find himself having been deposited in a strange oppressive place, 
+charged with the task of figuring out, not so much “who threw me 
+here” as “now what.” One feels simultaneously lost and impelled, 
+driven and trapped. These were the emotions characterizing the 
+heroin addicts we observed in a study completed a few years ago, and 
+these were the emotions characterizing the participant observer.’ In 
+those days, heroin was the medication of choice to which many 
+adolescents looked for the anaesthetic revelation of their desires. We 
+hypothesized that these young people sought from heroin a 
+temporary relief from the falterings of an imperfect civilization 
+which inflicted upon them the impossible task of seeking a forbidden 
+deliverance from their lower class plight. The situation was relatively 
+uncomplicated — one drug, one class, even one principal ethnicity, 
+making it possible to generalize from the particular turmoil of these 
+adolescents to the plight of similar adolescents elsewhere. 
+
+Quickly thereafter, a much younger population, no higher in 
+class but quite different in ethnicity, seized on the inhalation of glue 
+fumes and similar substances for the relief of their special turmoil, 
+forcing a modification of prior hypotheses, not solely with regard to 
+age and ethnicity, but also with regard to the range and scope of 
+substance choice.” But one could still adhere to the view that drug 
+misuse was the predilection of a relatively small number of young 
+“deviants’’ in our society, without risking professional scorn, 
+although it was becoming increasingly clear that the “problem’’ was 
+becoming increasingly serious. 
+
+
+Then, as everyone knows, LSD use spread among the middle 
+class youth of the nation as a fire through a field of hay, spreading 
+with it an array of substances (marijuana, mescalin, peyote, 
+psilocybin, et al.) across ages, classes, ethnicities, cities, and 
+subcultures, The situation came more and more to resemble the 
+well-stocked bar of the average American home, such that specific 
+drugs for specific experiences at specific times and places became the 
+rule, rather than the exception. The drug scene,’ like that of its 
+
+
+16 TimeForms 
+
+
+parents’, produced connoisseurs conversant with a variety of drugs 
+which induced desired experiences under chosen circumstances, with 
+degrees of social appropriateness shaded as finely as the gradations of 
+the Japanese bow. The “problem,” it was agreed, had reached 
+epidemiological proportions. It was occasionally noted, en 
+passant, that the new drugs had been available and in use by a small 
+number of cognoscenti for twenty years, and that some had been in 
+use for literally thousands of years. The question arose, “why are so 
+many young people now using so many drugs.” Parallels drawn to 
+the use of alcohol, sleeping pills, stimulants, tranquillizers, cigarettes, 
+aspirin and a veritable horde of socially sanctioned analgesics were 
+deemed not to the point. This was “different.” 
+
+
+It was not difficult to assemble ‘“‘data’’ from magazines and 
+newspaper accounts supporting the view that a stratification of drug 
+taste was in evidence, that lower class youth preferred “body” drugs 
+(largely heroin-and other morphine derivatives), that upper-lower 
+youth were beginning to favor ‘‘speed”’ (methamphetamine and other 
+stimulants), and that the initial sample of LSD users seemed to be 
+dropouts from a middle class life style their parents were astonished 
+to find they (the young) were not enjoying to the hilt, and were, in 
+fact, specifically critical of its alleged crass materialism (i.e., spiritual 
+vacuum). The out-of-hand rejection of affluence was especially 
+shocking to those by whom this affluence was newly won, i.e., the 
+nouveau bourgeois. 
+
+And, some noted, ‘“‘this’ was also international.* Like the jet 
+set chronicled in the mass media, youth in many world cities were 
+equally conversant, ‘tho differentially supplied, with the whole 
+panoply of drugs that so concerned their elders. To make matters 
+worse, it emerged that the therapy industry, to which parents had 
+been accustomed to turn for the relief of their offsprings’ alleged 
+symptoms, was increasingly regarded with suspicion, distrust, and, 
+not occasionally, outright disdain by young drug users—partly 
+because parents assumed that drug use was ipso facto pathognomonic 
+of emotional disorder, and partly because legislatures decreed that 
+drug use was ipso facto criminal. In short, the young were told that a 
+major norm of their subculture was either sick or wrong, although no 
+
+
+TIMEForMs' 17 
+
+
+one could dispute their right to a subculture without vitiating his 
+right to his own. Intellectuals murmured “double bind;’’ youth 
+growled “hypocrisy.” 
+
+
+Into this breach bravely rode the ill-starred ‘“Hippies,’’ whose 
+philosophy was abhorred by the very media which extolled and 
+subsequently expropriated their aesthetic. Settling into Haight-Ash- 
+bury in California and the East Village in New York, hippies 
+pronounced, as the Spenglerian Beats of the fifties had pronounced 
+before them, the imminent demise of western civilization. Unlike the 
+Beats, however, hippies set about systematically replacing those 
+institutions of straight society which, they charged, had brutally 
+alienated them from the joys of their own lives. 
+
+
+In July of 1967, at the Dialectics of Liberation conference 
+convened in London by R.D. Laing, Allen Ginsberg described the 
+new generation, variously called hippies, flower children, the love 
+generation, the now generation, and freemen, as having a whole set 
+of subcultural institutions of their own. For social workers, there 
+were the diggers; for politicians, provos; for police, Hell’s Angels and 
+other Bikers; religion consisted of an amalgam of Tibetan, Egyptian, 
+Hindu, Zen and astrological speculation, all facing in a deliberately 
+mystical direction, drugs and sexual rituals serving as sacraments. For 
+charismatic leaders, there were Leary, Kesey, and others. Language 
+was reinvented, as was music. Philosophy, art, morality, justice, truth 
+and beauty, each received a psychedelic rebirth and transfiguration. 
+Extensive media coverage of these evénts turned most Americans, 
+whether they liked it or no, into observers of the psychedelic drug 
+scene, in varying amounts and degrees of participation. If one wished 
+now to observe, with some aspiration of scientific method, one had 
+to abandon hypotheses restricted as to age, drug, or locale, for the 
+“problem” was manifestly societal in incidence and prevalence, if not 
+(yet) demonstrably in origin. We set ourselves the task of examining 
+those societal processes which might help to answer the query heard 
+now in virtually all quarters — why indeed were so many young 
+people using so many drugs in so many ways? 
+
+
+18 TimeForms 
+
+
+SOCIOGENESIS 
+
+B.F. Skinner could not have devised a more negative stimulus 
+for the young people in the East Village who regularly use 
+psychedelic drugs than the word Bellevue, a hospital on the fringe of 
+the community which they regard somewhat less positively than a 
+medieval dungeon replete with chambers of torture. The establish- 
+ment it is said to represent found itself hoist by its own petard when 
+its propaganda convinced an already irate citizenry that LSD tumed 
+sweet-faced youngsters into psychotic monsters, dangerous crimi- 
+nals, irrepressible rapists, and habitual thieves, since the public 
+turned around and demanded for its safety that these same either be 
+incarcerated or therapized and preferably both. Though the young 
+avoided both with nimble and embarrassing alacrity, they were aware 
+and made no secret among themselves that living in voluntary 
+poverty, using drugs whose street-calibrated dosages bore little if any 
+relation to actual content, created psychological, sociological and 
+medical problems which might benefit from the ministrations of 
+psychotherapists, physicians and community craftsmen, if only a 
+“hip” variety of these could be found. A number of helping 
+institutions soon decided that, ideological differences notwithstand- 
+ing, there were more young people with more unmet needs than 
+history had witnessed in a long time, such that ameliorative 
+intervention could no longer be deliberated. Mountains of bureau- 
+cracy shuddered, and hippy projects were founded, the most famous 
+being Dr. Smith’s clinic in Haight-Ashbury. A less famous semi- 
+counterpart, called the Village Project* attempted to care for some 
+of the psychosocial ailments of the local young “residents.” One 
+could there “rap” (talk) with groups of young people on topics of 
+their selection. One of their favorite topics was the subject of this 
+writing — Why drugs? Their astonishing widsom as sociologists both 
+simplifies and complicates my task, since sociologists, like their 
+therapeutic colleagues, seek ‘to understand, not simply accept, the 
+manifest content of behavior, even (especially?) the behavior called 
+understanding. 
+
+
+“sponsored by Jewish Family Service of New York 
+
+
+TimMEForms 19 
+
+
+Rap session participants at the Village Project were uniformly 
+agreed that ‘“‘dope”’ is central but not causal (i.e., a necessary but not 
+sufficient explanation) of their life-style; that getting high, getting 
+stoned, tripping (via LSD, STP, Mescalin, marijuana, and/or any 
+desired combination) is like opening a door to other voices and other 
+rooms, but, after you’ve opened the door, it’s up to you to keep 
+walking and actually do the trip, during which, if you’re up to it, you 
+will meet all manners of new turned-on experiences which are very 
+much your own solutions to your very individual plight. Dropping 
+out of alienated societal roles is said to be a prerequisite to real 
+tripping, since the ego-trips of which society is said majorly to 
+consist become visible as cul-de-sacs and blind alleys, to which a 
+return is unthinkable. A new freedom, the right of phantasy as 
+self-exploration, is ordinarily proclaimed prior to tripping, and only 
+subsequently reinforced by good trips. Bum trips are said to be due 
+to fear of letting go, or to contaminated drugs, not to the substances 
+themselves. Uptight people are to be avoided during trips since their 
+fear (and their violence) are said to be as contagious as they are 
+dangerous. 
+
+
+Two convergent trends in society were said to be principally 
+responsible for the drop-out phenomenon, to which the added 
+enticement of tripping is secondary. These trends are: 1) Automa- 
+tion: the attainment of an incredibly high level of affluence and 
+abundance in post-industrial (computerized) society, it is said, 
+renders the work-for-a-living (Calvinist) ethos a superfluous relic of 
+the first industrial revolution. Since supermarkets, restaurants and 
+other food merchants have far more than necessary, simply asking 
+for the remainder provides enough to live on. This makes it possible 
+to afford the leisure time needed to engage in self-exploration via 
+tripping, sexual variety, residential mobility, etc. Parents who 
+covertly send checks they can easily afford to send now that junior 
+has left home are not rare. In short, it is said, now that automation 
+has replaced work, play has assumed its rightfully central role, and, if 
+you know how, acid (LSD) is a powerful yet pleasant toy. 
+2) Cybernation: contemporary society has the power to communi- 
+cate vast amounts of information almost instantly. Just as the first 
+
+
+20 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+generation of mass media (linear print and film) fostered mass 
+consumption through mass advertising, at the behest of mass 
+production, so now the second generation of media (electron- 
+ics — audio and video tape, computerized pattern recognition) has 
+created an era of global communication, where nothing is foreign, 
+nothing remote. In McLuhanesque terms, the content of the electric 
+media is the former mechanical media, just as the content of the trip 
+is yesterday’s psychology. Once, a psychoanalytic foray was bedrock, 
+Now, all such forays become the ingredients of emergent psychic 
+forms called trips. 
+
+
+It will be perceived that electricity is common to both of the 
+societal trends the villagers put forward as explanations of psyche 
+delia, which support the view that if Hoffman hadn’t invented acid, 
+it would have been necessary to do so, since acid renders the 
+organism capable of enjoying the information overloads which have 
+become characteristic of our electrified society. The analogy runs 
+like this: as water is to fish, so acid is to the children of the age of 
+electric (global) communication. In the wake of such massive societal 
+forces, it follows that new social forms must emerge, to handle, as a 
+trip handles for the individual, the information impact on social 
+organization. Hence, the retribalization process McLuhan has des- 
+cribed is said to be the accommodation youth culture has made to its 
+electric environment. The commune (be it urban or rural, an 
+insignificant distinction in an era of total information) is a natural 
+social response to the age of electronic sociogenesis. 
+
+
+The convergence, then, of automation and cybernation, was 
+offered by east villagers as the explanation for the existence of 
+psychedelic drugs. These drugs, they say, are simply the psychochem- 
+ical equivalents of an electric society in which automated energy is 
+cybernetically processed. 
+
+
+Just as there are said to be two fundamental societal processes 
+at the root of psychedelic culture, so there are two “sick” 
+institutions which protagonists of psychedelic experience diagnose as 
+particularly in need of replacement, i.e., war and education. Wars, it is 
+said, are fought for the preservation of territoriality, which no longer 
+
+
+TiMEForms 21 
+
+
+matters in an age of planetary communication, by people who have 
+not yet learned that all violence is self-destructive exactly to the 
+extent to which it is efficient. Wars which require the young to fight 
+for the very values of the old they have rejected are thus said to be 
+doubly unjust in that they enroll pacifists in aggression, and 
+simultaneously pit young brothers in an emergent planetary culture 
+against each other. Hence, the young reject what they regard as a 
+forced choice between suicide and fratricide. Besides, it is added, the 
+trip experience is as delicate and fragile as it is lovely, to which even 
+subtle psychological violence is abhorrent and disgusting, not to 
+mention physical brutality. It is said that trips teach the futility of 
+violence, wars included. 
+
+
+Schools, which claim to teach the heritages of their societies, 
+are rejected no less vehemently for making that very claim. The 
+young who proclaim the appropriateness of their electric sensibilities 
+argue that a school system which attempts to foster industrial values 
+is engaged in a process of mechanical propaganda no less insidious 
+than any other form of brainwashing. It is said that schools, and 
+especially multiversities, are information factories designed to pro- 
+cess young people into readiness for alienated roles in the military 
+industrial complex, from which the young are already in full flight. 
+Some even argue that universities are worse than battlefields since 
+they are the training grounds for them without acknowledging that 
+that is their nature. Universities are said thus to add hypocrisy to 
+their irrelevance to the electric age. 
+
+
+Attending to these themes over and over again, the participant 
+observer gradually shucks off his surprise that “heads” engage so 
+earnestly and so solemnly in “raps” on art and media in the same 
+breaths as they rap about war and education. Their earnest solemnity 
+is distributed equally over these topics because they are, in their 
+view, struggling for the very existence of the only culture that gives 
+meaning to their daily experience. They are literally fighting for their 
+lives, 
+
+Every culture selects from the range of human potentials, and 
+molds the organisms that are its raw stuff in its own image. And 
+
+
+22 TimeForms 
+
+
+every, culture, by its agreement that some values and behaviors are 
+central, defines other values and behaviors as peripheral, less central, 
+“deviant.” This is no less true of the participants in the Village 
+Project, so that, in what follows, the inference that each and every 
+one of these young people is singlehandedly responsible for the birth 
+pangs of a new civilization should not be drawn. For every sane 
+“head” we confront, we met two lost or mad ones. Yet the point lies 
+deeper — for if, as it seems, there is a new culture aborning, then for 
+many the birth process is extremely painful, if not injurious. But not, 
+we emphasize, for all. 
+
+
+Once this is understood, one also understands why the young 
+will gladly ignore a serious upper-respiratory infection (gained from a 
+shared pipe) or a piece of glass in a bare foot (acquired on a stroll 
+together). They are felt to be badges of solidarity incurred in a 
+collective struggle, in a revolution, they say, with nothing less than 
+culture itself at stake. 
+
+
+UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING MEDIA 
+
+The reader will recall that we set ourselves the task of 
+understanding why the psychedelic culture understands itself the 
+way it does, that our inquiry regards the electric metaphor as the 
+manifest content, which itself requires explanation. In the language 
+of my discipline, stated explanations are regarded as ideologies, 
+‘themselves requiring explanation. Sociologists refer to this specialty 
+as the sociology of knowledge, a field heavily indebted to such giants 
+as Marx, Mannheim, and Marcuse, for their elaboration of the view 
+that men’s situations determine their thoughts far more than their 
+thoughts determine their situations. Thus armed, we turn our 
+attentions to the social process which has elevated the electric 
+metaphor into a believed mythology. 
+
+
+It was Marx, correcting Hegel, who first revealed what now is 
+regarded as a commonplace, although at first it seemed esoteric and 
+arcane. In the dialectical view, when men reflect on their situation, 
+they diagnose the injustices of their condition, and then seek to 
+change it. They attempt to change the world as they find it into the 
+
+
+TimEForms 23 
+
+
+world they want it to be, by their work. When, by their work, they 
+do transform their situation, and then again reflect on it, they, like 
+God in Genesis, see that the world they have made is good, or, at 
+least, more just than it was. This process of work changing reflection 
+and reflection leading to further work is described as the dialectical 
+relation between social substructure and ideological superstructure. 
+Thus, the industrial revolution, itself a new mode of changing the 
+world, transformed the preindustrial (Calvinist) ideology of thrift 
+into the post-industrial (Veblenist) ideology of progress, i.e., con- 
+spicuous consumption. Before it, the devil made work for idle hands; 
+after it, the popular view was that all work and no play makes Jack a 
+dull boy. Mobility supplanted class struggle as inevitably as the 
+
+
+machine replaced the bicep. 
+It remained for Marcuse to show that societies’ efforts to 
+
+
+generate demand even beyond the greedy dreams of conspicuous 
+customers required them to foster what he called “surplus repres- 
+sion,”> i.e., to get people to believe that it was more important to 
+repress instinctual eroticism than to develop it, because it was more 
+important to consume (for society) than to transcend (alter society). 
+Subsequently, Marcuse revealed that post-industrial society employs 
+its media to establish an ideology hostile to transcendence itself, such 
+that citizens are bidden to remain one dimensional men.® Those who 
+attempt to rise above the one dimension society permits by creating 
+works of two dimensions (the prototype is the consciously alienated 
+artist who depicts the new dimension in all its transcendent glory) 
+will find their works reduced to one dimensionality through mass 
+media mechanisms — his work will be mass produced and mass 
+marketed, and thus made ordinary and routine, if not tawdry and 
+banal. A case in point was noted above — the appropriation of 
+psychedelic art forms by the “plastic’’ advertising industry. One 
+por also add long hair, acid rock, “hip” jargon and “freaky” 
+clothes. 
+
+
+The relevance of these theories to our inquiry is the follow- 
+ing: Marx envisioned a process that took an hundred years to have 
+its full impact, and, within that time, Marcuse saw processes take 
+their toll in less than a generation. A recent N.Y. Times article (in the 
+
+
+24 'Timelorms 
+
+
+business section) described third and fourth generation computers, 
+which all came about within a decade.* If we regard computers in 
+general as the new technological means of production, and informa- 
+tion configurations as the new ideological products of that process, 
+we may calculate that societies now change ten times faster than 
+Marx’ original depiction. If we count each generation of computers 
+separately, we confront a society which can change the structural 
+base of its ideology four times within a decade. If ideologies are 
+formed by reflection on the world we make by our labors, it follows 
+that we are living in an era of such rapid change that those 
+accustomed to it will regard even a 5 year old ideology as hopelessly 
+irrelevant, since it no longer describes the world one confronts. 
+
+
+The extremity of this situation may be directly observed in 
+what sociologists call intergenerational stratification, i.e., the genera- 
+tion gap. In a society which changes so rapidly, the very process’ of 
+socialization by which parents attempt to acculturate their infants, is 
+doomed since the contents of that socialization will be obsolescent 
+even before the process is over, even if most of it, as the 
+psychoanalysts tell us, is accomplished in the first 5 years. Such a 
+pace of change makes obsolete the very possibility of teaching an 
+
+
+ideology which explains the world situation to those in a dissimilar 
+.world. When the world changes four times in a decade, it had better 
+invent a way of comprehending itself that changes as fast as 
+experience does. And that, I argue, is exactly what psychedelics 
+are — a psychochemical technology which no longer bothers with the 
+simple enumeration of the content of processes, but focuses the 
+inner eye on the exponents of such processes. That, I submit, is the 
+inner meaning of the term “tripping,” which focuses on the rates of 
+change of a changing experience, not simply on the changing content 
+of experience. 
+
+
+Bitter conflicts are thus generated between those who trip and 
+those who do not know what tripping is, who hurl the epithet 
+
+
+“first generation, vacuum tubes; second, transistors; third, integrated (printed) circuits; fourth 
+
+
+— bioelectrics. 
+
+
+TimeForms 25 
+
+
+“hedonism”, as if that, finally, was that. Other epithets are 
+employed, ranging all the way from subversion to seduction. 
+Subcultural confrontations no less acrimonious than “race riots” 
+have not been rare, and little documentation is needed to remind us 
+that, but for one rare summer of flower power, relations between 
+police and the psychedelic community have not always been cordial. 
+The point is, tripping stratifies the forms of consciousness, giving rise 
+to behaviors which uninitiates must regard as strange and unfamiliar, 
+if not as weird, sick, and/or demented. The public media reveal that 
+this new form of consciousness is the issue. Is it sick, we are asked? 
+Can it possibly be healthy? 
+
+
+The science media are uniformly in agreement that psychedelics 
+alter the time sense of experience. Just as computers can process 
+billions of bits (binary digits) of information per second, so when 
+high, can one seem to experience hours and even years in a few 
+minutes. That is the meaning of the word “high,” which describes in 
+spatial terms an experience in which one seems to be able to scan 
+vast horizons from above, encompassing thousands of bits of 
+experience as astronauts take in thousands of miles in a glance. 
+
+
+But do not be misled by the spatial metaphor, nor by the 
+electric one, for a more important property of the expanded time 
+phenomenon is the following — when you expand time, you give 
+yourself the ability to pay full emotional attention to events which 
+in “real” (clock) time would have sped by too rapidly for your 
+empathy to catch hold. This accounts for the observation frequently 
+made that a true “head” will “play” with an unknown object while 
+one more hurried than he will simply not have the time to spend on 
+it. This property of the psychedelic experience also helps us account 
+for the alleged aphrodisiacal properties of LSD and related sub- 
+stances, since, when it is not hurried, when one can give one’s full 
+time to the emotional appreciation of each caress, sexual enjoyment 
+(any enjoyment, for that matter) is materially enhanced. 
+
+
+I have alluded to but two of the time changing properties of the 
+trip — the ability to appreciate changes in rates of change, and the 
+
+
+26 TimEForMs 
+
+
+ability to dwell on detail. If they seem contradictory, perhaps a bit 
+of clarification is in order, for we have not yet touched the heart of 
+the matter. 
+
+
+It lies in the very nature of generalization that once made it 
+clarifies particulars. We are all familiar with the experience of 
+uncertainty when perceiving a vaguely familiar object at a distance. 
+As we draw nearer and its outlines become sharper, we exclaim — ah 
+yes, it’s one of those. It is just so in the case before us — with a slight 
+variation, for acid, I believe, is only the first of many engines soon to 
+be constructed, which engenders the ability to generalize and classify 
+not objects, but tzmes. Thus, the ability to dwell on rates of change 
+brings with it the ability to more exquisitely dwell on instances of 
+change. 
+
+
+You see where the argument leads. Just as the automated 
+(second) industrial revolution generalized the first by dealing with 
+the informational exponents of energy processing rather than simply 
+with energy constellations (objects) seriatim, so the psychedelic 
+(second) chemical revolution generalized the first (anaesthetic) one 
+by dealing with the temporal exponents of getting high rather than 
+simply getting stoned (drunk) time after time. 
+
+
+That is why the process of generalization, which we poor 
+mortals attribute to the power of our intelligences, is a far more 
+naturalistic process than we often perceive. Generalization, it begins 
+to emerge, is that natural process whereby instances transcend their 
+classes of events. Just as galaxies generate stars which expand the 
+limits of galaxies, as men make worlds which outmode their world 
+views, so now we are witnessing one of the most far-reaching 
+revolutions ever to come from human effort, i.e., we are beginning to 
+pass beyond (depasser, aufbeben) the era of human history which, 
+impelled by the scarcity of objects, clung to the dream that the 
+endless production of objects would set us free. Now that the young 
+can directly experience a world in which cybernetic automation 
+makes scarcity an obsolete concept, they begin to inhabit another 
+
+
+TimEForms 27 
+
+
+whole realm, the dimension of time, which Einstein brought to earth 
+after his promethean intellectual trip. 
+
+
+If we seem wholly supportive of all of the values of young 
+psychedelists, let us not be misunderstood. Our task here is to 
+analyze the sociological currents on which psychedelia floats, not to 
+examine in detail the pathologies of some of its incumbents. It is one 
+thing to examine the social forces which drive a movement — it is 
+another to focus on the plight of those so driven. Entirely another 
+matter is the question of action—what shall we do for those 
+damaged by misuse of psychedelic substances. These are tasks for 
+another writing. 
+
+
+CONCLUSION 
+
+I hold, then, the view that our culture has so accelerated the 
+pace of societal change that the simple serial encountering of one 
+experience after another has become obsolete for its young, who are 
+trying to dwell exponentially (i.e., to generalize) on what we elders 
+can only manage arithmetically. They are not only as comfortable in 
+the realm of time as we are in the realm of space, but they have a 
+sense of adventure and discovery about time which many of us have 
+about space. While we build rockets to take us to the stars, they 
+attempt to build a culture which will take them into temporal 
+regions of mind which we will fail to comprehend with merely spatial 
+models. 
+
+
+In my view, this adventure, and its corollary misadventures, is 
+absolutely central to what we are about as a species. The young seek 
+nothing less than the next step in the evolution of human 
+consciousness, the transcendance of spatial, linear, one-dimensional 
+consciousness. 
+
+
+It is clear that this is no small undertaking — that the risks are 
+terrible, that the likelihood of tragic mistakes is high, that there will 
+be fatalities and large numbers of casualties. | fervently wish that 
+they were unnecessary and aim my work to prevent as many as 
+
+
+28 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+possible, and to assist in the healing of those we fail to prevent. For 
+it is true that many of those embarked on this adventure are as blind 
+to its dangers as they are unaware of them, so that they are often 
+foolish and often injured. 
+
+
+And yet, there are some who know, who hear the music of the 
+spheres, who accept the deeper challenge to carry history forward. 
+These will be found, on close examination, when they have removed 
+some of the outmoded ideological baggage we force them to carry, to 
+be engaged in founding a new form of temporal consciousness, which 
+I call ‘‘groovin’ on time.” 
+
+
+TimeForms 29 
+
+
+TIME, PATHOS, AND SYNCHRONY: Accelerating Alienation 
+
+
+INTRODUCTION 
+
+This paper is one of a series reporting participant observation on 
+the relation between the ‘‘psychedelic subculture” and the almost 
+unexperienceable rate of social change endemic. to our post-industrial 
+environment. ‘‘Acidoxy versus Orthodoxy”’ compared and contras- 
+ted some of the value conflicts between ‘‘heads” and therapists as 
+they experience their respective changes. ““Groovin’ on Time — Frag- 
+ments of a Sociology of Psychedelia’’? examined the hypothesis that 
+psychedelic drugs represent the beginnings of an emerging psycho 
+chemical technology enabling homo sapiens to manage the otherwise 
+unmanageable rate of social change generated by cybernetic automa- 
+tion. In this chapter what is explored is the view that our 
+post-industrial vate of social change radically alters the notion of 
+“alienation”, anachronizing and rendering obsolete some of the very 
+criteria we have been accustomed to use in attributing the statuses 
+“mental health” and “mental illness” to individuals, groups, and/or 
+“subcultures.” In addition it is argued that the rate of change 
+inflicted by the current cybernetic environment on individuals, 
+groups, and/or subcultures calls for the delineation of wholly new 
+criteria as to whom we should call “alienated”, mentally healthy 
+and/or mentally ill. Application of these criteria throws light on the 
+differences between a ‘‘bum trip’ and a good one, between tripping 
+and schizophrenia, and, in addition, help us to put the double bind 
+hypothesis in a perspective rendering it susceptible to further 
+generalization and specification. 
+
+
+In our view, bum trips, schizophrenic episodes, and other “‘hang 
+
+
+” 
+
+
+ups” are called “alienated” because, in an environment which 
+
+
+30 TrmeForMsS 
+
+
+changes faster than we can comprehend it, we become addicted to 
+outmoded conceptions of the temporal nature of human experience. 
+Abandonment of these unnecessarily limiting conceptualizations is 
+facilitated by examination of an alternative metaphor.? 
+
+
+We shall argue that recasting the dialectical metaphor can 
+provide theoreticians and clinicians with a new way of understanding 
+the social genesis of individual “pathology” and suggests a way 
+to transcend it. 
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS 
+
+As everyone knows, New York’s Greenwich Village was the 
+location of the largest permanent assembly of “heads” (regular users 
+of psychedelic substances) in the nation:or in the world, for that 
+matter. But what is becoming equally well-known, through increasing 
+advertisement in the several media, is that New York and San 
+Francisco no longer may lay claim to a monopoly on psychedelic 
+enthusiasts, especially since those college campuses which do not 
+report the existence of their head contingents are only exactly that, 
+ie., those who do not report. Few doubt that they are there 
+nonetheless, and it is becoming increasingly clear that not all of them 
+wear long hair, since even high school teenyboppers now practice 
+that form of communication. 
+
+
+Network radio is thoroughly aware that the special music of 
+psychedelia, sometimes called acid rock, is a two billion dollar 
+business which it ignores at its peril, notwithstanding the exquisite 
+paradox that acid lyrics put down the sort of (bureaucratic) 
+“uptight” consciousness of which the networks consist. Similarly the 
+most brilliant films and videotapes now emerging from head culture, 
+which laugh in tragicomic dada style at the “strait” movie world, are 
+being sought by the same networks and movie worlds whose 
+existence they mock and subvert. Few painters ignorant of the 
+psychedelic experience are counted in the avante garde, as are few 
+practitioners of post-New Left politics. Clinics opened with the aim 
+of offering relief to those ‘‘damaged” by their drug-induced 
+
+
+TimeForms 31 
+
+
+adventures quickly discover that there are at least two kinds of acid 
+enthusiasts: heads who know what they’re doing, who therefore 
+don’t want any “help” of the traditional kind* (psychotherapy, job 
+counselling, family therapy, et a/.); and very young patients who 
+seem adrift in the chaos of contemporary life, the angry lost 
+runaways seeking refuge, peace and a meal, maybe. Universities find 
+themselves in a situation not essentially dissimilar, since often, as 
+Kenniston® reports, the brightest kids, who have the best ideas as to 
+what the universities must become if they are to survive, are those 
+who are closest to the head scene. Young bi-cultural professors (half 
+intellectual and half hip) are decreasingly rare. Record companies 
+now employ ‘“‘company freaks” who mediate between bedraggled 
+looking rock groups and vested company executives.© The demand 
+for young therapists who “know acid” soars while hope of finding 
+them in sufficient numbers approaches the vanishing point. 
+
+
+Observations of similar phenomena are not hard to assemble: 
+
+
+A graduate Sociology student teaching in a “ghetto” grammar 
+school (to avoid the draft) plans a thesis on why the black kids who 
+used to see through the political slogans of the ‘‘War on Poverty”’ at 
+age twelve, now do so at age nine, and even earlier. 
+
+
+A Philosophy Ph.D. drop out from Berkeley guest-lectures to a 
+Social Pathology class at a small university, during which he first puts 
+down the audience for not understanding McLuhan, then, putting 
+down McLuhan as nostalgic, begins extolling “‘Bucky”’ Fuller. 
+
+
+Three black pre-teens helping to collect dollars during the 
+Living Theatre’s performance of “Paradise Now,” pocket every other 
+
+
+bill, giggling “‘shee-it” at the naivete of the bourgeoisie who think 
+they’re “contributing to a just cause.” 
+
+
+A conversation at a coffee house examines for two hours why 
+the strobe light behind the Beatles film ‘‘The Yellow Submarine” 
+helps enjoy it if you’re high on pot. 
+
+
+32 TirmeFormMs 
+
+
+Young clinical psychologists who protest they haven’t learned 
+anything fundamentally new since they began “training” wonder if 
+acid therapy will render their educations obsolete. 
+
+
+Exotic nightclubs offer total environments of mixed media, 
+renting out shifting sound-light-movie-slide-music-video walls, with 
+individual earphones and semi-transparent gowns for seven dollars an 
+hour. 
+
+
+Four interns and their wives look for an inexpensive house in 
+the “East Village” to establish a commune offering free medical care 
+evenings and weekends. 
+
+
+The Philosopher Whitehead proclaimed in 1950 that the West 
+had witnessed more change in the last 50 years than in the last 50 
+centuries, and the several commissions investigating the 21st century 
+announce that the rate of social change in the year 2000 will have 
+become 300% faster than it is now. 
+
+
+Private portable video cameras and tape recorders were owned by 
+5 million Americans by 1970. 
+
+
+Scientists at MIT are investigating whether video-holography 
+will replace television as the major medium of the next decade. 
+
+
+DISCUSSION 
+
+The foregoing are all examples of a phenomenon increasingly 
+observable in our age of rapid change. What is common in each 
+observation is a discrepancy between two rates of change, to which 
+we apply the term achrony.’»® Achronistic situations are found 
+when those accustomed to one rate of change are confronted by 
+another. Those accustomed to a rapid rate who find themselves in a 
+decelerating situation are thus not entirely dissimilar to those who 
+are accustomed to a relatively slow rate of change who find 
+themselves confronted by an accelerated one. Both experience a 
+change in the rate of change tliey are used to, although, to use an 
+algebraic metaphor, they are oppositely signed. 
+
+
+TimMEForms 33 
+
+
+But calling one change “‘positive” and the converse “negative” 
+clouds the potential severity of the emotional experience engendered 
+by such situations. For example, if “identity” is based on the 
+expectation that a given rate of change will continue to obtain 
+throughout one’s life, ‘“‘positive’’ changes in the rate of change will 
+precipitate continuous identity crises. In psychoanalytic language, 
+this means that one will constantly face a situation in which one’s 
+identifications become increasingly obsolete. The fact that persons 
+faced by the prospect of identity annihilation often resort to violent 
+defensive actions in order to maintain their identities? »1° focuses the 
+severity of achronistic plights at the appropriate level of magnifica- 
+tion. This sort of thinking leads logically to the abandonment of 
+philosophies based on sameness, or identity, since these concepts 
+suggest a permanence and stability which it is no longer possible to 
+observe in any but the most remote culture still untouched by 
+cybernation. 
+
+
+An even more somber example comes into view if we look at 
+the so-called generation gap in an achronistic perspective. The young 
+for whom each new experience represents a greater percentage of 
+their entire experiential world, can, for that reason, accept change 
+experiences far more readily than their adult counterparts, for whom 
+new experiences constitute a lesser percentage of their total 
+accumulation. The truism that most kids are far more open to change 
+than their elders, is only partly explained by the fact that adults, by 
+the time they have reached adulthood, have slowed down their rate 
+of change as compared to their young, who are still changing rapidly. 
+It is also partly explained by the fact that the young were born into a 
+world that was already changing faster than the world into which 
+their parents were porn, so the two generations not only change at 
+different rates, but they are changing their rates of change at 
+different rates. The “gap” problem is thus far more serious than the 
+adjectives “traditional versus innovative” suggest, for the “gap” is 
+not simply one set of norms against another—it is actually one set of 
+rate norms against another. The generations are quickly growing 
+further apart. 
+
+
+34 TimeFOoRMS 
+
+
+Mathematicians and astronauts are accustomed to calculate such 
+rate discrepancies by placing them in differential equations, where 
+the X’s and the Y’s, so to speak, are changing rates of acceleration 
+and deceleration. Clearly, if you want to calculate exactly when and 
+for bow long to fire your rocket engine to boost your acceleration 
+from sub-orbital to escape velocity, how long you may continue to 
+decelerate due to earth’s gravity, when you will begin to accelerate 
+due to moon gravity, when and for bow long you should fire your 
+engine to escape moon orbit, and when and for how long you must 
+fire to decelerate in order to land safely, clearly, you had better 
+master changing rates of change. 
+
+
+It is less commonly observed that exactly the same sort of 
+exquisite timing is called for in comprehending the rates at which 
+technology alters cur social and personal lives. Factually, we do not 
+have the ability to calculate with comparable precision how to 
+accelerate and decelerate the rates of social change that govern us. In 
+this perspective, it is curious to note that so few have even sought, so 
+to speak, the gas pedals and the brakes of our society. More 
+curiously, when they are sought, a cry and a harangue are heard that 
+control over the rates of commonly change-inducing technology will 
+lead to facism, imperialism, socialism, communism, name your 
+poison. 
+
+
+Yet, few dispute that it is to technology that we must look if 
+we wish to locate the forces accelerating our rate of change. The 
+situation becomes urgent when we note that machine technology, 
+which outpaced muscle power a hundredfold, was itself outpaced a 
+millionfold by the early computers, which in turn were outpaced 
+another millionfold by current nanosecond computers, which do 
+more than two billion bits of arithmetic per second. To put it mildly, 
+automation increases the rate of change of work, which, in turn, 
+increases the rate of change of the society in which that work is 
+done. Similarly, cybernation, which is the automated work of 
+processing information, has vastly increased the rate at which 
+‘information and feedback change the environment. We must thank 
+
+
+TimeForms 35 
+
+
+McLuhan for reminding us that we are in a very different world from 
+the one in which a few monks labored for years to produce a few 
+illustrated bibles. Now, billions of words in millions of books and 
+hundreds of thousands of magazines leap out at us from our 
+cybernetic environment. The scholar is not the only one faltering in 
+this gale of words. Nor are the children alone in receiving the 
+combined barrage of TV, radio, and other forms of urban din, whose 
+rate of increase, I need hardly remind you, is increasing. 
+
+
+Very well, you say. Granted. The rate of social change is 
+increasing. So is society’s information output. What has all that to do 
+with “alienated youth”? with LSD? with schizophrenia? 
+
+
+THEORY 
+
+It lies in the very heart of that process we call “generalization” 
+to array a large number of common instances under one idea, to 
+which we commonly affix a name, which labels it as the class, or set, 
+of all such objects. We usually perform this magic on classes of 
+objects we can see, visually, and for similar reasons, have come to 
+believe that only visible objects lend themselves to the process of 
+generalization. And, since time is something we don’t see, visually, 
+we have come to believe that it is not a member of the class of 
+generalizeable objects. 
+
+
+But this is false, as the astronauts of more than one nation 
+continue to visibly demonstrate. Their trips are vivid proof that a 
+very substantial theory of temporal generalization does in fact exist. 
+
+
+And, as has been argued elsewhere, the LSD trips of those 
+astronauts of inner space we call “heads” also provide us with proof 
+that times are experientially generalizeable, that tripping is an 
+experience of temporal generalization, in which the exponents of 
+time, or rates of temporal change, and not simply mechanical 
+succession, are deliberately enjoyed for their own sake. Heads who 
+manage to trip successfully and without discernible damage are 
+
+
+36 TimeForMs 
+
+
+perfectly comfortable with shifting rates of joy.’ Indeed the more 
+rate changes one enjoys, the better the trip. This is because acid, for 
+heads, seems to confer the mysterious ability to expand the 
+apperception of time, such that, when you have more time to enjoy 
+what you're into, you enjoy it for a “‘longer”’ time. 
+
+
+To put it another way — if you experience your experience at a 
+slower rate than your wristwatch, you will feel that you have more 
+time to spend on each experience. However, you aren’t experiencing 
+slower than your wristwatch. In fact, you’re processing more 
+information than usual (for example, your eyes are dilated, letting 
+more light in). Thus, while it helps a little to say that it feels like 
+you're going slow and your watch is going fast, it is more accurate to 
+say, as heads do, that you're high, as in a higher level of 
+generalization. Another metaphor describing the high is this: imag- 
+ine walking on your knees, underwater about four feet deep, then 
+standing up into the fresh air and blue sky. Now imagine that the 
+water is clock time (or, as Heidigger called it, Das Element) and that 
+time is to us what water is to a fish. Now ask yourself — what is this 
+fresh air and blue sky above? 
+
+
+It must be another kind of temporal experience. One which 
+generalizes clock time, hence both transcends and illumines it, as a 
+generalization illumines a particular. Clock time is seen as only one 
+of the kinds of temporal experience you can have when you become 
+aware of other kinds. 
+
+
+But how is this possible? Isn’t there only one kind of time, the 
+succession of one moment after another, that is, what Bergson called 
+duration? Perhaps the physicists are the right people to answer this 
+question. But be prepared even there for a surprising answer, since 
+some physicists have now accustomed themselves to the idea that 
+time is not an invariant, and that not all fundamental qualities (e.g. 
+the positron) are, as they say, anisotropic,’ or one directional. And 
+it just may be that there are other kinds of time if we but knew how 
+to look for them. 
+
+
+TimEForms' 37 
+
+
+But, whatever the physicists find, theoretical and clinical 
+scientists do not have to pore over abstruse mathematical equations 
+to become aware of an experience in themselves and in their 
+constituency of a very common experience, namely, that some- 
+times(!) experience seems to drag, so that minutes seem like hours, 
+and, ‘‘at’’ other times, experience is so joyful that hours seem like 
+minutes. 
+
+
+What I am asking you to imagine, if you have not had a 
+psychedelic experience, is a region of consciousness in which time 
+becomes so elastic that both expanding and contracting time become 
+only two of the qualities of another whole region of temporal 
+experience. In addition, I not only ask you to imagine it, but I 
+suggest that the experience of this region is absolutely commonplace, 
+a common characteristic of everyday life. 
+
+
+To understand this, you have but to reflect that a generaliza- 
+tion, any generalization, consists of arbitrarily drawing an imaginary 
+temporal parenthesis around a number of remembered experiences 
+you have had before, so that you say, in effect, these are all kind 
+“A”? and the rest are kind ‘‘not A.” That is, as Hegel’? noted long 
+ago, negation is constitutive of assertion. You must say this is one of 
+these and not those in order to say this is this. You must, as Plato! * 
+noted long before Hegel, re-cognize in order to cognize at all. 
+
+
+Dialectical theorists are wholly familiar with this line of 
+reasoning, which was sufficient unto the task of describing how we 
+generalize as long as the world moved by at a relatively slow and 
+manageable pace. In such a world, the frequency with which a 
+number of A’s came by was relatively comfortable, and one was 
+under no special press to construct categories to subsume all such 
+A’s. Aristotle, as I recall, constructed a metaphysic in which 10 
+categories subsumed the entire cosmos. 
+
+
+But now when the pace at which new A’s enter experience is so 
+fast and furious that we must become specialists in order to manage 
+ever smaller quadrants of daily life, the situation is almost totally 
+
+
+38 TimeForMs 
+
+
+different. Marx described an industrial revolution that took a 
+hundred years to elapse. We now process experience via computer- 
+ized machines that change the nature of the environment in ten 
+years. 
+
+
+And heads devise environments in which a dozen movies, a 
+dozen symphonies and a dozen Kaleidoscopic strobe lights barrage 
+their consciousness with sensations as awesome in number and kind 
+as the birth of a galaxy billions of light years in “‘size.”’ 
+
+
+Confronted by a rate of experience of such stupendous (or 
+mind blowing) complexity, the human mind must attempt to 
+re-cognize faster than ever before. To do so requires wholly new 
+kinds of generalizations. Therefore, we should not be surprised that 
+many people in diverse regions of society have begun to move 
+beyond generalizing only visible objects, by attempting to generalize 
+(invisible) tzmes. Many are beginning to learn how to have such 
+experiences comfortably and joyfully because they know that just as 
+duration generalizes rest, as velocity generalizes duration, as accelera- 
+tion generalizes velocity, so there are other kinds of temporal 
+experience which have as their particulars, changes in the rate of 
+change. They confirm William James’! view that there are regions of 
+mind as unusually different from our waking consciousness as our 
+waking consciousness differs from our dreams. 
+
+
+One of these regions, I hold, is filled with that kind of time 
+heads call “high,” a region which consists of the generalizations of 
+our more banal experiences of duration, velocity, and acceleration. | 
+think we have become aware of it recently, because the number and 
+kinds of change-experiences thrust on us by our hurtling cybernetic 
+environment — has made obsolete our usual method of making 
+generalizations, that is, of recognizing our world in traditional spatial 
+categories. 
+
+
+TimeForms 39 
+
+
+This view gives us the basis of an answer to our central inquiry 
+which may now be rephrased as follows. Could it be that a higher 
+more general kind of time-experience may be in conflict with a lower 
+more special time-experience, as a meta-message may be in conflict 
+with a message, as in the double bind theory of schizophrenia? That 
+a bum trip consists of the annihilating terror of being in what feels 
+like two different times at once? Could it be that time, which we 
+thought at its very interior core to be the rate of things, might 
+consist of levels of itself characterized by differing rates of 
+occurrence, such that clock time is only one specific form of 
+experience? 
+
+
+The hypothesis is attractive, since it helps to explain why some 
+schizophrenics are described as stuck in “‘concrete (linear) thinking” 
+while others seem lost in a strange world of racing images. It helps to 
+explain why ‘‘talking somebody down from a bum trip” consists 
+essentially in telling him to “go with it” — “get into it” — “ride it” 
+“follow it” ‘‘it’s all right — it’s all valid experience.” It even helps to 
+explain why it’s called a trip, as if it were a voyage in time. 
+
+
+In this connection, it is instructive to recall the theoretical 
+paradigm of the double-blind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson and 
+his co-workers wrote: 
+
+
+Our approach is based on that part of communication 
+theory which Russell has called the theory of logical types. The 
+central thesis of this theory is that there is a discontinuity 
+between a class and its members. © 
+
+
+If we recall that the genesis of a logical class is a generalization made 
+to re-memberallexperiences of a given kind, it begins to be clear 
+that double-bound (schizophrenic) persons are those told simulta- 
+neously to remember an experience as a member of a class and “at” 
+the same time to deny validity to the experience of that class. In 
+
+
+40 TimeForms 
+
+
+other words, the bind prohibits the experience of generalization 
+(uniting past and present experiences in a synthesis), yet commands 
+the present experience to be familiar. This annihilation of memory 
+negates the very process of present experience. 
+
+
+Bum trips, like schizophrenia, are therefore well described as 
+failed dialectics, since their pathology results from the negation (of 
+“normalcy”’) not itself being negated. Some therapists encourage the 
+schizophrenic to “go on through” the process of madness, since they 
+believe, and, I think, correctly, that madness is only the first moment 
+in a dialectical process, that madness itself must be negated after it 
+negates “‘sanity.”'’ The above is only a very fancy way of defining 
+the word “freaky” in the context of a “freak out’’ philosophy, which 
+regards episodes of madness as prerequisite to the achievement of a 
+“‘higher”’ synthesis. 
+
+
+In the instance of schizophrenia, our hypothesis suggests that 
+there is indeed a double bind at work in its genesis, but that double 
+binds are a very special sort of temporal contradiction in which the 
+person is not only asked to remember what he is commanded to 
+forget; he is also asked to experience two different times simulta- 
+neously. Yet this is a patent impossibility unless the person can be 
+made aware that he will not lose his mind but gain another 
+dimension of it by entering a region of experience in which such time 
+conflicts are only special cases of another kind of time,-which, if he 
+chooses, he can inhabit comfortably. Unfortunately, few therapists 
+are aware that there is such a region, and therefore find it impossible 
+to offer support and encouragement to a patient who is trying to 
+find it. Therapists addicted to the view that there is only one kind of 
+time, clock time, will obviously not be able to avail themselves of 
+this clinical prerogative. 
+
+
+Heads, however, know all about this region, which is why, on 
+the one hand, they are not baffled by a bum trip (e.g. a temporarily 
+stalled dialectic—a ‘thang up’) and why, on the other hand, 
+
+
+TimeForms 41 
+
+
+somebody bumtripping prefers an experienced head to a therapist 
+innocent of this information. A head will say — “Keep going,” a 
+“strait” therapist is likely to say—‘‘Come back.” As in the case of the 
+“generation gap,” here are two groups changing at different rates of 
+change: the one attempting to devise learning experiences for 
+themselves which expand the ability to handle exponentially 
+increased rates of information confrontation, the other advising a 
+diminution of that same ability. This is often regarded as antipro- 
+methean advice. 
+
+
+Although the traditional name applied to the class of events 
+described above as failed dialectics is the word ‘‘alienation’’, there are 
+several reasons to believe that the term is dated, i.e., obsolete.!® 
+Originally, Feuerback used the term to describe the condition of 
+estrangement lJovers felt when they were drawing apart when they 
+wanted to draw together. Hegel applied the term to all dialectical 
+processes which were half-complete. Marx applied the term to social 
+classes in unequal relation to the means of changing their historical 
+situation. While it is correct to observe that so-called alienated youth 
+stand in an unequal relation to the masters of our technological 
+environment, and to observe that youth is “alienated” from such 
+institutions as the draft, universities, business, and political parties, it 
+is necessary to observe a crucial difference between Marx’s proletar- 
+iat and today’s psychedelic generation, namely, this generation does 
+not want to belong to a culture it finds obsolete. It wants to change 
+the rate of culture change, not simply its contents. 
+
+
+For this reason, we must begin to speak of the post-cultural era 
+as the ideal of radical youth. For the same reason, we may no longer 
+properly regard them as a “‘sub-culture” having most of their norms 
+in common with us and a few deviant norms thrown into the bargain. 
+In a very real sense, the generation of youth who are experimenting 
+with technologies which may well master rates of experience far 
+beyond our present mastery, may with some justice regard the strait 
+world as alienated from the kind of post-cultural world we shall all 
+
+
+42 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+soon inhabit if current technology continues to accelerate its rate of 
+change. 
+
+
+It seems preferable to reserve the term alienation for those 
+situations in which two lovers, or classes, or sub-cultures, stand in 
+unequal relation to the means of achieving a goal they clearly 
+envision as their desirable condition, and to apply the term achrony 
+when the discrepancy experienced by antagonists is one of rates of 
+change. They are very different experiences which ought to have 
+their own terminologies. (The final chapter discusses how achrony 
+generalizes alienation by focusing on the rate exponents of that 
+condition. Suffice it here to say that it is difficult to agree on the 
+means of change while disagreeing sharply on the rates which seem 
+likely to bring it about “in time.”’) 
+
+
+CONCLUSION 
+
+The central nervous system functions, as Freud observed, like a 
+cell wall, keeping certain things in and certain things out, by 
+regulating the rate of substances exchanged between cell and 
+environment. LSD seems to have the power to speed up the pace at 
+which the central nervous system engages in a dialectic with the 
+environment. It seems to do so by opening the door to higher regions 
+of temporal experience, such as changes in the rates of change. When 
+these rates are harmonious, like notes in a chord, we experience a 
+synchrony of times, a joy which is very like the music of our 
+experience. When they are “out of sync,” as video people say, we 
+experience a shattering horror, a temporal bind, in which various 
+aspects of ourselves seem to be proceeding at different and 
+conflicting paces. This sort of depersonalization, i.e., of feeling in 
+two times at once, is at the root, we believe, of all ‘‘mental illness,” 
+in varying degrees and amounts. 
+
+
+The same condition, in which one rate of experience is in 
+conflict with another, characterizes the so-called generation gap, 
+
+
+TimEForms 43 
+
+
+which, at the moment, comes on like a piper cub and a rocket going 
+in opposite directions through a hurricane. Similarly, we may employ 
+the term achrony to describe the rate discrepancy between those 
+blacks who want dignity now and those moderates who insist it will 
+take a long time. 
+
+
+Achrony, then, differs from alienation as acceleration differs 
+from duration. It is not simply a condition of estrangement from the 
+means of change, but a condition of temporal dysynchrony. Just as, 
+in the spatial metaphor, you can’t do anything about what’s 
+bothering you if you aren’t in the same place as it is, so, in the 
+temporal metaphor we have described above, you can’t do anything 
+about the rate of experience that oppresses you if you aren’t in the 
+same time dimension as it is. 
+
+
+The special pathology which becomes the lot of those who are 
+unable to master the variations of temporal experience which the 
+current pace of social change inflicts is therefore much more severe 
+than those forms of pathology it generalizes, since it no longer 
+suffices to know what the pathogen is. We know. It is the pace at 
+which technology outmodes our powers of generalization. The 
+crucial issue is: can we devise modes of consciousness which can 
+comprehend and thus master the forms of time we now passively 
+experience. 
+
+
+For it is one thing to trip in a mixed media environment that 
+blasts away outmoded concepts of time and space, which most 
+experts agree is what acid does. It is quite another for a whole 
+society to dwell serenely in a comfortable mastery of its rate of 
+change, a condition of temporal peace we call synchrony. It is not 
+obvious that we can manage the latter with anything like the felicity 
+of the former. 
+
+
+The urgency of attaining a post-cultural era is not lost on the 
+young, who know, perhaps better than those well socialized in the 
+
+
+44 TrmeFormMs 
+
+
+forties, that if we are to survive the seventies, we must immediately 
+begin to devise radically new methods and strategies. It is an instance 
+of bitter irony that we call those engaged in that adventure 
+“alienated youth.” 
+
+
+TimeForms 45 
+
+
+THE COMING SYNTHESIS: CHRONETICS AND CYBERNATION 
+(The Architecture of Social Time) 
+
+
+PROLOGUE 
+
+Rearviewing the decade of the sixties, we can now estimate that 
+technology has wrought more rapid social change in the last ten years 
+than in the past ten millenia. This makes it imperative, yet more 
+difficult, to forecast the seventies. Certain broad parameters seem 
+partially visible, which support the view that radicals (i.e., those who 
+go to the roots) will devote their considerable energies and talents in 
+certain directions, among which is the elevation of control over rates 
+of social change to first priority. Why this forecast seems likely, and 
+what the radicals’ efforts will probably be, are the principal topics of 
+this chapter. 
+
+
+INTRODUCTION 
+
+Waves of awareness seem to occur in societies in a way very 
+similar to waves made by a pebble in a pool, although, in our time, 
+the pace of social change calls for a much more turbulent ‘metaphor, 
+perhaps a river rushing angrily through its rapids. Recourse to such a 
+metaphor would help. us to describe why there are still persistent 
+efforts to label those who enjoy the psychedelic experience as social 
+deviants who lack respect for law and order, notwithstanding the 
+spreading wave of awareness on the part of many investigators that 
+the psychedelic revolution and the cybernetic revolution are as 
+inextricably related as feedback is to information. ! 
+
+
+Nevertheless, the very pace of the wavefronts which help us to 
+understand the relation between the age of computers and the age of 
+acid requires us to attempt some sort of predictive navigation, lest 
+
+
+46 TimEeForMsS 
+
+
+that feeling of racing blindfolded along the river of change quickly 
+becomes a helpless panic. Those ‘‘scientific’”’ forms of inquiry and 
+scholarship which the young rightly denounce as rearview mirroring 
+are no longer sufficient, (if they ever were). In order not to crash we 
+must attempt prophecy, for it is rapidly becoming a truism that the 
+hurtling pace of social change is accelerating. Even if hindsight 
+permits us to conclude that the technology of information expansion 
+gave rise inevitably to the politics of consciousness expansion, it is 
+time now to inquire, “What does the future look like to radicals of 
+the post-psychedelic generation?” 
+
+
+Two sources of ‘“‘data” relevant to this inquiry are 1) scientific- 
+technological forecasts and 2) social-cultural innovations. Locating 
+these data in the context of a theory of social change? may enable us 
+to see, in the most general terms, a little of what may be in store for 
+us, assuming we shall survive until the 21st century. 
+
+
+THE POLITICS OF NEGATION 
+
+Why does it seem like such a long time since the hippies first 
+offered their flowers to our surprised faces, proclaiming the birth of 
+a new culture embracing peace, love, and play, in opposition to our 
+war, fear, and work ethos? The answer seems simple — so much, so 
+much has happened since 1960. Vietnam has grown from a 
+nightmare into a chronic international psychosis. A few tribal 
+communes have mushroomed into thousands, scattered all over the 
+planet. Black power emerged, universities became policed enclaves. 
+Yippies and Chicago. At ‘“‘Woodstock”’, a half-million longhairs came 
+together, turned on, and grooved on their music, with lower rates of 
+“social pathology” than the society at large. Man has extended “‘his”’ 
+ecosphere to include the moon, Nixon became president. 
+
+
+Once, Whitehead could write that there had been more change 
+in the first 50 years of the 20th century than there had been in the 
+50 prior centuries.* Now, reviewing the decade of the sixties, we can 
+say that there has been more social change in the last decade than 
+
+
+TimeForms 47 
+
+
+there was in the previous five, notwithstanding the rapid invention 
+and diffusion of automobiles, airplanes, radios, television sets, 
+telephones, and jet planes, each forever altering the communication 
+basis of social structure. All this before computers. 
+
+
+I have elsewhere described how the computer should be seen as 
+a phoenix rising from the ashes of the industrial revolution, whose 
+death knell it sounded. 
+
+
+Just as the second (automated) industrial revolution 
+generalized the first by dealing with the informational 
+exponents of energy-processing rather than simply with 
+energy constellations (mechanical objects) one at a time, 
+so the second (psychedelic) chemical revolution general- 
+ized the first (narcotic) one by dealing with the temporal 
+exponents of getting high rather than simply getting drunk 
+time after time. 
+
+
+My attempt there was to show that an age whose technology 
+processes billions of bits of information per second creates the need 
+for corresponding expansion of human consciousness in order to 
+experience that age, and that LSD was seized upon by the young as 
+the facilitating agent of that necessary expansion. In short, “‘acid’’ 
+did for consciousness what computers did for technology.* It spread 
+like a wave through the children of the middle class made affluent by 
+that technology. The turned-on generation promptly focused its 
+expanded awareness on the values of its predecessor generation, and, 
+finding them dangerously anachronistic, proclaimed the dawn of a 
+new political age with new political values. 
+
+
+Thus was born the politics of negation, which, like every 
+negation, came directly from the loins of its parent culture. Just as 
+the industrial worker found his prior serfdom suffocating, so the 
+children of cybernation found the industrial liberalism of their 
+parents untenable. 
+
+
+48 'TimeForms 
+
+
+Parents were at a loss to understand the phenomenon behavioral 
+scientists called ‘‘the generation gap”. Why did the young want so 
+much sex so quickly and so extrafamilially? Was the family all that 
+bad? Why were so many dropping out of school, notwithstanding 
+counter-pressures from the draft? Did not the young want an 
+education? Was leisurely life on the campus so intolerable? Was it 
+preferable to living in filth-strewn poverty? Did the young actually 
+believe that-rural communes could replace urbanism as a way of life? 
+Did they believe that film and videotape could become alternatives 
+to mass media? Sure, parents said, there are flaws in the institutions 
+of our culture, but wasn’t working to change them better than trying 
+to build a counterculture?® And what was all this talk about Mao, 
+and Che — were the kids communists, fer Chrisake? Weren’t they 
+afraid of chromosome damage from LSD, and doesn’t pot lead to 
+heroin addiction? (Chorus: ‘“‘What is the younger generation coming 
+to?”) 
+
+
+The children of cybernation treated these inquiries as double 
+binds, commanding on one hand, conformity to (parents’ views of) 
+current society, and demanding, on the other, a rigid adherence to 
+social norms long outmoded. They knew their culture was far 
+beyond such quaint institutions as thermonuclear war, a dollar fifty 
+minimum wage, and briefcase bureaucracy. They were not interested 
+in patching up brutal institutions — they wanted to replace them, 
+and not just them, but the whole tissue of their interconnection, 
+which we call culture. Hence their fondness for visionaries who 
+imagine another kind of life, not just repairs to the old one. 
+
+
+It was therefore not a sufficient diagnosis to say that the young 
+were “‘alienated”’, i.e., that they could not share in the benefits of 
+our society because their work was inequitably rewarded.’ Their 
+work could not be rewarded in the old culture, for their work, during 
+the sixties, was the negation of that culture, not one institution at a 
+time, but the whole of it, from its economy to its sciences, from its 
+drugs to its nightclubs. Negation was the watchword,® by which they 
+meant living in deliberate alienation from the principal institutions of 
+
+
+TimEForms 49 
+
+
+society, quietly, painfully, being ‘‘cool’’, exploring their “heads,” 
+“doing their own things’’ while avoiding parents, police, and the 
+draft. Like explorers on a new continent, the trick was to avoid the 
+hostile natives while building a community of their own. Better still, 
+find out why the natives are so hostile, and turn ’em on to peace, 
+love, and play. 
+
+
+To appreciate the magnitude of this undertaking, imagine 
+yourself to be a 19 year old, fully aware of the power of the military, 
+of industry, of government, of the media, and of their attitudes to 
+your long hair and freaky clothes, and then say to yourself — we’ll 
+change all that, because it’s violent, inhuman, and very likely to bring 
+the entire species of man to a whimpering radioactive germ-infested 
+end. Imagine trying to create an alternative planetary culture for the 
+human species because you know that nothing less will help it 
+survive. If those were your aims, where would you look for 
+resources. 
+
+
+BEYOND THE POLITICS OF NEGATION 
+
+The first resource of the young is their youth, which, in our 
+time, means that they are incredibly sensitive to the changes 
+occurring around them. While it may seem at first paradoxical, a 
+moment’s reflection reveals that it is in fact this very same sensitivity 
+to our potentially catastrophic ecology that reveals to them its 
+potentially beneficial resources. Actually, this is the perennial role of 
+the critic, whose awareness of how good it might be enables him to 
+denounce how bad it really is. 
+
+
+Critical youth of the seventies will therefore not be more 
+content than their predecessors of the sixties with information doled 
+out to them by universities, media, government, etc. The reverse is 
+probably closer to the mark. Nor will those few ‘‘counter-institu- 
+tions” they have founded, e.g., underground newspapers, film, music, 
+be able to handle the job of informing the more than 120 million 
+people under 25 who will populate the U.S. seventies, even if a 
+thousand more newspapers, films, and records were to find their way 
+
+
+50 TreForms 
+
+
+into the sun. For these are only negative institutions, known to be 
+temporary, doing the job till replacements can be fashioned. 
+
+
+There are several technological resources which participant 
+observation reveals to be under active consideration by the young. 
+Note that they require incredibly high levels of sophistication just to 
+understand their potential usefulness, let alone their mastery. The 
+young people of the seventies who are now building these devices 
+will deserve more than ever before the term radical, since that word, 
+as everyone knows, means, “one who goes to the roots”. 
+
+
+1. Videotape and Cable tv: The fact that there are more tv sets 
+in the world than there are bath tubs serves as a testament to the 
+enforced passivity of the generation which owns them, for there is no 
+way for the tv viewer to relate actively to the medium except to 
+turn it on and off. By and large, radical youth now regard mass tv as 
+sop unworthy of them, and even more of them will continue to do so 
+until it stops pushing consumer values at them. They are not into 
+“conspicuous consumption” and their own art is vastly superior. 
+
+
+But video tape is video feedback, which provides the enthusiast 
+the chance to do, indeed, to be, his own program, not simply in the 
+living room, but in the classroom,® in the community, even in 
+therapy. Have you seen yourself on videotape? Have you watched a 
+group of young black kindergarten kids doing so? Or observed a 
+dance class, or a theatre group, or a family therapy session make 
+systematic use of this instant playback process to probe into where 
+they are really at? To enjoy themselves? To make joy for others? 
+Young radicals have been familiar with these experiences for some 
+years now, and will press for their increasing ‘‘political” utility. 
+Beyond the emotional liberations this medium can deliver, note that 
+“they” — e.g., universities, tv networks, government — will be unable 
+to subject the young so equipped to their customary editorial 
+policies. Community news shows become possible, decentralizing the 
+cybernetic forms of control that now program them. Conservative 
+estimates tally 5 million vt sets now privately owned.!° If it doubles 
+
+
+TimeForms 51 
+
+
+every year, as tv did, we shall Have 160 million vt sets in private 
+hands in 5 years, many of them in radical hands. 
+
+
+But this is only half the news, since there is every likelihood 
+that we shall interconnect our videotape systems by cable just as we 
+currently interconnect our telephones, opening the door to such 
+fascinating possibilities as direct (vs. representative) democracy on 
+every level, from neighborhood to nation. Jefferson’s dream of a 
+fully informed electorate voting on everything could come true, if 
+this drastically de-stratifying technology were not already perceived 
+as the drastic threat it is to the existing power structures. Imagine a 
+government without secrets, or a bureaucracy without specialization 
+(ie., special access), or a society where information is not power for 
+some, but for all. I am not suggesting that such a society will come 
+about in the 70’s, but I assure you attempts in that direction already 
+occupy a good deal of radical attention. 
+
+
+I will not frighten you by suggesting that some combination of 
+videotape, cable tv, and some kind of post-LSD chemical will make a 
+bid to replace the present educational dungeons we call schools and 
+universities. Electronic art, now in its- infancy, will have matured 
+beyond the point where a few millionaires can hoard the 10,000 
+most precious paintings on the planet. When we have the technology 
+to fold feedback upon feedback upon feedback, we shall loose a 
+revolution in consciousness several layers deeper, higher, wider, than 
+we can presently imagine without exhausting the present technolog- 
+ical capabilities of videotape and cable. We are doing such experi- 
+ments at the Center for the Study of Social Change.!! Who knows 
+what lies beyond. Do radicals? 
+
+
+2. Lasers and Holographs: Once, in a moment of mirth, Tim 
+Leary suggested that the way out of our present predicament was to 
+put all the metal back underground. Perhaps that is impossible, but 
+the least of the laser’s potentials lies in its ability to do without 
+wires, for, as you may know, a laser is a beam of polarized light 
+whose special properties enable it to carry energy and information 
+far more effectively than wires ever could. 
+
+
+52 TimeForms 
+
+
+Recent laser applications include drilling holes only 1 micron 
+wide and 1 micron apart on special tapes, such that 10,000,000 
+bits of information can be stored on a piece of tape one inch 
+square.!? This makes it possible to put the entire Library of 
+Congress (the world’s largest) on 5 drums of tape which can be 
+scanned by a computer in millionths of a second. Alternatively, one 
+could carry a 500 volume library on a piece of paper no larger than a 
+dollar bill, or enable the creation of such gadgets as wrist tv phones, 
+or portable computers no larger than a shoe box doing whatever 
+cooking, cleaning, and communicating Mrs. Housewife used to do 
+while wholly automating Dad’s entire factory. 
+
+
+It’s going to be very difficult to pose as an expert (i.e., to have 
+privileged access to information) on anything in such a world. Hence, 
+it’s going to be very difficult to make rules based on special privilege. 
+This does not make radicals unhappy. 
+
+
+Another application of the laser will be the very widespread use 
+of synchronous satellites (those which seem to stay in the same spot 
+in the sky because they rotate with the earth) to replace telephone 
+switchboards. Dial your friend in China on your wristphone and be 
+in “instant” touch with him and his culture. International boundaries 
+tend to. dissolve under this kind of gentle prodding.!3 Perhaps 
+international wars will have the same fate? Maybe not in the 
+seventies, but please be assured that more and more radical energies 
+will be devoted to using these technologies for the political values 
+noted above. 
+
+
+A third major application of the laser is its use in making 
+holographs, those weird plates of film which fix all the light 
+impinging on them so that they are rather more like electric windows 
+than snapshots, since by changing your angle of viewing you change 
+the information you get. If the only use to which holographs were 
+put was the transformation of 2-dimensional tv into “‘tri-d”, that 
+alone would be as significant an advance as tv over films, or film over 
+radio. But such McCluhanesque advantages pale in the face of recent 
+evidence that the nervous system of man seems to follow principles 
+
+
+TimEForms 53 
+
+
+very similar to laser holography, such that information (memory, 
+tradition, learning—call it what you will) seems to be stored in 
+synapses like light captured on holographs, so that investigation of 
+one leads to knowledge of the other.’ 
+
+
+In other words, this technical breakthrough in physics turns out 
+to be a conceptual breakthrough for neuropsychology. It is difficult 
+to overestimate the significance of this finding since it opens the 
+door to understanding how the nervous system coordinates not only 
+our entire physiology, but also our transactions with the world of 
+experience. It gives one the feeling that we have understood nothing 
+before, that it all lies before us. Fine, say the radicals, while 
+professionals moan and feel incompetent. 
+
+
+Yet, there is an application of laser physics which transcends 
+even those described above. Recently, it was announced that 
+physicists had focused a very powerful laser on a very few atoms of 
+fusionable material, producing in effect a tiny, controlled thermonu- 
+clear explosion, like the one which powers the sun.'* If this fact fails 
+to tax your imagination, recall that work requires energy, that 
+controlled thermonuclear fusion can become an extremely cheap 
+source of unlimited energy, with which man can power enough 
+production to eliminate scarcity for all of the future. This means 
+enough food for everyone, and enough energy to send a thousand 
+rockets to the moon, Mars, and beyond so there will be room for 
+those so fed, not to mention the permanent replacement of enforced 
+muscle labor by fusion-powered machines. I ‘pass over the side 
+benefit of planet-wide ecological health in the form of xo chemical 
+pollution of the atmosphere, although I hope that happens before 
+the 15 years ecologists say we have before evolution on planet earth 
+dies of it. In short, controlled thermonuclear fusion would mean 
+placing at the disposal of man energies comparable to those of the 
+sun, which Kepler, you may recall, believed was God, because it 
+powered earth’s revolution. 
+
+
+3. The Body: The body is becoming the most universally 
+accessible research facility because anyone well enough to do 
+
+
+54 'TimeEForMs 
+
+
+research has one. Anyone with a few cheap biomonitoring devices 
+can wire up his autonomic nervous system to some inexpensive 
+readout indicators and set about conditioning his own autonomic 
+functions. Scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and 
+Development have in this way shaped heart rates and rhythms.'® 
+Many undergraduate students are currently building systems which 
+visually display brain wave rhythms as colors keyed to their 
+emotional preferences, to teach each other the language of each 
+others’ autonomic-cerebral functions, with the aim of more direct 
+and intimate communication. The day may not be far away when 
+messages of this sort will dive to the hormonal deeps of our natures 
+so that a “word” of comfort may soon substitute for the cruder 
+“medications” we call tranquillizers, sedatives, barbiturates, stimu- 
+lants, antidepressants, etc. We have come a long way from reading 
+out the biophysical correlates of selected clinical “interpretations”; 
+we will soon be building them to order. Control of brain waves, heart 
+beats, and other so-called “involuntary” functions will then become 
+quite ‘“‘voluntary’’, so that a science of voluntary endocrinology does 
+not seem beyond our imminent grasp. And, if Darwin or Freud or 
+Reich or any of a dozen others were right, we may at last begin to 
+understand and hence heal our frightened orgasms. I assure you — 
+radicals have been into this field for quite a while, not without 
+considerable guidance, by the way, from their newly found yoga 
+friends. Those unhappy with the term “ecstacy engineering” may 
+prefer the concept of affect ‘enhancement’. You will find that the 
+terms don’t matter when you speak autonomic. Many radicals 
+already do. 
+
+
+4, Others: One could go on with the list of roots radicals will 
+investigate in their attempt to seize the reins of evolution. One could 
+mention the world-ecology game currently being played by Buckmin- 
+ster Fuller in his attempt to plot the redistribution of all world 
+resources, including air, intelligence, and synergy. One could describe 
+how environmental ecologists are building furniture designed to 
+interact with human processes;!7 or gravitronics, in which the very 
+waves of gravity are studied with a view toward liberating man from 
+their grasp; or tachyonics, in which theories of particles which only 
+
+
+TimreForms 55 
+
+
+exist at faster than light velocities bid fair to generalize not only the 
+bulk of all contemporary relativistic physics but all notions of before 
+and after since, in such a world, a faster than light particle returns 
+before it leaves. 
+
+
+But such ventures are really beside the point of our present 
+inquiry, which is, what does the future look like to post-psychedelic 
+radicals. So far, we have merely recited a list of technological 
+potentialities which radicals will try to use in their ‘‘political” 
+attempts to build a new planetary culture. Is there any data which 
+indicate they’ll succeed? That is, to betray my sympathies, are there 
+any grounds for hoping that radicals will succeed in their use of the 
+above technologies to guide social change in a desirable as opposed to 
+its presently suicidal direction? There are a few. 
+
+
+TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE OF SOCIAL TIME 
+
+Beyond the obvious benefits of their youth, the children of 
+cybernation share certain other ‘“‘chronetic”’* advantages, among 
+which are their inability to swim well in the turgid waves of 
+capitalism but to frolic like surfers in the new media. Hence, even if 
+they only continue their present activities, we may predict with some 
+confidence that they will not adjust their technology to the so-called 
+free market, but to their new political values of peace, love, and play. 
+That is, they will continue to try to make technology serve them, 
+rather than serving it, as we do in consumer society. 
+
+
+But can they bring it off? Aren’t they foolish trying to tame the 
+technological monster? When the New York Times asked Abbie 
+Hoffman on April first what he thought was foolish, he said, “A 
+hundred longhairs toppling the presidency — that’s foolish’. Simi- 
+larly, when a prominent longhair got arrested recently on a 
+technicality, he ‘got off’? when he threatened to call a tv press 
+conference announcing Yippie support for Mayor Lindsay. These 
+anecdotes serve to illustrate the contention that the children of 
+media power know how to use it. The principle is simple — feedback. 
+Like those tiny Japanese wrestlers who turn an opponent’s superior 
+
+
+56 TimeForMs 
+
+
+strength against him, Yippies forced the media, by making news, to 
+broadcast counter-cultural commercials. 
+
+
+The same is true of underground film, psychedelic art, 
+miniskirts, and let’s be honest, pot and acid, which a rapidly 
+increasing number of middle-class professionals are using with 
+increasing enjoyment, learning how from — you guessed it — their 
+longhaired children, or students, or patients. Now, as the number of 
+longhaired children increases, so does the number of parents of 
+longhaired children, who then inevitably create a powerful middle- 
+class pressure against harsh drug laws, to which even the Department 
+of Justice cannot long remain immune. One of our respondents put it 
+this way: “I turned my old man onto pot. He’s a judge and he digs 
+it. So next time a kid is up in front of him, he’ll be with the kid, 
+cause he smokes too, dig?”’ Again, feedback. 
+
+
+Anecdotes of this sort underscore the point that there are 
+energies within the establishment which radicals can bend to their 
+own purposes. It is therefore an oversimplification to ask whether a 
+large enough number of radicals can assemble enough energy to 
+accomplish their purposes. Like Yippies and Japanese wrestlers, 
+radicals are learning how to turn superior strength against itself, an 
+effort in which they will enlist not only the formidable democrati- 
+zing power of the new technologies themselves, but also some 
+exceedingly strong sociological powers. 
+
+
+What is meant by the phrase, “‘. . . the democratizing powers of 
+the new technologies”? Are the new technologies inherently dem- 
+ocratizing? The answer comes in view if we recall that videotape, 
+cable, lasers, holographs, and autonomic engineering each increase 
+the rate of human communication. When more information reaches 
+more people faster, pattern recognition must be accelerated, since 
+more patterns cognized means more patterns re-cognized. Recogni- 
+tion facilitates reflection. Reflection generates criticism. Increasing 
+criticism generates pressure for change. 
+
+
+TrimEFormMs' 57 
+
+
+Another way of understanding the impact of technologically 
+accelerated information flow is the following: When events occur 
+too rapidly to feel one at a time, we respond by grouping or 
+classifying; we can then say “all of those”. But when the rate of 
+information flow is so rapid that many “all of thoses” arrive in a very 
+short time, we must now group all of those. In short, rapid 
+information flow creates a pressure toward higher levels of generali- 
+zation, which transcend prior classifications of events. 
+
+
+Cyberneticians! ® will recognize here an old story — information 
+overload, requiring new programming. “Heads” are equally familiar 
+with this law, for LSD barrages the organism with a faster rate of 
+experience than previous categories can tolerate, thus ‘‘blowing”’ the 
+mind, i.e., dissolving pre-conceptions. 
+
+
+Hence, the impact of each of these technologies can be 
+democratic in tendency, since each of them consists precisely in an 
+acceleration of the amount of information processed in a given 
+amount of time. VT consists of faster feedback, cable of more 
+interconnections. Lasers move more information than miles of thick 
+cable. Each holograph is like a thousand electric windows. Note that 
+interconnecting them multiplies the rate. 
+
+
+As the number of persons with access to this greatly increased 
+rate of information flow is vastly increased, there occurs an 
+overloading of the previous categories they used to process that 
+information. The same mind-blowing fate awaits those categories of 
+culture we call norms, the rules governing behavior. As the rules 
+governing behavior are barraged from all sides with information from 
+as many perspectives, the rules are subjected to overload strains they 
+cannot survive. Just as you can no longer hide unseemly facial 
+gestures on a 2-way videophone, so you can no longer propagandize a 
+community if your cables have cameras at each terminal. Just as you 
+couldn’t comfortably watch starving Biafran children while eating 
+your tv dinner if they could watch you too, so government will find 
+it hard to restrict tv access and will be unable to maintain secret 
+court hearings while demanding increased citizen participation. 
+
+
+58 TrmeFormMs 
+
+
+Similarly, lasers and holographs will bring to billions of people 
+the ability to communicate with each other more, and more often, 
+than their present cultural separation permits. The same is true of the 
+new autonomic languages we shall soon learn to speak, across current 
+cultural boundaries. In sum, the democratizing potentials of these 
+new technologies lie in their power to negate preconceived 
+categories of privilege, and to necessitate higher levels of generaliza- 
+tion. That is, they accelerate transcendence. 
+
+
+But the democratizing power of the new technologies is not the 
+only energy to which radicals have access. There are formidable 
+sociological energies as well. To observe them, we need only note 
+that radicals have already demonstrated considerable ability to 
+accelerate their own pace of social change, accelerating ours in the 
+bargain. Does anyone seriously expect them to slow down in the 
+foreseeable future? The fact seems to be — they are. making a new 
+and faster culture, not just negating the old one. We are already 
+changing faster than we want to, though not nearly fast enough for 
+them. They are democratizing faster than we are, and we envy them 
+for it. They seem to know where the pace-makers of social change 
+are, and they seem to know how to regulate them. 
+
+
+For example, they demand more democratic universities. First 
+we gas and club them, then admit they were right, then go along part 
+way. Would we have gone so far so fast without their urging? 
+
+
+They are democratizing sexuality, insisting that we throw off 
+once and for all those remains of puritanic morality which still infect 
+us. We bellow in outrage, arrest them for nudity and indecent 
+exposure, then flock to Oh Calcutta, Che, and I Am Curious 
+(Yellow). Would we have gone so far so fast, if not for them? 
+
+
+They exhort us to play instead of mechanical labor. We call 
+them bums, parasites, and loafers, arrest them for vagrancy, then 
+automate another thousand jobs and fly off to Acapulco. 
+
+
+TimEForms 59 
+
+
+They: turn on with drugs different from ours. We resurrect 
+prohibition, barricade the Mexican border, give them 15-year 
+sentences for possession of two marijuana cigarettes, then secretly 
+try it ourselves and find it is better than 2 martinis on the rocks. 
+Maybe this time they’ll help us avoid the silly retrogression that 
+prohibition was. I doubt we could do without them. 
+
+
+But examples are not theory. It does not suffice, although it 
+helps, to note that the Woodstock and Isle of Wight Festivals 
+assembled a half-million longhairs peacefully, joyfully, playfully. For 
+numerical strength is not the root issue. 
+
+
+CHRONETICS AND CYBERNATION 
+
+The root issue seems to be: how does technology induce social 
+change. The answer seems to lie in the realization that technology 
+itself is the result of two intersecting environments, which we call 
+“science” and “culture’’, the former referring to a specific set of 
+beliefs (or preconceptions) which the main body of professionals 
+regard as the “laws of nature”; and the latter referring to an unstated 
+but even more firmly held set of beliefs (or preconceptions) which 
+the majority of men in a given society regard as the laws of human 
+nature. ‘‘Discoveries” in one field, without interaction with the 
+other, simply do not become “technology”, by which we usually 
+mean the material techniques a culture builds for itself to mediate its 
+environment. 
+
+
+Thus, technology does not, by itself, explain why social change 
+comes about, for it is first necessary to inquire why a given 
+technology is adopted. Why, for example, did the Chinese discovery 
+of rocket power never get beyond the level of firecrackers for 5000 
+years. Why did Plato’s discovery that the earth was round lay 
+dormant until the Renaissance. There are many other examples. 
+Although we are all familiar with the phrase, “Nothing is so powerful 
+as an idea whose time has come”, we seldom make full theoretical 
+use of it. Social change, in my view, occurs exactly then — when an 
+idea finds its fertile time. Knowing when and why the time is 
+
+
+60 'TrmEForRMS 
+
+
+right — or better, knowing how to make it right — would enable one 
+to understand and, hence, to modify social change. 
+
+
+It begins to be apparent that there are very sound and 
+sophisticated “political” reasons for radicals’ investigation of com- 
+munications technology, since communication is the life blood of 
+culture — the medium, as it were, in which given cultural norms are 
+the messages. A generation which mastered those communication 
+processes could indeed refer to itself as the architects of social time, 
+since their principal energies would be devoted to the investigation of 
+how most efficiently to communicate the most information relevant 
+to species survival to the largest number of people, in the fastest 
+possible time. 
+
+
+Radicals’ investigation of media physics thus turns out to be a 
+political act, aimed at altering those assumptions on which all human 
+cultures have based themselves so far, i.e., the belief that war, fear 
+and mechanical work are the necessary attributes of human nature. 
+Radicals hope that new planetary media will render wars obsolete by 
+rendering national boundaries obsolete; that they will render fear of 
+the stranger obsolete, for who will be the stranger when all men 
+communicate as brothers; and that they will render dull work 
+obsolete by providing lovers with time to love while fusion energy 
+powers the world’s production. 
+
+
+Perhaps an apochryphal story is the way to end this attempt at 
+prophecy. Legend has it that Marx was once confronted with the 
+objection that his vision of history was transhistorical and naive if he 
+thought all men under Communism would finally be happy. He is 
+said to have replied, “I did not say all men would be happy. Perhaps, 
+when that time comes, men will finally begin to suffer as men — all 
+prior suffering having been animal.” 
+
+
+Perhaps young radicals’ vision is comparably transhistorical. 
+Perhaps technology will overcome them, leaving robots the heirs of 
+men. My attempt has been to show that this is very unlikely. One 
+thing is certain — the time is right, and they know it. 
+
+
+TimeForms 61 
+
+
+PSYCHEDELIC MYTHS, METAPHORS, AND FANTASIES 
+
+
+ABSTRACT 
+
+Subcultures create their own dialects composed of special words 
+and phrases embodying their special experiences. Hip language is an 
+example. Consideration of some aspects of the special vocabulary 
+used by psychedelic enthusiasts provides an entry into the special 
+myths, metaphors, and fantasies of their “subculture’’. Among these 
+are the “electric” metaphor (e.g., turned on, channels of communica- 
+tion, bit, etc.); the cybernetic metaphor (e.g., feedback, playback); 
+McLuhanisms (e.g., media, message, cool); and others more manifest- 
+ly psychiatric in reference (e.g., paranoid, hang up, etc.). 
+
+
+This chapter arrays these sociolinguistic data in support of the 
+hypothesis that psychedelic myths, metaphors, and fantasies are 
+largely responses to discrepant rates of social change engendered in 
+post-industrial societies by their variety of new technologies. 
+Discrepant rates of social change engender discrepant rates of 
+experience, a condition we term “achrony’’. It is suggested that 
+“achronistic’”’ experiences generate the psychedelic myths, meta- 
+phors, and fantasies discussed. The question raised is — are radical 
+hopes “‘mere”’ fantasies? 
+
+
+INTRODUCTION 
+
+Participant observation is a method of research which suffers 
+paradoxically from its own merits, since it yields up far more data 
+than one can neatly conceptualize and statistically manipulate. 
+Nevertheless, clinicians and social scientists have long been aware 
+that it is often the method of choice, especially when the universe to 
+be sampled is of indeterminate size or character, or when the subject 
+of inquiry is of such known complexity that the complexity itself 
+becomes the subject of inquiry. 
+
+
+62 TrmeForms 
+
+
+For example, clinicians and social scientists whose interests 
+acquaint them with members of the psychedelic generation quickly 
+become aware of a bewildering complexity of themes recurrently 
+expressed by members of this subculture.’ These include aspects of 
+Eastern mysticism, Western pharmacology, Egyptian theology, Greek 
+astrology, Japanese diets, and a veritable panoply of similarly 
+esoteric elements. Early in their encounters with psychedelic 
+protagonists, clinical-and social scientists are greeted with what seems 
+to be a private language, complete with its own nouns, verbs and 
+adjectives as well as syntax, grammar, and structure. Increasingly, 
+many investigators are beginning to conclude that their ignorance 
+will remain fixed unless they master to some degree the complexities 
+of this sociolinguistic universe. And, as they do so, they become 
+aware, along with their increasing fluency, that the words and 
+sentences of this subcultural jargon, like the words and sentences of 
+their own professional vocabularies, resemble icebergs, only a 
+fraction of which are available to ‘‘conscious” observation, the 
+remainder being submerged in a sea of shifting sociocultural and 
+idiosyncratic currents. If we wished to know, in a given encounter, 
+not only what the words mean in general, i.e., in American speech, 
+but what they particularly mean, 1e., to the individuals speaking 
+them, we would be well advised to devote attention to both aspects. 
+The principal aim of this chapter is to focus attention on the 
+sociocultural aspects of psychedelic speech, to assist those investiga- 
+tors who wish to understand how what is (1) cultural, what is 
+(2) sub-cultural, and what is (3) psychological, may be more sharply 
+delineated. Such efforts follow the lead of Henry Murray, whose 
+maxim, “All men are like all other men, some other men, and no 
+other men”, became part of the founding philosophy of that field 
+anthropologists call ‘‘culture and personality”’.® 
+
+
+The general hypothesis woven through the paragraphs that 
+follow is that language is properly included in that class of social 
+events which have in recent years experienced the tremendous 
+impact of the changing technologies characteristic of contemporary 
+societies. Specific hypotheses with regard to the impacts of particular 
+
+
+TimEForms 63 
+
+
+technologies on particular populations are then derived and tested 
+with sociolinguistic data. I will attempt to show that an understand- 
+ing of the impact of certain technologies on the lives of the 
+psychedelic subculture helps us to distinguish psychedelic myths 
+(i.e., beliefs shared by most ‘members of the subculture) from 
+metaphors (favorite comparisons used by the subculture to compare 
+itself with the general American culture) and from fantasies 
+(apparently idiosyncratic acts of imagination by individual members 
+of the subculture). Failure to draw such distinctions increases the 
+danger that observers will infer psychological disease (e.g., hallucina- 
+tions) where none exists, and conversely increases the danger that 
+legal and social scientists will attribute to pharmacological agents 
+powers that actually reside elsewhere (e.g., the technologies charac- 
+teristic of post-industrial societies). 
+
+
+METHOD AND PROCEDURE 
+
+In addition to its usefulness in managing complex data, 
+participant observation permits great flexibility of operation, so that 
+one can learn, not only from living in the neighborhoods where his 
+“subjects” (including himself) live, but one may move about in the 
+many places where his subjects behave, including hospitals, universi- 
+ties, coffee houses, and underground theatres. Here too, the method 
+suffers from its virtues, since cogent objections against the reliability 
+and validity of the data so derived may be well-founded. Suffice it 
+then to assert at this point that I have learned the language in the 
+many places where it is spoken.* You will have to judge for yourself 
+whether the generalizations I derive therefrom describe the popula- 
+tion with which you are acquainted. 
+
+
+Procedurally, I will first present a list of words and phrases 
+drawn from this language. I will then show that groups of these 
+words and phrases can be shown to have their origins and contexts in 
+the several technological characteristics of our society. I will then 
+attempt to show how the experiences generated by the various 
+technologies operating in contemporary society generate some of the 
+
+
+myths, metaphors and fantasies characteristic of the subject popula- 
+tion. 
+
+
+64 TimeForms 
+
+
+SELECTED ASPECTS OF THE PSYCHEDELIC DIALECT 
+
+A glossary of words used by the psychedelic generation 
+published in 1966, began with the caution, “Of course, by the time 
+you read this, it may well be out of date’”.® It begins with the word 
+“acid”, of course, then lists the word “backwards’’, which it defines 
+as ‘tranquilizers or any central nervous system depressant”. 
+
+
+Proceeding alphabetically, on our own list, we would next list 
+the word “bit”, which means any item of information or behavior, as 
+in “that bit’. A “bummer” is a bad trip, or any bad experience. 
+Someone who has had too many trips is said to be “‘burnt-out”. 
+Someone who has had a number of good trips is likely to be “cool” 
+about it, i., relatively uninformative unless asked by a trusted 
+person. 
+
+
+A trip may begin well but may end badly. The painful 
+termination of any experience, by extension, is termed “crashing”, 
+or “coming down hard”. This is especially likely if one “uses” 
+“crystal” (or “speed”, or “forwards” or ‘“‘ups”’, i.e., amphetamines or 
+other central nervous system stimulants). Someone who is deeply 
+into the interior (vs. the social) aspects of a trip is ‘‘destroyed” (or 
+“zonked”, “out of his mind”, or “‘spaced’’). Contrary to popular 
+belief, it is entirely possible to “dig” (or enjoy) such experiences. 
+One can “get into” them if one knows how. One can even dig 
+experiences which “blow your mind”’, i.e., dissolve those structures 
+of consciousness on which we ordinarily rely for ‘‘sanity”. One who 
+does not understand such mental events will probably “bug” 
+(bother) one who does, with his irrelevant questions. One who knows 
+how “high” another is may get a ‘contact high” (empathetic 
+euphoria) in communicating with him. ‘‘Copping out” means 
+resorting to conventional vs. ‘“‘hip’’ explanations or behaviors, i.e., 
+giving up. 
+
+
+If something is really ‘‘groovy” (particularly enjoyable) one 
+may say it is ‘‘crazy”. An ‘“‘out of sight” or ‘“‘far out” (avant garde) 
+experience is particularly groovy, but not quite “mind blowing”. 
+People who don’t know how to “groove” are said to be a “drag” 
+
+
+TimEForms’ 65 
+
+
+(i.e., they reduce one’s joy). Drags tend to “bring down’ or “turn 
+off” people who would prefer to be “high” or-‘‘stoned”’ (using a 
+psychedelic drug or being high or stoned on, or by, anything else 
+they happen to be “into” or “grooving on’’). The trick is to “turn 
+on” (be high on something, not necessarily ‘‘dope”, i.€., any 
+pharmacological substitute) and to stay turned on. Then one can 
+“grok” (dig communicating, or meditating joyfully and profoundly). 
+
+
+If one “flips”, or “flips out”, one may be either particularly 
+enthusiastic or psychotic, depending on whether such “freaky” 
+(unusual) experiences are dug or one gets “hung up” (panicked or 
+very worried) about them. Such “‘hassles” (bothersome trivia, 
+worthless rituals, meaningless events) are considered to be “drags” or 
+“downs” by real “‘heads” (regular users of psychedelics). Heads who 
+“smoke joints” (use marijuana) or ‘“‘drop” (ingest) LSD regularly, 
+usually distinguish themselves from those who do so very often (pot 
+or acid freaks), although they may also be music freaks, or print 
+freaks, or sex freaks, etc., depending on which activity they very 
+often engage in to turn themselves on. 
+
+
+Heads who dig “out of sight gigs” (experiences which require 
+some skill) regularly “rap” (talk intensely) about them with other 
+heads making similar scenes. “Riffs” are scenes where really good 
+raps Occur, although uninitiates may “put down’”’ (deplore) or “bring 
+down” (ruin) them unless caution is exercised. When bad or “heavy” 
+scenes generate “paranoia” one has to decide whether to “split” 
+(leave); whether others are “straight” (naive); or represent ‘“‘the man” 
+(straight authority). Failure to make a decision leaves one “uptight” 
+(tense) and unable to ‘“‘go” (groove). 
+
+
+People who have dropped tabs of acid or toked on a joint of 
+grass, who have successfully integrated these experiences for them- 
+selves, are said to be “together” (healthy) although one is even more 
+healthy if one has gotten both his head and his scene together. One 
+can then feel “good vibrations” and ‘know where it is really at”. 
+Such people used to be called ‘with it”; they now have their own 
+
+
+66 TrmeEForMS 
+
+
+»”» ae ”» ce 
+
+
+“bags”, “gigs”, ‘‘scenes”, etc. They enjoy “balling” (intercourse) and 
+instantly recognize cats and chicks who are “into it’. They are: 
+seldom hassled because they know how to “score” (buy drugs) 
+without getting “busted” (arrested) or getting “burnt” (buying 
+counterfeit drugs). They are very “spacey” people who like to go 
+through their own “changes” so they generally avoid “shrinks” like 
+the plague. 
+
+
+The foregoing list, it should be recalled, is a biased sample. 
+Nevertheless, if we regard the subcultural dialect from which the list 
+derived as a symbolic organism® having an ecology and an evolution 
+analogous to other living organisms, we may begin to investigate how 
+this dialect achieved its present form, and examine how it relates to 
+its parents. 
+
+
+TECHNOLOGY AS ENVIRONMENT 
+
+Following Hegel, or clinical practice, we may begin anywhere, 
+confident that the whole story will eventually unfold. Previous 
+work’ suggests that we will reach the heart of the matter faster if we 
+observe that many of the words selected bear the imprint of the 
+technologies which originally created them. 
+
+
+Thus, the central terms which have become the most widely 
+known by reason of frequent repetition are acid and trip. An acid, as 
+everyone knows, will dissolve most metals. In this context, Leary’s 
+demand that we put all the metal back underground serves to reveal a 
+feeling very common in the subculture, that mechanical and metallic 
+experiences are to be avoided and replaced, hopefully by better ones; 
+but if such experiences cannot be removed or replaced, perhaps 
+dissolving them in another sort of acid will help for the time being. 
+And, if one can simultaneously dissolve the machine and travel, out 
+of sight of all such machines, so. much the better will the trip be. We 
+sometimes forget that taking trips of the more ordinary variety, using 
+automobiles, railroads, ships, and airplanes, has become absolutely 
+commonplace for the great majority of Americans only in the last 25 
+years, when mass transportation became a technological reality. 
+
+
+TimEForMsS' 67 
+
+
+Again, as everyone knows, it is not simply the availability of 
+mass transport, but of rapid transit which describes our era of jet 
+planes and 400 horsepower cars. Taken in conjunction with another 
+well-known fact, i.e., that highway accidents claim more deaths than 
+wars, one begins to account for two more popular metaphors — 
+speed and crash. In the dialect, ‘‘speed kills” is a familiar graffiti 
+which puns deliberately on highway technology by pointing out that 
+one who goes very fast on drugs is as likely to crash as his highway 
+counterpart. This same awareness of the hurtling pace of our era 
+seems to underlie such words as backwards and forwards, whose drug 
+translations seem to be regressing and accelerating. The word 
+“rushing” means a particularly delightful experience of those first 
+few flushes of euphoria that begin many drug scenes. 
+
+
+The word ‘‘scene” of course is usually associated with drama, 
+most often, in our era, with film or tv drama. Similarly, riffs and gigs 
+derive originally from the speech of musicians who performed in 
+these media. Both travel and media experiences may go too slowly, 
+in which case they will be said to drag. 
+
+
+Such “interpretations”, however, -are rather commonplace. 
+Almost as well-known are the terms “turn on” and “‘turn off’’, which 
+remind us, according to McLuhan® of the fact that the psychedelic 
+generation is composed of the first generation of children raised 
+entirely in an electric environment, consisting not simply of tv sets 
+which one can only turn on or off (as Vice President Agnew 
+observed) but of an entire industrial establishment powered no 
+longer by muscles and steam but by electricity and its 20 year old 
+wonderchild, the computer. 
+
+
+Computers make automation possible because they process 
+billions of bits of information per second, which is not only 
+exponentially faster than machinery but exponentially more pro- 
+ductive. As noted elsewhere?, an era which processes that much 
+information that fast calls forth a corresponding increase in the 
+consciousness of the people who live in that era. As McLuhan says, 
+
+
+68 'TimMEForms 
+
+
+the computer is the LSD of the business world’ °. Turning the quote 
+around, it has been said that acid is the computer of the turned-on 
+generation. In other words, as noted elsewhere’?, the psychedelic 
+revolution is the result of the cybernetic one, and is an appropriate 
+response to it. 
+
+
+Put it this way: heads are trying to do psychologically what 
+computers have done sociologically, that is, exponentially expand 
+the ability to process vast quantities of experience very rapidly. Such 
+experiences tend to vanish into the future very quickly. They tax the 
+imagination, which responds with such phrases as “outta sight”. 
+Minds which have dissolved preconceptions (programs) which pre- 
+vent such rapid processing may be said to be “blown”, as if their 
+fuses were trying to handle more current than they were designed 
+for. Too much of this sort of thing will earn the description “burnt 
+out”. 
+
+
+Paradoxically, electric media require more participation be- 
+cause, so to speak, the gaps between the billions of bits they use to 
+move information must be filled in by the observer. Such media also 
+require higher levels of participation because the pace at which they 
+deliver information is so fast. If a picture is worth a thousand words, 
+how many words is a two-hour tv documentary worth, requiring the 
+viewer to reach conclusions on more matters in a day than granddad 
+had to decide in a lifetime. Media which foster increased participa- 
+tion are said to be “cool”; those which suggest less are said to be 
+“hot”. It was no accident that the generation which insisted on 
+marching on Washington, called itself “cool”, i.e., responding to the 
+pressure of our electric media to participate faster at higher levels of 
+consciousness in a world of vast informational complexity. Political 
+“trips”, as it were. 
+
+
+When you're “where it’s at”, you are like the diamond stylus 
+tracking the grooves of an LP record. Your feelings will follow the 
+changes in the chord structure of the music. One of the best 
+compendia of myths, metaphors and fantasies easily available is the 
+Beatles’ recently released book of illustrated lyrics. Although books 
+
+
+TimeEForms' 69 
+
+
+and print are regarded as hot media, suitable only for intellectuals 
+and other professionals, still, the lyrics are a groove, as they say. 
+
+
+Rockets which must reach transorbital velocities (beyond 
+25,000 miles per hour) are not now readily available to the common 
+man except as he imaginatively identifies with the astronauts who 
+recently landed again on the moon. This relative unavailability 
+should not hide the fact that this extension of man’s ecosphere, even 
+beyond the media extensions of his nervous system, was the principal 
+value of the journey. Hence, we should not be surprised to note that 
+the words “spaced out” or ‘‘spacey”’ are the most recent additions to 
+the psychedelic dialect, since the technology of space flight is the 
+most recent extension of our technological environment. Similarly, 
+since, it is absolutely essential for NASA’s computers to include in 
+their calculations the most minute alterations in the relative positions 
+of sun, moon and earth, we should not be too surprised to note that 
+astrology is one of the principal myths of the psychedelic sub-cul- 
+ture. 
+
+
+The need for brevity prevents any extended discussion of 
+astrological language here. We may pass beyond this topic by simply 
+noting that astronautics is a major technology in the same environ- 
+ment in which astrology is a currently flourishing mythology. 
+
+
+The general notion which each of these parallels between 
+technology and language suggests is one with which students of the 
+human mind should be familiar. It is the maxim that we must 
+understand what consciousness is conscious of in order to understand 
+what consciousness is. Since we already know that the principal 
+impact of technology is to change the world we live in, we should be 
+able to conclude rather quickly that language, one of the principal 
+incarnations of consciousness, will contain reflections of the environ- 
+ments man is conscious of. We should also not be surprised to 
+discover in the language of one of our principal subcultures, 
+reflections of those technologies which have most changed the world 
+from a pre-industrial agrarian society into a post-industrial cyberna- 
+
+
+70 TimeForMs 
+
+
+ted one. In short, there should be words for the experiences 
+technology has fashioned for the subculture, as indeed there are. 
+
+
+The question of central interest in this chapter, however, is not 
+whether the subculture is sharply aware of its technosphere; few will 
+argue that it is not. What we wish to discuss is whether the forms 
+of awareness they cherish are real, sound and healthy, or are they 
+unreal, unsound and unhealthy? We want to know whether the 
+language of this subculture “describes things that aren’t there”; in 
+short, whether radicals are experiencing the sociological equivalent of 
+an hallucination in their hopes for social change. 
+
+
+THE MIND METAPHOR 
+
+Hang ups, hassles, bum trips, visions, crashes, paranoia, flips, 
+freak outs, being stoned, zonked, spaced, and vibrations, are words 
+which the psychedelic dialect uses to describe forms of consciousness 
+which are readily admitted to characterize the subculture’s style of 
+awareness. In short, they are far from oblivious to what we might call 
+fixations, obsessions, psychiatric episodes, hallucinations, depressive 
+states, paranoia, lapses of consciousness, frenzies, narcosis, euphoria, 
+empathic identification, etc. 
+
+
+The problem seems to be that they often value such experiences 
+positively, whereas we are more likely to view them as pathognomon- 
+ic indices supportive of diagnoses of mental unsoundness. This is 
+something of a paradox, since a major part of their awareness of such 
+phenomena derives from the fact that they are the most psychia- 
+trized generation in history. For, if by technology we mean the logic 
+of a set of techniques, we may say that the psychedelic generation 
+has been made more aware of the logic underlying psychiatric 
+techniques than any prior generation in history, precisely because of 
+the widespread adoption of the techniques of psychiatry in contem- 
+porary America. Similarly, shall we dismiss their largely negative 
+evaluation of contemporary American social sciences as spiteful 
+
+
+TimeForms 71 
+
+
+reaction formations, or are there grounds for concluding that their 
+rejection is healthy and sound, notwithstanding the fact that they 
+live in one of the most thoroughly social scienced worlds ever to 
+occupy the planet. 
+
+
+In other words, how shall we account for the fact that 
+psychedelic language seems to adopt words and phrases derived from 
+the mechanical technologies they deplore while rejecting words and 
+phrases derived from the psychiatric and social technologies they 
+have been raised on. 
+
+
+Although the answer to this question goes to the heart of the 
+matter, and will help us to distinguish sound from unsound myths, 
+metaphors and fantasies, there is one further paradox we must 
+confront before we can spell the answer out. It was to this final 
+paradox that Wittgenstein alluded when he said: ‘“‘Whereof man 
+cannot speak, thereof should man be silent’’!*. He referred to the 
+fact that in each of our lives, we fling a bridge of shared meaning 
+across that chasm which separates our tiny individualities from that 
+massive infinity which is the universe of all (or no) meaning. 
+
+
+Culturally, we know that a population will collectively erect 
+‘this bridge by consensually validating a set of beliefs, or myths, 
+which enable the consciousnesses of that people to be shared. Yet, 
+like the fantasies which egos erect to preserve sanity, they remain 
+largely out of awareness, i.e., unconscious. When challenged, such 
+myths and fantasies will be vigorously defended by the persons or 
+populations espousing them, since they feel they require them to 
+remain sane. Their content is the wisdom of things unseen, and their 
+function is to maintain unseen the very bases of consciousness, 
+without which consciousness could not be, yet with which conscious- 
+ness cannot be conscious of its bases. 
+
+
+So it is with the psychedelic dialect, which is based on premises 
+of which it seems unaware, just as psychiatric and social science are 
+
+
+72 TrmeForms 
+
+
+based on premises of which they are largely unaware. And, just as it 
+is the proper function of research to uncover these assumptions (or 
+myths) so that we may learn a little more about what makes us 
+human, so it is the proper function of psychedelic protagonists to 
+uncover the assumptions (or myths) underlying the trip philosophy, 
+and its attendant forms of consciousness. 
+
+
+But how can those devoted to psychedelic exploration seek the 
+help of psychiatric and social scientists if those scientists begin with 
+the assumption that psychedelic explorers are ipso facto unwell, 
+devoting their time to exploring the blindalleys of mental pathology. 
+If most scientists say that tripping is hallucinating, and that ends 
+that, we should expect psychedelic protagonists to reject the 
+so-called ‘‘scientific assistance” (e.g., psychotherapy) just as perempt- 
+orily as science rejects theirs. Which both of them, in fact, do.'4 
+
+
+If a person wonders whether his paranoia about being arrested 
+and hospitalized for observation is real or delusional, where does one 
+draw the line between the likelihood of his arrest and his alleged 
+paranoia? For, the more he reveals to the establishment his 
+preference for those forms of consciousness he consensually shares 
+with the members of his own subculture, the more likely is his arrest. 
+How do we know that his feelings of profound distrust are sound or 
+unsound merely by listening to him, when the establishment 
+constantly barrages him with “information” saying that he and his 
+whole subculture are ‘“‘sick”. More to the point, how is be to know? 
+Faced with a culture which seems to him to prefer to remain 
+unconscious of its own genosuicidal tendencies, how can we expect 
+his culture to trust ours? And it is no use arguing that each culture 
+has a right to its own myths, metaphors, and fantasies, for the fact is 
+that the establishment (though not its avant garde) simply condemns 
+the psychedelic enthusiast, if not for his pathology, then certainly 
+for his imprudence. Let us inquire how this situation came about. 
+
+
+TimEForms_ 73 
+
+
+ACHRONY 
+
+Just as a simple list of words fails to capture the nuances of a 
+dialect, so the simple enumeration of those technologies in our 
+ecosphere fails to depict the complexity of those forms of 
+consciousness which must experience them. We cannot simply add 
+the impacts of the technologies rampant in our society, since each is 
+quite distinct, and we scientists know that it is not permitted to add 
+apples, oranges, and say, pills. But even if we had simple numbers 
+measuring the impact of our several technologies, we would be 
+forced to multiply, not add them, to approach their true impact — 
+which I believe to be so vast and far-reaching in their multiple impact 
+that nothing comparable has ever before happened to the human 
+species. I think the total impact of the technologies of our age has 
+produced a generation more unlike its parents than its parents were 
+unlike the apes from whence they sprung. 
+
+
+Permit me to explain this conclusion, which might otherwise 
+seem to be an hallucination. All human cultures so far have been 
+characterized by a pace of evolution sufficiently slow to permit 
+parents to transmit their lifestyles to their young. Apes did this, but 
+poorly, since their communications were restricted to a relatively few 
+media, such as imprinting’ *, kinesics!®, or direct mimicry. Humans 
+mastered another whole universe of symbols when the neocortex 
+permitted the invention of language’? and other symbolic media, 
+€.g., music, paint, sculpture, etc.* But 20th century technologies 
+have changed all that, for we now invent culture faster than we can 
+transmit it, even with electronic media which process billions of bits 
+of information per second. Hence, the so-called generation gap is in 
+reality a chasm we in the establishment cannot bridge because the 
+gap is widening faster than we can build across it. It is a situation 
+which prompted Margaret Mead to observe that now, for the first 
+time in history, our children must become our teachers.'® But even 
+
+
+“and vice versa 
+
+
+74 TimeEForRMS 
+
+
+that forecast seems optimistic, since there is no guarantee that we 
+could learn fast enough even if we tried, and we don’t even seem to 
+
+
+be trying. 
+
+
+There seem to be temporal strata in our society very like those 
+geologic strata which mark the ages of the earth; there are faults and 
+fissures in our culture like those on the surface of our planet; there 
+are mountains and valleys in the temporal nature of our contem- 
+porary experience; yet, we are strolling about as if we were still in 
+the garden of Eden while our children are screaming warnings to us 
+that the species Man is in great peril. We will often be in error if we 
+mistake their cries of warning for the shouts of children gone mad. I 
+am saying that their mythos is valid if it says our society must be 
+made over because it is based on an obsolete warrior culture, and 
+that we must soon learn to make love, not war. 
+
+
+A generation whose vision is so drastically other than ours 
+might well regard itself as “freaks”, that is, a race of mutants who 
+find themselves alone and afraid in a world they most emphatically 
+did not make, but who accept the responsibility to make it over, lest 
+they too perish. 
+
+
+I am saying that their metaphors are valid if they hold that we 
+are like blind men walking the steep cliffs of species suicide, and that 
+their communal philosophy of brotherhood promises a better chance 
+of species survival than the bureaucracies we presently inhabit. I am 
+saying that very often, we accuse them falsely of hallucinating 
+because they see things we say aren’t there because we refuse to look 
+at them, e.g., imperialism, genocide, racial oppression, ecological 
+poison, and a generalized reign of psychological terror and violence 
+supported by threats of nuclear and/or germ warfare. In such a 
+world, he is mad who is not paranoid. 
+
+
+So that the citizens of psychedelia should receive no more glory 
+than is rightfully theirs, we must recognize that their responsibilities 
+
+
+TimEForms 75 
+
+
+are as staggering as their ‘“‘pathologies’’. 1 do not claim that they are 
+without pathology, that all their myths are right, that every 
+metaphor they use to distinguish themselves from us is true, that 
+each fantasy is beautiful and fine and good. There are “‘sick”’ ones, to 
+be sure, and broken ones, and lost ones. 
+
+
+But the point lies deeper. In an age whose technologies thrash the 
+waters of time about so violently, by unleashing wave after wave of 
+rigid and turbulent social change, we shall all be caught, one way or 
+another, in cross-currents which pull us now one way, now another. 
+Therefore, it no longer suffices to say that we live in an age of 
+anxiety, or a period of alienation, or an era of anomie, because, in 
+our time, those pathogens are not only chronic but accelerating their 
+“influence. It seems, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that time itself is out 
+of joint, a condition we have termed “achrony”. 
+
+
+Achrony describes the plight of those caught between discrep- 
+ant rates of experience. It seems to me that the term fits the 
+psychedelic generation, who have been forced to endure more rapid 
+shifts in the rates of their experience than any before them, 
+engendered by the most powerful and the most rapid world-changing 
+technologies man has ever invented. 
+
+
+The miracle in such a world is that so few of them hallucinate, 
+that is, mistake for a direct sensory experience forms of awareness 
+that derive from another time, be they memories (voices) from the 
+past or visions (terrors) of the future. 
+
+
+CONCLUSION 
+
+You have by now no doubt become aware that I have been 
+making a rather unsubtle plea. I will make it explicit: Fellow 
+scientists, in our confrontations with the long-haired, freaky-clothed 
+
+
+76 TiMEFoRMS 
+
+
+members of the psychedelic generation, let us make particularly 
+special efforts to understand their political condition as the context 
+of their psychological lives. Let us distinguish sharply between the 
+madness of our civilization and what may only be the sadness of the 
+child before us. And let us try to remember that all men are like all 
+others in some aspect if we but look deeply enough. 
+
+
+TimeForms 177 
+
+
+METARAP: WHO YOU ARE IS HOW YOU CHANGE 
+
+
+(An essay on Temporal Stratification and/or the 
+Cybernation of Transcendence) 
+
+
+Rap I 
+
+
+1. A.N. WHITEHEAD, 1938 
+
+The planets, the stones, the living things all witness to the wide 
+preservation of identity. But equally, they witness to the partiality of 
+such preservation. Nothing in realized matter of fact returns 
+complete identity with its antecedent self. This self-identity in the 
+sphere of realized fact is only partial. It holds for certain purposes. It 
+dominates certain kinds of process. But in other parts of process, the 
+differences are important and self-identity is an interesting fable. For 
+the purposes of inheriting real estate, the identity of the man of 
+thirty years of age with the former baby of 10 months is dominant. 
+For the purposes of navigating a yacht, the differences between man 
+and child are essential. The identity then sinks into metaphysical 
+irrelevancy. In so far as identities are preserved, there are orderly 
+laws of nature. In so far as identities decay, these laws are subject to 
+modification. But the modification itself may be lawful. The change 
+in the individual may exhibit a law of change, as for example the 
+change from baby to full grown animal. And yet such laws of change 
+are themselves liable to change. For example, species flourish and 
+decay; civilizations rise and fall; heavenly bodies gradually form, and 
+pass through sequences of stages. 
+
+
+2. MARGARET MEAD, 1970. 
+
+Today, suddenly, because all the peoples of the world are part 
+of one electronically based, intercommunicating network, young 
+people everywhere share a kind of experience that none of the elders 
+
+
+78 'TimeForms 
+
+
+ever have had or will have. Conversely, the older generation will 
+never see repeated in the lives of young people their own 
+unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This 
+break between the generations is wholly new: it is planetary and 
+universal. 
+
+
+3. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, 1970. 
+
+Is the human an accidental theatergoer who happened in the 
+play of life —to like it or not—or does humanity perform an 
+essential function in Universe. We find the latter to be true.. .In 
+1951 I published my conclusion that man is the antientropy of 
+Universe. Norbert Weiner published the same statement at the same 
+time. 
+
+
+4. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, 1970. 
+
+Within decades we will know whether man is going to be a 
+physical success around earth, able to function in ever greater 
+patterns of local universe or whether he is going to frustrate his own 
+success with his negatively conditioned reflexes of yesterday and will 
+bring about his own extinction around planet earth. My intuitions 
+foresee his success despite his negative inertias. This means things are 
+going to move fast. 
+
+
+5. THE BEATLES — IN ABBEY ROAD. 
+‘And in the end 
+the love you take 
+is equal to the love 
+you make.” 
+
+
+Rap II 
+Wouldn’t it be a groove if we could sit back now and breathe a 
+satisfied sigh of relief now that the sixties are over, and say, well, we 
+
+
+made it through. It certainly was a freaky 10 years. Computers, acid, 
+rock. Whew. 
+
+
+Of course, we can’t. Now world ecology has to be done, or no 
+
+
+TimeEForms 79 
+
+
+more man. Tempting as it might be to rest a while, we know we 
+either put the planet together in a new way or we’re finished. Done. 
+
+
+There seem to be a number of approaches. 
+
+
+1. SOME SAY: 
+
+We’d better hurry up and industrialize the “‘developing” nations 
+or they’ll gang up and wipe us out. Spread the wealth. Sure, 
+capitalism isn’t a perfect system, but what is. Industrialization would 
+at least feed ’em and clothe ’em, right? 
+
+
+2. OTHERS SAY: 
+
+Listen, that capitalist rap is thirty years dead, man. Haven’t you 
+heard about electronics and the second industrial revolution. We 
+don’t process matter (energy) anymore — we process information. 
+People don’t have to work, pulling levers any more. Any repetitive 
+process can be programmed, electronically. Automated, man. 
+
+
+3. OTHERS: 
+
+What are you guys talking about. Don’t you realize that we’re in 
+the mess we’re in because nobody paid any attention to the systems 
+those automated processes are part of, so now we have a polluted 
+planet. From now on, we have to figure how automation relates to 
+the ecosystem. Haven’t you ever heard of feedback. You know, 
+where the “effect” loops back to influence the “‘cause”. From now 
+on, we either plan for how our machines feed back on our life styles, 
+or, like Leary said, all the metal back underground. I’m not for 
+electronic laissez-faire either, man. 
+
+
+4. STILL OTHERS: 
+
+I find it hard to get into your progress metaphors. They all seem 
+to ignore the terrible pain we’re all in. | mean, how can you dream of 
+rosy futures while Vietnam is tearing the skins off hundreds of 
+thousands of young guys like us, while the pigs are practicing 
+genocide on the panthers, while the trial is screaming that justice is 
+only for the silent majority. Not to mention what they’re doing to 
+us. 
+
+
+80 TrmeForms 
+
+
+My scene is to let it bleed. 1 don’t wanna fix it. It’s broke, man. 
+We need a new one. So, some of us got our shit together, built a 
+dome out in New Mexico, and we live close to the land. No more 
+mine-yours games, no more technology. Just getting into each other, 
+man, finding that quiet still center within ourselves. 
+
+
+5. OTHERS STILL: 
+
+Jesus. You sit out there in the woods all peaceful and groovy 
+but somebody else has to keep them off’ your back. You think 
+they’re gonna leave you alone, man, with your “sexual communism” 
+and your dope and your ‘‘deprived”’ children. You think you can just 
+concentrate on what’s going on inside your head, and make believe 
+you don’t hear the whole civilization crashing into ruins all around 
+you. Wake up, man. They’re killing your brothers and your sisters 
+right now, and you're next. 
+
+
+Rap III 
+
+
+1. FIRST OBSERVER: 
+
+Obviously, they’re all correct. The electronic industry is 
+probably more aware than they are that national boundaries are 
+obsolete. The synchronous satellites are only the top of the iceberg. 
+Trans-national conglomerates became necessary as soon as data banks 
+in the computers could handle the complexity of a thousand branch 
+offices. And before that, radio, telephone, jets, and television went 
+beyond national boundaries. 
+
+
+The problem is not whether to spread the wealth, but how. 
+Right now, we’ve got three political ecosystems; — us, the Russians, 
+and the Chinese — worrying about how to get the Africans and the 
+rest of the “‘little” countries on their side, like South America, or 
+India, or the Middle East. To borrow a phrase from the kids, the 
+concept “nation” is not where it’s at. The problem is, how do we get 
+beyond ideologies and belief systems which define spreading the 
+wealth as imperialism, Communism, Maoism, what have you. 
+Personally, I think the kids are gonna do it. I mean, kids all over the 
+
+
+TimEForms 81 
+
+
+planet are more like each other than they are national citizens, and I 
+give them a lot of credit. They’re gonna do it. I’m confident. 
+
+
+2. SECOND OBSERVER: 
+
+Sure, sure, the kids are a new post-industrial culture, beyond 
+ideology and all that. Sure they live in an electronic ecosphere 
+communicating planetary consciousness with each other like puppies 
+at the teat. They don’t have to work because the computers will do it 
+all. Don’t you see, though, that that is precisely the problem. They 
+have to come up with a new “post cultural’’ culture so they’ll be able 
+to live in their electronic ecosphere, but there’s absolutely no 
+precedent for coming up with a new planet-wide post-electronic 
+culture. So how, to borrow your phrase, are they gonna do it. Even 
+the universe didn’t do it ex nibilo. 
+
+
+3. THIRD OBSERVER: 
+
+They won’t have to. Didn’t you hear ’em talking about 
+cybernation and systems theory. Our minds boggle at the thought 
+that each and every last unintended consequence of every little flea 
+bitten automated factory product will have to be reckoned into the 
+bargain, but, fer chrissakes, that’s what computers are, don’tcha see, 
+the screw driver that comes with the general systems theory manual. 
+Instead of thinking about the hardware all the time, try to realize 
+that the kids are designing the software. What do you think rock and 
+roll is. What about those costumes. Aren’t their communes attempts 
+to get past the wreckage of the nuclear family, that casualty of 
+industrialism? Their whole generation seems marvellously capable of 
+responding to our technosphere with an ecosphere of their own. 
+Don’t you think the kids raised on computers and television, the kids 
+now in grammar school, are going to be sufficiently flexible to take 
+the steps they’ll have to take. I think, just as the industrial generation 
+came up with liberalism, and the computer generation came up with 
+acidoxy, well, in the same way, the current generatibn is gonna come 
+up with a hip version of cybernetics. They’ve had their McLuhan to 
+cut their eye teeth on, so their politics is McLuhanesque. Look at 
+Abbie Hoffman. Uses the media like a stick ball bat. He knows about 
+feedback, let me tell you. And his kids are not gonna take any 
+
+
+82 TimeEForMs 
+
+
+nonsense from trans-national conglomerates or the Soviets or the 
+Maoists. They’re gonna use the planet’s media like Tom Paine used 
+pamphlets. I think technology has met its match in the next 
+generation. They’re gonna make it serve them, not serve it, because 
+they’re not content to be the software for a hardware they can’t 
+control. 
+
+
+Don’t tell me about no precedents. They’ve got plenty, and 
+then some. 
+
+
+4. FOURTH OBSERVER: 
+
+You're all missing the point, although I agree with what’s been 
+said. Using your own cybernetic metaphors, you could arrive at a 
+more general formulation than you have, instead of getting stuck on 
+the particulars, as I think you have. Look. Even Marx recognized that 
+a given technology (or means of production, if you insist) calls forth a 
+given ideology (or culture, with your permission). So, we design an 
+electronic technology and they obligingly come up with hip 
+cybernetics. The point is, can they come up with a new culture 
+before a new hardware system elicits it. In other words, if a new 
+consciousness is always a response to a new technology, how do we 
+know that the technologies now on our drawing boards — say, 
+Tri-d —are going to elicit a brand of culture that will get us 
+by — that is, insure species survival. The problem, it seems to me, Is 
+much more serious than you guys seem to have seen. 
+
+
+Put it this way. What if man is a feedback loop for planetary 
+evolution, that is, man’s role is to monitor life on the planet. If so, he 
+may be able to adjust a few things here and there, turn a few dials so 
+the boilers don’t blow up, so to speak. But that doesn’t give us any 
+guarantee that he can design a better planet, or a better man, for that 
+matter. 
+
+
+I’m asking whether the feedback theory of conciousness 
+provides any hope at all. If it’s an after-the-fact mechanism, | don’t 
+think it offers us any hope at all. More specifically, if you think all 
+those kids out in those communes are doing anything more than 
+
+
+TimEForms 83 
+
+
+becoming conscious of their condition after they’re in it, I’d like to 
+be told about it. 
+
+
+5. FIFTH OBSERVER: 
+
+You don’t understand feedback, or some other other things I’m 
+gonna tell you. Let me start with an example. You know what 
+happens after a forest fire. The forest goes into a condition of 
+positive feed, proliferates like mad, changes its rate of growth, not 
+because it wants to, as the teleologists would have us believe, but 
+because the surrounding systems it interfaces with no longer 
+maintain it through their feedback on it. Its growth becomes 
+unchecked for a while, like a computer programmed to scan without 
+any limits put on it. It becomes a temporary runaway, you might 
+
+
+say. 
+
+
+Now, very similar processes occur in human populations. You 
+can see it in demographic systems, and even more generally, you can 
+see it in norm systems, that is, in whole cultures. You can even see it 
+in psychological terms, when kids “blow their minds” with some 
+chemical or other, which removes the nice neat negative feedbacks 
+imposed on them by their surrounding ecosystems, let’s say, families 
+and/or schools. 
+
+
+Similarly, when a new technology is introduced, you don’t just 
+get a response to it — you temporarily release the culture from its 
+priorly programmed equilibrium with its peer cultures so that, for a 
+while, its inhabitants are freed up to grow wild for a time, before a 
+new set of negative feedbacks lock in. 
+
+
+I see it as a kind of breathing, a kind of rhythm characteristic of 
+any system. Call it cybernetic music, if you want. So, if I’m right, 
+what this means is that the whole electronic revolution did not just 
+spawn a bunch of hairy rock and roll respondents, although it 
+certainly did that. But not just that. It cut loose a generation of kids 
+from a set of obsolete (i.c., no longer enough) norms that were 
+locking them in, asking them to live in the post-industrial ecosphere 
+with feedback loops still hooked into the old Newtonian mechanics. 
+
+
+84 TimeForms 
+
+
+The point is, when electricity turned ‘em on (by turning 
+mechanical feedback off), they proliferated, not just like a forest, 
+with more of the same kind of trees, but came up with something 
+new, that wasn’t there before. That’s how this planetary conscious- 
+ness came about. But, beyond that, the point is that feedback, both 
+positive and negative, does not simply maintain systems in equili- 
+brium. Somehow it combines to create things that weren’t there 
+before. Ex nibilo. Whether they’re new forms of consciousness on a 
+given planet, or new planets in a given galaxy, human consciousness 
+is not unique in creating, not just responding: The whole universe 
+seems to do it. And I think the kids are catching on to that fact. 
+
+
+One final illustration. One afternoon, we were sitting around in 
+the office, and somebody asked whether I thought the universe was 
+running down, you know, the entropy form of the second law, and if 
+it was, how did I account for evolution. And did we think the 
+universe was running down because our society was, or was our 
+society coming apart because the universe was. 
+
+
+So I trotted out my Fuller memory and tried to explain that 
+there seemed to be two aspects of Universe that were not 
+customarily seen together, that. just as there is radiant, or dissocia- 
+tive, energy, so also is there emergent, or associative, power, which 
+Fuller calls synergy. So that things don’t just come apart, they also 
+come together. In other words, it’s a mistake to talk about receding 
+galaxies without also talking about gravitation, just as it’s a mistake 
+to talk about cultural disintegration without also talking about new 
+forms of cultural (or post-cultural) integration. 
+
+
+Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there seem to be 
+nice neat forces at work in the universe which we can ride like surfers 
+so we have nothing to worry about. That’s sort of like saying isn’t it 
+nice our legs just reach the ground. I see nothing in these 
+generalizations to guarantee that man the species has to make it. 
+Maybe we’re dinosaurs and maybe there’s a new environment 
+growing that we can’t live in. 
+
+
+TrmeForms 85 
+
+
+But I don’t think so. I think what’s happening is that we’re 
+gradually beginning to use more and more of those neurons the 
+shrinks are always telling us we're only using 5% of, that we’re giving 
+ourselves challenges now that force us to become the creators, rather 
+than the creatures, of evolution. It may be, and I think it is, that the 
+time has come for us to think of “consciousness” and “‘culture’’ as 
+only 2 of a larger set of parameters, and that they’re not particularly 
+cordial ones at that, locked as they always have been, till now, in a 
+series of feedback loops we don’t particularly care for anymore. And 
+the guys who say there are no ways out haven’t got a shred more 
+evidence than the guys who say there are. 
+
+
+I dunno. Wasn’t it James who said there are forms of 
+consciousness as different from what we call normal waking 
+consciousness as that is from sleep. Seems like there oughta be. I’d 
+hate to think we’re the most advanced life forms in the universe. 
+
+
+Metarap I 
+Critias: How is the century proceeding? 
+
+
+Timaios: Not bad. Not bad at all. Mathematicians recovered quickly 
+when Godel showed them no postulate system can remain 
+perfectly consistent if carried far enough. Reimann took them 
+beyond Euclidean space. Einstein of course opened the way for 
+new theories of time, but they’re still a little wary. It’s hard for 
+them to think without simultaneity — makes them feel the 
+universe isn’t there, you know. Still, they’ve developed the 
+calculus. Made some moon shots already. 
+
+
+Critias: That’s promising. How about their music? 
+
+
+Timaios: Same there. Looks good. They went atonal a while ago. 
+The young have a form they call rock which unites poetry, 
+folklore, protest, etc. Electronic sounds are strangely beautiful, 
+in their primitive way. Some of the abstract ballet is magnifi- 
+cent too. 
+
+
+86 ‘TimEForMS 
+
+
+Critias: Art? 
+Timaios: Earthworks. Holograms. Light. Fine. Very fine. 
+Critias: Physics? 
+
+
+Timaios: Wonderful. They’re just crossing the bridge between 
+sub-atomic “‘particles” and sub-nuclear fields. Fellow named 
+Gellmann looks very promising, and another named Feinberg 
+may just have a way for them to generalize Einstein. A few of 
+them are trying to detect gravity waves. Shouldn’t be long 
+before they master them. Also, some pretty interesting things 
+happening with lasers, communications hardware, and the like. 
+More interesting, some are beginning to wonder why some life 
+forms (populations of bacteria, for example) seem to “‘obey the 
+same laws’’, as they say, that populations of gas molecules do. 
+Shouldn’t be long before they find that the rate of negentropy 
+is very slow at the gas level, and gets faster as you go up the 
+evolutionary scale. 
+
+
+Critias: What about war technology. Are they still constructing 
+those deadly systems? 
+
+
+Timaios: Yes, but the young seem to be withdrawing from all that. 
+Culture lag. There are still a large number of “neutral” 
+technicians employed in war industries but I think it’ll phase 
+itself out as the young mature. 
+
+
+Critias: How about their therapists. How far have they gotten? 
+
+
+Timaios: That’s a bit more complex. Some overlap with the social 
+scientists, but they’re all so stuck in their craft unions. The 
+medieval thing. Psychiatrists either clung to biochemistry or 
+psychoanalysis for a while. Then they found groups, then 
+families, etc. Some of them are going quite far, actually. 
+Systems approaches, communication contexts, ecology. Begin- 
+ning to see’ that any level below can be programmed by the next 
+
+
+TimEForms 87 
+
+
+level up. Like the physicists. Too bad they don’t talk to each 
+other very often. Social Psychiatry looks good, if they can 
+figure out a way around the so-called community mental health 
+centers, which got coopted by all that money. But the 
+communities themselves are forcing an evolution. The Blacks 
+and the Puerto Ricans. Magnificent people. Great dignity. 
+
+
+Critias: An old story. The people grow beyond their chains. Tell 
+me — is there joy? 
+
+
+Timaios: Among the youth. They are the only ones. They found 
+certain chemicals, much like the Hindi used to use, and released 
+themselves from the self-prisons which mirrored their machines. 
+It wasn’t long before they found that transcendence could be 
+facilitated if one had enough friends of like mind. At first, they 
+used them mainly as aphrodisiacs, but they soon found the 
+experience of awe was a door to higher realms. Very hard for 
+them to do, since their whole culture was going the other way, 
+so to speak. But they are doing it. They rear their children 
+differently, they revere each other, stare gently into each 
+other’s eyes for long periods. What is most promising is that 
+they now experience time dilation, in which, as you know, 
+minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days, and days seem 
+like weeks. During such experiences, when the veils of illusion 
+fall from their eyes, they probe new depths, ascend new heights, 
+widen their vistas, but most important, they do so together. 
+Hence, they begin to build the foundations for the next era. 
+
+
+Critias: What do you think is next for them? 
+
+
+Timaios: As I said, the young are now aware of time dilation. It will 
+not be long before they find ways to guide the rates of any 
+process, be it space flight, planetary ecology, cultural inte- 
+gration, psychological maturation, or anything else they desire. 
+
+
+Critias: Have they begun temporal design? 
+
+
+88 TrmeForMSs 
+
+
+Timaios: Not yet. But, as I say, they’re beginning to rear their young 
+differently, as citizens of the planet who.cannot bear to see any 
+starve while they have food, any killed while they have life, any 
+lonely while they have mates. They do not tolerate wealth while 
+any need, nor do they honor progress here at the expense of 
+regress there. The most sensitive among them are accustoming 
+themselves to living in continuous change, and are beginning to 
+thrive on it. 
+
+
+Soon, they will find that even change changes, and will 
+have to accustom themselves to that process as well, whether it 
+changes slowly or rapidly. 
+
+
+It is difficult, Critias, for me to distinguish my hopes for 
+them from my estimates of their future. They seem to know 
+that joy is the emotion which accompanies transcendence, but 
+they seem reluctant to swim in the oceans of time even while 
+they begin to enter endless space. 
+
+
+Critias: How old are they? 
+Timaios: About a million years, in their present form. 
+
+
+Critias: And you want to hurry them. Let them cling like puppies.to 
+the breasts of their cultures. They will be gone soon enough. 
+
+
+TimeForms 89 
+
+
+DRUGS AS CHRONETIC AGENTS 
+
+
+INTRODUCTION 
+
+In previous chapters we have reported data derived from 
+participant observation of the various scenes in which young people 
+use the drugs of their choice in the special ways they have chosen. 
+For the most part, the observations were carried out with one or 
+another drug the focus of our investigation. For example, we 
+examined the heroin scene and reported on it to the exclusion of the 
+other drugs concurrently used by the heroin users. Similarly our 
+investigation of so-called “glue sniffers” was conducted and reported 
+separately. The same is true of our reports of the psychedelic scene. 
+
+
+Our reasons for doing so were partly historical, since the 
+heydays of various drugs were at different times, and partly practical, 
+i.e., one cannot discuss everything at once. But the principal reason 
+for the separateness of our studies was a theoretical one, in that each 
+drug study was conducted as an empirical test of a set of hypotheses 
+derived from a larger theoretical interest. We have for some time now 
+been engaged in the study of time processes, i.e., how time and its 
+mysteries are understood in the various disciplines, ranging from 
+astrophysics to anthropology. Our attempt has been to derive a set of 
+generalizations descriptive of time processes in ANY discipline, in 
+other words, the study of time itself, not simply the time of the 
+physicist or the psychologist. We call this study ‘““CHRONETICS”, 
+and define its scope as the study of temporal processes in their own 
+right. We seek, in short, to determine whether there are general laws 
+which all time processes obey, and if so to determine what they are. 
+
+
+The first problem we confront in such an effort is one with 
+which all investigators are confronted, no matter what their field, 
+namely, to what extent is our ordinary experience a bias which 
+
+
+90 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+blinds us. In other fields, say, geology, one may experiment with the 
+elements of one’s concern, ¢.g., rocks, rivers, rain, etc. But how does 
+one experiment with time? How do we know whether the assump- 
+tion is correct that time is an invariant, which ‘“‘flows evenly”, to use 
+a popular expression, or whether the assumption of invariance blinds 
+us. to possible variations in temporality. It is tempting to regard 
+recent evidence from physics as confirming the view that time varies 
+considerably at subnuclear levels of observation, and hence that time 
+may also vary elsewhere. But this courts the danger of going beyond 
+the limits of the data. 
+
+
+Thus we were struck very early in our investigations by the 
+almost total unanimity of our research subjects’ reports that their 
+drug experiences altered their experience of time. A similar unani- 
+mity is found in pharmacological, psychological, and phenomeno- 
+logical reports, further confirming our subjects views. In the 
+remainder of this chapter we shall attempt to summarize our 
+previous findings concerning which drugs change the experience of 
+time in which ways, and to justify our tentative conclusion that 
+drugs are taken by those who take them (indeed, also by those who 
+prescribe them) principally for that reason, namely, to alter the rate 
+of experience. 
+
+
+In addition to this psychological effect, however, we shall 
+endeavor to show that the temporal aspects of certain social 
+processes are also involved, so that when we refer to drugs as 
+chronetic agents we are not restricting ourselves to exclusively 
+subjective or psychological parameters but explicitly to those aspects 
+of experience with which the sociologist is rightly concerned, which 
+we might call sociological architecture. 
+
+
+In this sense, notwithstanding the summary nature of this 
+paper, the investigations here reported must be regarded as prelimi- 
+nary, for it is a long way from demonstrating that our experience of 
+time may vary under certain conditions to establishing that there are 
+
+
+TimeForms 91 
+
+
+laws of time variation whose discernment the chroneticist properly 
+pursues across the ranges of many disciplines. 
+
+
+We invoke as our measuring instrument the cybernetic notion 
+that human beings. in their subjectivity as well as in their sociation 
+may be heuristically regarded as information processing systems, 
+characterized initially (and minimally) as receivers, programmers, and 
+broadcasters. That is, we perceive, think, and communicate. And of 
+course, more. Much more. How do drugs alter these processes? 
+
+
+CHRONETIC PHENOMENOLOGY 
+
+There are three classes of drugs with which we are concerned, 
+which in the street language of our subjects are called “downs”, 
+“ups”, and “‘trips”’, referring in the first case to narcotics, sedatives, 
+barbituates, and alcohol, i.e., CNS depressants. Trips include mari- 
+juana, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, psilosin, etc., i.e., psychedelics, to 
+employ Osmond’s term. As every neurologist knows, heroin, mor- 
+phine, methadone, ez.al., have the property of constricting the pupils 
+of the eye, which the street talk calls being “‘pinned”’. Of course this 
+means that less light is entering the retinal chamber and indicates 
+that the amount of information the subject tolerates is reduced in 
+proportion to dosage. The “input” function to the higher cortical 
+centers is sharply reduced by narcotics, not only visually, but across 
+thé entire sensorium. 
+
+
+Subjects report that the heroin high is like the astronauts 
+perspective in that time changes in the environment are seen as from 
+a great height, so that the net effect is an experience in which things 
+seem to go very slowly, if at all. At high dosages, “time seems to 
+stand still”, so that the euphoric experience of timelessness seems 
+paradoxically to last forever. This helps to understand why the 
+heroin experience is so cherished by those who cherish it. Even 
+though, to the outside observer it seems to last for such a “short” 
+time, to the serious heroin user, time seems to have stopped, and his 
+joy is eternal. Our subjects report it is exactly this temporary 
+eternity they seek. So do the makers of the 7,000 year old Sumerian 
+tablets which instruct the religious novice in its preparation. 
+
+
+92 'TrImEForRMS 
+
+
+Ups, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of 
+subjective reports associated with them. One subject described his 
+experience of ‘‘meth”’ (speed) as follows: 
+
+
+Hey, man, dig it, here’s how it feels. . . .Do you like 
+to drive fast in your car, man. Imagine you have this racing 
+car, see, with no windshield, see, and, they say you can 
+have NYC all to yourself with all the other cars gone. So 
+you go speeding around corners at 90 and open up to 200 
+miles an hour along Park Avenue, man, whizzing, and 
+spinning around the whole city all to yourself. You can do 
+anything as you want, an’ you can go as fast as you want 
+to go. Dig it man, imagine all that power just walking, 
+man, or screwing. Wow. 
+
+
+Clinicians will be sensitive to the omnipotent undertones in our 
+subject’s report, to the grand ideas of power and exhilaration. They 
+will not be unfamiliar with the fact that ‘coming down” or 
+“crashing” from ‘‘speed” (meth) is severely depressing, often to the 
+point of persecutory ideation and feeling characteristic of the 
+paranoid experience. 
+
+
+Note, however, in our subject’s report that it is the rate of his 
+experience he centrally cherishes. So much is this the case that he 
+will often use too much, then resort to barbituates to slow down, in 
+what soon becomes a cycle of speeding, slowing, then speeding again, 
+for days, sometimes for weeks at a time, with little thought of food, 
+sleep, or sociation. The fact that speed is alleged to confer long 
+periods of sexual potency bordering on Priapism is considered to far 
+outweigh the fact that it renders the serious user anorgastic. It is as-if 
+one were trying to move faster than time itself, squeezing in more 
+than mere clock time permits. 
+
+
+Speed “freaks”? are notorious broadcasters, who will talk 
+without interruption for 4 or 5 hours, at a very fast clip, usually to 
+the considerable consternation of their ‘‘straight’” friends. They 
+believe they understand things superbly well and deeply for the first 
+
+
+TimeForms 93 
+
+
+time and are very eager to share this new-found wisdom with anyone 
+who will listen for as long as they will listen. This seems to be due to 
+the fact that the CNS is stimulated, not at the perceptual-sensory 
+level, but at the higher cortical levels, so that sensory information is 
+processed faster. It is exactly this rapid illumination speed freaks 
+report they want. 
+
+
+‘Heads’ or adepts of the psychedelic experience well know that 
+trips seem to last far longer than clock time measures. Even a half a 
+marijuana cigarette will permit the smoker to feel that a three minute 
+musical selection has the temporal characteristics of a symphony and 
+the four hour high correspondingly feels like 8 or 10 hours. Acid 
+(LSD) a far more potent drug, is almost impossible to describe to 
+those who have not experienced it. Like sex, talking about it doesn’t 
+quite convey the qualities of the experience. For, in additon to its 
+ability to vastly expand the range of sensory delights, LSD induces 
+the most complex chronetic patterns yet known to man, such that 
+serious users regularly report variations in the variations of the time 
+experience. Moments of eternal stillness alternate with extremely 
+rapid pulsations and rhythms: feelings of rest, velocity, acceleration, 
+and changes in acceleration are common, and reports of even more 
+subtle and complex changes in time experience are common. That 
+this experience is deliberately sought is indicated in McCluhan’s 
+aphorism that the computer is the LSD of the business world (just 
+as) LSD is the computer of the counter culture. 
+
+
+What computers and acid have in common is the processing of 
+information at extremely high speeds. Computers operate in nanosec- 
+onds. No one knows how /ow LSD reduces synaptic thresholds, nor, 
+consequently, how high it increases the rate of neural firing. What is 
+well known, by heads at least, is that, in addition to its ability to 
+open wide the “doors of perception”, acid is also well named, for in 
+the cybernetic analogy what seems to happen is that the amount of 
+data is increased while the programs for its conceptual management 
+are simultaneously dissolved. It feels like a fuse has blown, so that 
+too much current is flowing. (Hence, the expression “mind-blow- 
+ing”’.) 
+
+
+94 TimeForMs 
+
+
+It is exactly this experience of sensory overload, de-program- 
+ming, and re-programming, that heads seck. Whether the insights and 
+experiences had with this powerful substance are “valid” or 
+“illusory” is a question for more research than present federal laws 
+currently permit. Suffice it to note that the extremely rapid 
+chronetic changes LSD includes are cherished by those who favor 
+LSD, as well as the feeling that a 12 hour experience of this sort is 
+regularly compared to a week or a month of continuous ecstasy. In 
+this context, one is not surprised to find recent opinion in 
+theological literature holding that the sacred mushroom (amanita 
+muscaria) was the agent inducing the mystical experiences that led 
+directly to the formulation of the major world religions. 
+
+
+CHRONETIC SOCIOLOGY 
+
+If we focus now upon the population who favor the drugs 
+discussed above, not simply upon the subjective experiences of their 
+individual members, a chronetic pattern of another sort emerges. 
+Brevity prevents an extended discussion of the ‘‘measuring instru- 
+ment’’ we employ as a sociological tool. Suffice it to say that the rate 
+of social change is increasingly adopted as a criterion in the social 
+sciences, in our era of rapid social change. If we ask ‘“‘what is the 
+relation between our three classes of drugs and the rates of social 
+change experienced by differing classes in America,” a clear pattern 
+becomes visible. 
+
+
+Thus, until very recently, narcotics use was principally the 
+predilection of the lower class, whose rate of change was widely 
+acknowledged to be the slowest in the fastest emerging society in the 
+world. This experience, which we have elsewhere termed ‘‘anachron- 
+istic’, is severely “painful” to those who experience it, since it is not 
+only an experience of extreme alienation, but of increasing aliena- 
+tion, whose rate of increase is increasing. Under such circumstances, 
+heroin might be said to be the medication of choice, since it is par 
+excellance the pain killer. It is a situation in which one might turn 
+around Marx’s classic phrase that religion is the opiate of the people. 
+
+
+TimeForms 95 
+
+
+Unfortunately, as the rate of alienation increases in the middle class, 
+we find an increase in the incidence of narcotics there as well. This is 
+becoming more widely known every day. 
+
+
+The upper lower and the lower middle classes are not, as a 
+group, experiencing a rate of social change identical to the lowest 
+class. In fact, it seems that we have an explanation for the popularity 
+of “ups’’ in this population when we note that their wish to “catch 
+up” with the bourgeoisie who are “moving up” faster than they is 
+temporarily granted by a class of drugs whose property is to confer 
+the illusion of acceleration. Note also that the illusions of ‘‘progress”’ 
+and “getting ahead” are beliefs entertained by this group far more 
+actively than the lowest class, who despair, or the upper middle class, 
+who pride themselves on “having arrived”. The “violence” often 
+attributed to the “coarse, gruff, working culture” is not untouched 
+by speed’s illusion of omnipotence, nor by its stimulation and 
+feelings of social persecution. They “go”’ together, as it were. 
+
+
+The most rapid rate of change in our society is experienced by 
+those who, like the computer, must process vast amounts of 
+information in a very little time, i.e., the most highly educated, those 
+whose participation in the cybernetic revolution of our times is 
+deepest. Typically, the children of upper middle class parents are 
+those most barraged with novelty in our society, since they 
+paradoxically have the leisure time in which to suffer from 
+information overload. The Berkeley rebels were born the year mass 
+TV was born, and study after study reveals they spent more time in 
+front of their TV sets than they did before parents and teachers 
+combined. Not to mention books, magazines and films. Or the threat 
+of nuclear holocaust. Or planetwide pollution. Confronted with the 
+massive responsibilities to “‘solve’’ these massive crises, knowing that 
+species Man will not long survive unless be quickly devises ways and 
+means to turn away from a chemical which confers the ability to 
+process huge amounts of information in a very short time. For theirs 
+is the first generation for whom the experience of accelerating social 
+change is the norm, and they know they have no choice but to thrive 
+on it. Imagine their dismay when they are simultaneously com- 
+
+
+96 TrmEForMS 
+
+
+manded to thrive on change and do nothing to bring it about. Their 
+patience with the slow moving institutions which thus double bind 
+them is therefore somewhat astonishing. 
+
+
+Let us hope it doesn’t wear too thin. For they are, literally, our 
+future. It is for them that we must attempt to discern the laws of 
+time and change, for without knowledge of these laws, we seem, as a 
+species, about to perish. With such laws, hopefully, the next 
+
+
+generation might have a chance to become chronetic agents of an 
+entirely new kind. 
+
+
+TimEFormMs 97 
+
+
+FREQUENCY AND FORM 
+
+
+What I am doing with my life is building a set of generalizations 
+comprehending how time works. I call thé comprehension of the 
+time laws of any process ‘‘chronetics”’. 
+
+
+I’ve been working at it a “long” time and have done it in some 
+strange places. Like, a dissertation on Plato’s theory of time, which 
+started in 58 but didn’t come till ’63. Like, in ’65 getting a 
+videotape system installed in a family therapy agency so that families 
+and therapists could play back their sessions during their sessions. 
+Like getting headaches trying to transform the laws of general 
+relativity into classroom sociology since 1953, though I hate the 
+math. Like trying to figure out acid time expansion during acid time 
+expansion. Etc. 
+
+
+This rap is about the chronetics of software, in other words, 
+some thoughts on the time forms of current communication events. 
+
+
+As everybody knows, Universe is not a very large expanding 
+balloon with galactic light bulbs interspersed “‘at” varying distances. 
+Einstein told us Universe is not a simultaneous assembly of things. 
+Universe isn’t there — in fact, man’s invention of the concept reveals 
+his terror crouching behind a facade of omniscience. Currently, our 
+mythos is that Universe is “really” atoms (i.e., waves of energy 
+spiralling at light velocity) arrayed hierarchically (i.e., a few is a gas, a 
+lot is a planet, a very lot a galaxy, etc.). Whitehead said the only 
+philosophical mistake. you could make (hence the error of every 
+philosophical mistake) was thinking you could simply locate any- 
+thing anywhere. This “fallacy of simple location” is the intellectual 
+form of man’s wish to evade the terror which would flood him were 
+he to admit the Heraclitus vision that all is flux. The emotional form 
+
+
+98 TImMEFORMS 
+
+
+of this saving illusion is hubris — pride — the myth of individual 
+autonomy, the ‘pursuit of loneliness”. Freud once wrote that the 
+human central nervous system works like the osmosis process of the 
+cell wall, whose main function is to keep some fluids in but most 
+fluids out. Fuller suggests the inside is the inside of the outside — the 
+outside the outside of the inside. Laing ponders why some people 
+who spit in a glass of water can’t — can’t drink it. Others can. Recent 
+experiments by Italian physicists, who ran electrons going “‘one way” 
+against positrons going “the other”, both “at’’ the speed of light, lead 
+them. to believe there’s another whole realm ‘‘underneath” quantum 
+atomics which is continuous, i.e., not ““composed” of quanta, but of 
+processes. 
+
+
+So in my view, there is no Universe anywhere, “at” any instant, 
+for there are no instants. Better — “‘there”’ isn’t. Time is. What seems 
+to be happening is a myriad of energy rates dyssynchronously 
+modulating. Nobody seems to know why there are different rates, or 
+how they change. Recent speculations include a realm on the “other 
+side” of the light velocity barrier wherein “particles” only go faster 
+than light, and if they slowed down to light velocity would annihilate 
+as in E=mc? (F einberg). Others, at the Princeton Center where 
+Einstein thought, wonder if there isn’t a realm under the atoms 
+where time ‘‘goes the other way, or not at all.” 
+
+
+What I’m trying to suggest, in mosaic, is a Universe of varying 
+frequencies, in which occasional synchronicities are called communi 
+cation. 
+
+
+Now, some frequencies, after million year evolutionary periods 
+of interacting dyssynchronously, have come into a harmony which 
+we call sensation. Air waves and ear vibrations in synch result in our 
+experience of sound. Light velocities in harmony with retinal 
+photochemistry result in vision. Rates of neural transmission, when 
+exceeded or unreached, do not result in experience since there are 
+limits within and only within which nerves fire. Overload or 
+underload, outside certain limits, result in nothing. No experiences. 
+No communication. 
+
+
+TimeForms 99 
+
+
+Hence, Fuller says, human “sensory equipment can tune 
+directly with but one millionth of the thus far discovered physical 
+Universe events. Awareness of all the rest of the millionfold greater 
+than human sense reality can only be relayed to human ken through 
+instruments devised by a handful of thought employing individuals 
+anticipating thoughtfully the looming needs of others.”’ 
+
+
+This is probably an overestimate. There is no reason to believe 
+that the tiny region of human synchronicity with Universe frequen- 
+cies which is our band of experience is as much as a millionth, 
+because it well may be that the range of frequencies goes from — © 
+to + ce, I have no quarrel with Bucky’s adorable naturalism, but the 
+range of options for synchronicity may be vaster than he has said. So 
+far. 
+
+
+Even if the spectrum is mot that large, it serves as a perspective 
+on which to map the tasks of software design. Like Huxley’s remark 
+that any good plumber could have done better than god-evolution 
+with the human appendix, it seems to be the case that the human 
+sensory channels are fairly crummy samplers of the range of universe 
+frequencies. Hence, any software system which sets the outer limits 
+of its responsibility as fostering the synchronicity of present human 
+wavelengths could be guilty of a reactionary nostalgia. Filling in the 
+gaps of the sensory range now is a tactic worthy of admiration, but it 
+shouldn’t be confused with the grand strategy which, minimally, in 
+my opinion, must include not only the design-expansion of the realm 
+of human experience, but the design expansion of the range of 
+synchronicities in our local region of universe. Man may be 
+negentropy, but there’s more to Universe negentropy than man. How 
+to tune in on that is the larger task. To say nothing of feedback. 
+
+
+It will be objected — “‘this is visionary — idealistic — there are 
+many more pressing urgencies presently at hand.” To which a good 
+reply might be “if you’re unaware of the spectrum you’re working 
+in, you're working with unnecessary blinders.” 
+
+
+100 TrmeEForMS 
+
+
+To put the matter differently — the larger the generalization, 
+the more significance (meaning, value, importance) the event. That’s 
+why we’re interested in Cosmology. That’s why we fly space ships. 
+That’s why we seek Atman, Buddha, Satori, enlightenment, trip. 
+
+
+Software, therefore, results whenever dyssynchronous frequen- 
+cies are mediated, i.e., related in some form of temporal harmony. It 
+is not very far from the Platonic vision that the music of the 
+planetary spheres is in proportion to the ratio of string lengths ona 
+lute, to the view which reveals that the fundamental units of 
+software are the chords and rhythms of perception. It is utterly banal 
+to hold that the “bits of digital information” metaphor comes 
+anywhere near the kind of planetary orchestration man is beginning 
+to compose. This vision can be ecologized by the recognition that 
+software results not simply from passing items of perception around 
+among human sensors, but whenever and however Universe frequen- 
+cies are proportioned. Man is not the only Universe function 
+producing software. It is an entirely common even in Universe, and 
+may in fact turn out to be its fundamental process, i.e., how it 
+basically forms, so that, to do it is to be like the Druids at 
+Stonehenge dancing to the rhythms of the cosmos. Groovin’, as it 
+were. 
+
+
+But there’s more. Recent evidence suggests that brain waves can 
+very easily come under deliberate control, that alpha highs can be 
+turned on at will, that autonomic nervous system-endrocrine 
+interactions can be accelerated-decelerated consciously, that, in 
+short, electronic yoga is now an increasingly popular research sport. 
+It begins to seem as if experience, not surgery, is the design avenue 
+for the deliberate human evolution. All this before the mass 
+availability of mini-laser communications technology, holographic 
+environments instead of rooms/walls of plaster, liquid crystal read 
+out systems, etc., etc. 
+
+
+So, it’s time to ask — what are the chronetic laws that govern 
+the accelerating process of which electronic software is only the 
+current mode? By this I do not mean “how soon will the matter 
+
+
+TimeForms 101 
+
+
+transmitter be invented” or “will lunar language finally substitute 
+Einsteinian categories for Aristotelian ones.” Such inquiries are an 
+exercise in linear prophecy only, necessary but not sufficient. I’m 
+more interested in temporal design and its prerequisites. 
+
+
+For example, sociologists have unwittingly placed at the 
+foundation of their game the notion of “expectation,” by which 
+they seem to mean what Eliot meant when he said the human kind 
+can stand very little reality — raw. People seem to have to know how 
+long a thing will be what it is to know how likely it will stay what it 
+is so they can expect it to remain what it was so when it comes by 
+again they can say — ah yes— that bit — nothing new (terrifying) 
+there. They want to be able to anticipate recurrence and periodicity, 
+so they can generalize, and say, oh yes, it’s one of those — I’ve seen it 
+before — it won’t hurt me because none of them ever did before. 
+When things (societies, cultures, groups, etc.) change fast, faster than 
+they can be generalized, people experience future shock — they need 
+to experience and generalize faster than they can. When they 
+repeatedly fail, they conclude (generalize) ‘I can’t know what to 
+expect.” This hopeless condition is known as despair. Are there ways 
+to accelerate the formation of generalizations which can stave off 
+this despair. Does acid do it? Will videotape? How? It will be 
+perceived that these questions are special cases of the more general 
+question: how to mediate discrepant frequencies — that is — what 
+forms of software (generalization — culture) do we require in this 
+temporal myriad we call home. 
+
+
+Surely, a beginning is the creation of a new planetary network 
+of communications hardware and software, so those who now dance 
+to vastly different drummers can come together in the first voluntary 
+civilization ever to steer spaceship earth: evolution consciously 
+deliberately joyously, freed of the fetters of national political (i.e. 
+humanicidal — ecocidal) idiocies. 
+
+
+More important, | think, is the work heretofore left to 
+mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, psychiatrists, and other 
+intellectuals — that is — identifying the waves and frequencies of 
+
+
+102 TimeForms 
+
+
+which our experiences are the result, intuiting the laws which govern 
+them, and designing better freer forms in which to live. 
+
+
+For example, a friend of mine set up his hardware so his five 
+year old son could: 
+
+
+1. watch Sesame Street broadcast 
+
+
+2. watch himself watching Sesame Street on a second live 
+monitor 
+
+
+3. make a tape of himself, watching his tape while watching 
+himself on a live monitor watching himself on tape 
+
+
+4. tape himself with a 5 second delay loop on one monitor and 
+try to mimic that so that the second monitor is in sync with 
+the first 
+
+
+5. play with variable delay loops on both monitors (2 decks) 
+6. play with multiple variable delay loops and live monitors 
+
+
+7. vary recording and playback speeds while doing any/all of 
+the above. 
+
+
+Not surprisingly, the boy began asking his father to help him do 
+things that went beyond the design limits of the hardware. To 
+explain why he couldn’t, his father began drawing diagrams of 
+multiple feedback loops with variable time loops, which the kid dug 
+on the basis of his experience. Then the five year old started 
+wondering how to design hardware so he could have the experience 
+he wanted. He had found the limits of the temporal rhythms built 
+into the hardware available to him, and imagined himself beyond 
+them, i.¢., temporal design. He wanted more software than there was 
+in his world. I pass over the obvious corollary that he also immunized 
+himself to the information pollution belching from commercial TV. 
+What interests me about such experiments (which we occasionally do 
+
+
+TimeForms' 103 
+
+
+at the Center) is the experimental immersion in complex time pools 
+which are not only exciting but architecturally motivating. 
+
+
+A question which bothers everybody involves ecological re- 
+cycling — there’s an awful lot of good information around which we 
+could share better if only those maverick data banks were set up. 
+After all, it’s chronetically silly to shoot tape at light speed, then air 
+mail it to friends in London. And, since “they” own the satellites, all 
+they have to do is charge prohibitive rentals so we can’t move our 
+information as fast as we shoot it. So Far. They are not gonna rent us 
+time to create alternatives to them. 
+
+
+So, it seems to me, we are going to have to come up with 
+software which is not only good for us but good for them, too. 
+That’s what global means. 
+
+
+We have no choice but to take them with us — i.e., turn them 
+on to the benefits of our way. We’re gonna have to go beyond the 
+hip ethnocentrism we built to defend ourselves against them. We 
+can’t any longer enjoy being so ‘‘far out”’ that nothing happens. This 
+could turn out to be a fatal underload. 
+
+
+The only choice we have, in my opinion, is to produce software 
+which mediates their (slower) frequencies and our (faster) ones into 
+those which harmonize both of us with the (much faster) vibes of a 
+really global synchronous system. To put it crudely, we have to show 
+the satellite-computer people (e.g., the “defense department”) how 
+our way is better for all of us; that a planetary form is better — for 
+all of us — than cartels. 
+
+
+I guess my own naturalism is unmasked in the following 
+optimistic statement — somehow the people always recognize a 
+masterpiece, so, as entry into the next phase, that’s what we have to 
+do. Which is not, in the strict sense, a political, but rather a 
+cultural-aesthetic task. 
+
+
+104. TimeForms 
+
+
+The dilemma — you can’t have a revolution unless your head’s 
+together, but you can’t get your head together unless you have a 
+revolution — here arises. I’m suggesting that both tasks — solidarity 
+and revolution — are facilitated by broadening the collective imagina- 
+tion with such questions as: What is that process of which 
+industrialism, then automation, then cybernation are the accelera- 
+tively appearing moments? What are the unknown time rules such 
+processes follow? Can we design other frequencies and forms? 
+
+
+I think so. But, as Fuller says — ‘“This means things are going to 
+move fast.” 
+
+
+METALOG 
+
+
+TimeForms) 107 
+
+
+ON SOCIAL TIME (II) 
+
+
+PROLOGUE 
+
+The first draft of this chapter was written 5 years ago when I 
+was an Instructor at Queens College, CUNY and Director of Research 
+at Jewish Family Service. It remained unpublished in mimeo form 
+since then because I wasn’t sure it was not simply an elaborate 
+hallucination. What faith I now have in the ideas put forward is 
+largely due to the sensitive audience granted me by Philip Slater at 
+Brandeis, and Henry Murray at Harvard, who first encouraged me to 
+get on with it, and by the students and colleagues who since have 
+patiently helped me to put my obsession with time into the 
+somewhat legible form before you. 
+
+
+INTRODUCTION 
+
+Galileo’s attempt to vindicate his conviction that light moved at 
+a finite velocity took the form of an experiment in which one of two 
+observers stationed about a mile apart agreed to signal when he saw 
+the light emitted from his partner’s lantern. If light possessed a finite 
+velocity (measurable at the distance of one mile by two interested 
+observers), his hypothesis would have received its vindication. But we 
+know now that it moved too fast for him. Speculation and 
+experiment have since revealed (Fizeau, Michelson-Morley)! what we 
+now regard as a common-place, i.e., light travels in finite velocities, 
+ie., it “takes time.” Most of us are now aware that Einstein’s 
+theories of relativity have something to do with a four-dimensional 
+space-time continuum. But, shoemakers to our own lasts, not until 
+recently did we perceive the relevance of these ‘‘physical” specula- 
+tions to our daily concerns. So light takes time...... ? 
+
+
+A moment’s reflection reveals that the physicist’s concern with 
+the velocity of light is similar, if not homological, to the social 
+
+
+108 TirmeForms 
+
+
+scientist’s concern for words and gestures, because, just as light is 
+information for the astronomer, so words and gestures are informa- 
+tion for social beings. 
+
+
+But a striking difference between light and word emerges if we 
+note that each photon delivers its information as it strikes a 
+photoreceptor, whereas it is notoriously observable that people may 
+pour out streams of words and gestures onto each other without 
+communicating very well at all. Some of this difficulty is understood; 
+we know about perspectives, frames of reference, points of view, 
+codes, categories, metaphors, and a host of other intervening 
+obstacles which alter the message as it is getting through. We know 
+about transmission failures, and we know that reception may be 
+garbled by malfunctions in the reception process. We tend to assume, 
+in the absence of the above alterations, that the content of a given 
+communication will have its intended consequence. 
+
+
+But, returning to the Galilean metaphor, what if there is 
+nothing wrong either with the lantern or with the observers’ visual 
+acuity? It may still happen that communication fails. Perhaps, under 
+such ideal circumstances, not the content but the rate of communica- 
+tion (e.g. the reaction-time of the observers) needs examination. It 
+may be, and we shall attempt to convey, that even perfect (noiseless) 
+contents often do not communicate because phenomena associated 
+with the rates, speeds, accelerations, decelerations, and similar 
+temporal parameters are involved. 
+
+
+Thus messages which arrive too fast to be recorded will be 
+missed, much as Galileo’s assistants failed to measure light’s speed. 
+Conversely, talk made too slowly will bore and precipitate ennui, 
+much as a tape recording, played too slowly, will growl. That these 
+conditions may obtain in those quadrants of the universe of social 
+behavior customarily studied by the social scientist is the hypothesis 
+of this chapter. 
+
+
+ALIENATION, ANOMIE, ANXIETY 
+We shall elsewhere observe that Marx’s alienation, Durkheim’s 
+
+
+TimeForms 109 
+
+
+anomie, and Freud’s anxiety have, in addition to their alliterative 
+resemblance, a more central similarity which derives from the 
+concern these men shared for the pathologies of urban man. When 
+Marx described the “‘alienation” the worker suffers because the 
+injustices of feudal serfdom have been replaced by newer modes of 
+production and distribution, he rejoices that a liberation has taken 
+place, but he is saddened (and angered) because the former peasant 
+now has no choice but to sell his time, ie., his labor per hour. 
+Tyranny has been removed only to be supplanted by a new form of 
+subjugation. To this point hath the dialectic come, as Hegel observed 
+in other circumstances.” 
+
+
+Durkheim’s fundamental explorations of anomie also implicitly 
+participated in a temporalist orientation, for he focused, especially in 
+Suicide, on those situations in which a former division of labor 
+and its concomitant set of norms, values, and roles, were made 
+suddenly obsolete by a subsequent division of labor, with its new set 
+of norms, values, and roles. He was of course far from insightless into 
+the obverse situation, the disintegration of a coherent social harmony 
+into a prior condition of organization, resulting in an inappropriately 
+complex norm system straddling the disorganized situation. 
+
+
+While it seems not uncertain that Freud was aware of the 
+writings of Marx and Durkheim, it is almost banal to point out, in 
+our era, that Freud’s theory of anxiety was very much an expression 
+of his own particular genius. This is especially evident in what many 
+regard as the best of his sociological works, namely, Civilization and 
+its Discontents.* This ground breaking work in psychoanalytic 
+sociology may be heuristically summarized as follows. When the 
+division of labor in a society increases and complexifies, the number 
+of norms and values increases concomitantly. But, when this larger 
+number of norms and values is introjected, becoming ingredient in 
+the personality, spontaneity is decreased, because, increasingly, the 
+forms and patterns of gratification available to the organism are 
+subject to increasingly complex social definition. As Marcuse° has 
+aptly demonstrated, it is a situation in which increasing sublimation 
+
+
+110 TirmeForms 
+
+
+calls for increasing repression. Or, to put the matter more prosaically, 
+it seems to haye been Freud’s view that complex civilization creates a 
+complex superego, which then accumulates controlling dominion 
+over the organism’s pleasure seeking. The thesis that our civilization 
+prevents us from enjoying our congenital polymorphous perversity is 
+rather univocally endorsed by Norman Brown® as the cultural plight 
+of contemporary western man. 
+
+
+Thus it is not very far from the thesis of Civilization and tts 
+Discontents to the following proposition: In a given social system, 
+as the number of normatively defined interactions increases, the 
+number of spontaneously defined interactions decreases. 
+
+
+The generality of this proposition calls for several clarifying 
+amendations, since it is almost too obvious that the theoretical 
+import of the Freudian statement is not far removed from the 
+theoretical import of Durkheim’s classical formulation. In both, 
+complexity finds its criterion in a simple enumeration of norms. 
+Somewhat more subtly, we point now to the theoretical intimacy of 
+this hypothesis with certain aspects of Marxian Sociology, in which 
+the increasingly laborious definition of the worker’s role brings about 
+his increasingly alienated situation. 
+
+
+At the heart of these formulations, we believe, is a temporal 
+assumption, which we may tease out by exploring the notion of 
+spontaneity. Certainly, we must avoid imputing to these theorists a 
+wish to avoid any and all socialization processes and to leave as 
+unimpinged as possible the noble savage, natural man.”? Each would 
+agree that a human isolate is inhuman, and that a man alone is no 
+man at all. Yet each found a certain measure of inexorable necessity 
+in the very “state” of affairs he deplored. 
+
+
+If we do not inquire into this inexorability, we shall be left with 
+nothing more than theories of pathogenesis. If however we can make 
+some reasonable formulation of the “native” possibilities of man, 
+that sort of humanity he has prior to alienation, anomie, and 
+anxiety, then perhaps we shall be able to state at least some of the 
+
+
+TimeForms 111 
+
+
+prolegomena to a sociological theory of human joy, as well as the 
+conditions under which human life is subjected to pathology. 
+
+
+If it is impossible to make any headway here, then we shall have 
+to resign ourselves to a perennial entrapment between alienation and 
+freedom, mechanical and organic solidarity, thanatotic and erotic 
+life, or, more generally, to an impotence when confronting the desire 
+to transform the social basis of Life and Death. Faith in an inevitable 
+“‘progress’”’ now seems worn thin. 
+
+
+The approach, we suggest, is to be found in the characteristics 
+of our own age upon which so many writers, from Marx to Merton, 
+have commented. I refer to the twin conceptions of social process 
+and social change, and, to paraphrase Whitehead,® to the fact that we 
+have witnessed more rapid change in the twentieth century than in 
+the twenty centuries before it. 
+
+
+SOCIAL PROCESS AND SOCIAL CHANGE?® 
+
+Two root metaphors seem to be employed with especial 
+frequency in the social scientists’ conceptualization of social process 
+and social change; the part-whole metaphor, and the space-time 
+metaphor. Relating these to each other we may derive the following 
+
+
+four-celled paradigm: 
+
+
+space time 
+
+
+I Il 
+
+particle instant 
+I] . IV 
+
+gestalt process 
+
+
+In cell I, we locate the particle point of view, in which things, 
+events, processes or changes are construed as the resultant configura- 
+tion of a number of individual particles. Thus a molecule is a number 
+
+
+part 
+
+
+whole 
+
+
+112 TimeForms 
+
+
+of atoms, a galaxy a (very large) number of stars and planets, a group 
+a ‘“‘composition”’ of individuals. Processes and changes are ascribed to 
+the addition or subtraction of parts. Many gas particles will set up a 
+gravitational field, eventually forming a galaxy; many individuals will 
+enter into patterned interactions, eventually forming a group. For 
+example, population pressure (the increase in number of individuals) 
+has not infrequently been allotted the engine role in social processes 
+and social changes. 
+
+
+Critics who castigate this sort of conceptualization in the social 
+sciences as ‘‘methodological individualism,” argue that the derivation 
+of social relations from the units of behavior is reductionist, 
+atomistic, and primitive. Proponents assert that their thoughts are 
+modeled on reality and are therefore genuinely descriptive of the 
+situations which capture their interests. 
+
+
+In cell II, we locate the gestalt point of view, in which things, 
+events, processes and changes are construed as self-defined wholes. A 
+molecule may be intellectually analyzed or “broken’’ into its 
+component atoms, just as a group may be analytically separated into 
+its component individuals. But gestaltists insist that a molecule is a 
+molecule, and a group is a group, prior to our analytic operations. 
+They say that galaxies whirl and eddy, groups migrate or form 
+communities, as wholes. Methodological individualists criticize this 
+view as sociologistic, and, occasionally, psychologists view thinking 
+of this sort on the part of their sociological colleagues as peculiarly 
+unspecific. Proponents argue that anything less than gestaltic 
+thinking distorts the reality of groups, commits the fallacy of 
+misplaced concreteness,’° and is ultimately reductionist. A group is 
+a group is a group; its processes and changes are sui generis. 
+
+
+In cell 111 we confront the instant point of view. Clock-time, for 
+instance, is said to consist in the sum total of units measured. Thus 
+an hour is ‘‘really’”’ 60 minutes, a year 365 days, etc. For particalists, 
+analysis of change or process consists in measuring the number of 
+instants and charting what happens at each instant. The sympathy 
+between the particle view and the instant view becomes apparent 
+
+
+TimeForms 113 
+
+
+here, since at is a spatial referent. But where is an instant? 
+Nevertheless, sympathy is not identity, so that protaganists of the 
+instant persuasion may, with equal justice, chide the particle 
+advocate by asking “when is a particle?” The relativity enthusiast 
+confronts an instantist critique of the familiar E=mc? equation when 
+it is noted that a particle ‘‘at’”’ the velocity of light would have to 
+achieve infinite mass. Similarly the analyst of social change who 
+advocates an historical perspective is asked to note in his analysis of 
+change what the state of affairs was when he observed the problem 
+system. 
+
+
+In cell IV, we meet the proponent of the process point of view. 
+He is the most adamant critic of reductionism, whether of type I, II, 
+or III. He holds that the whole time of events, physical and/or social, 
+must be perceived in its entirety, He holds, with Heidegger,'* that 
+time is to man what water is to the fish, so that, if we abstract man 
+from his element, we court the danger of asphyxiating our analysis. 
+Like light, he reminds us, life takes time. If we make non-temporal 
+analysis, we will speak in artificialities. Just as we cannot hope to 
+understand (versteben) the drama if we merely conceive (begreifin) 
+of the separate scenes, so we must perceive man in his actual 
+enduring social process. Snapshots provide lifeless models for so 
+chronic a reality as man. 
+
+
+Critics of the processualist are quick to object that processes 
+actually consist of 1) particles, 2) gestalts, or 3) instants. To these 
+the processualist may respond with a superior grin. But he meets a 
+more constructive critic in the social scientist who says: “Well and 
+good. Whole processes are whole processes. But how shall we 
+understand them? Where do we mark off beginnings, middles, and 
+ends? How do we know how long a given process lasts, where one 
+leaves off and another begins? If you require that we reconceptualize 
+what we have heretofore regarded as events composed of parts, what 
+concepts shall we employ?” 
+
+
+These, in our view, are sage inquiries. We shall not affront our 
+critic by calling him a reactionary who demands a crystal ball as the 
+
+
+114. TimeForms 
+
+
+price of progress. How indeed shall we think processually? How shall 
+we measure change? Before presenting our views on these matters, let 
+us describe more explicitly one characteristic of the four-fold 
+paradigm presented above; it is cumulative. This we have attempted 
+to convey in our sequential enumeration. The simplest, and, we 
+believe, least helpful perspective for the social scientist’s analysis of 
+process is the particle view, depicted in cell I. Passing over the degree 
+of probability that we shall someday so integrate “Science” so that 
+we will have a continuum of perspectives ranging from Physics to 
+Anthropology, and from Geology to History, we hold that present 
+day social science has little to gain from an atomistic point of view 
+because it introduces far more complexity and sheer number than we 
+can presently handle. A similar remark applies to cells II and III (the 
+gestalt and the instant, respectively.) For no one is really interested 
+in charting, let us say, the history of American Culture, second by 
+second. And why stop there? The cesium clock given to us by 
+Professor Mossbauer will complicate seconds into billions of units per 
+second.’* One could carry the argument further by resort to logical 
+devices (borrowed from Zeno, et al. ). 
+
+
+It is the wiser course to proceed empirically. We must 
+investigate, by employment of tools now available, how, in fact, the 
+processes relevant to human actions have been understood by their 
+various participants and investigators. 
+
+
+We shall find, if I am not seriously in error, that the traditional 
+western conceptualization of time is a linear depiction, involving 
+past — present — future terminologies, and such variants as begin- 
+ning, now, and eventually; birth, life, death; thesis, antithesis, 
+synthesis; origin, process, recapitulation, and others.!3 In these 
+schemes, investigations of social processes are’ assumed to be 
+intelligible when referred to a linear metaphor, such that marking off 
+units of time of varying “‘lengths” are held to be meaningful. Thus 
+we say ‘‘a short time,” “‘a long time,” in a myriad of ways, whether 
+we call them seconds, days, months, years, light-years, or eons. It will 
+
+
+TimeForms 115 
+
+
+be perceived that these are reductionist since they employ a spatial 
+model. In assuming that time is two-dimensional (i.e. linear), we 
+make it impossible for phrases like ‘‘a hard time,” ‘‘an easy time,” “a 
+high time,” and/or ‘‘a low time” to make any but euphemistic sense. 
+Thus: 
+
+
+present 
+past pr future 
+
+
+Let us agree, since it exists, that this linearization of time is one 
+possible conceptualization. But let us not assume that this two-di- 
+mensional view is the only possible conceptualization of social 
+process. What if time may be viewed as 3 dimensional, or 4, or by 
+extension, n-dimensional, as the mathematicians say. In other words, 
+instead of charting experience on what we gratuitously assume to be 
+a two-dimensional graph, let us inquire how time is experienced in 
+various social situations. In this way, we can avoid forcing the views 
+of time that other cultures have made into our pre-conceived 
+framework, borrowed from an ethnocentric and outmoded physics. 
+(For example, the traditional Chinese view of time would not “fit” 
+our western paradigms at all.)'* In addition, by seeking a more 
+general view, we may regard such concepts as alienation, anomie, and 
+anxiety, which were plotted on a before and after linear model, as 
+genuine, but amenable to supplement. 
+
+
+By focusing on socially experienced time, we derive further 
+benefit by not assuming, as Newtonian physics was wont to assume, 
+that time is an absolute, a constant, proceeding at some unknowable 
+rate. If it ‘“‘takes’’ linear time to measure linear time, we shall remain 
+caught in a self-contradictory scientific agnosticism, unless we choose 
+another path. Such a path, we hold, comes into view when we focus 
+
+
+116 TimeForms 
+
+
+on socially experienced time. We may then, if we choose, investigate 
+how the assumption of two-dimensional physical time captured such 
+a prominent place in the halls of social speculation. 
+
+
+Experienced time is notoriously variable. Sometimes events 
+seem to last forever, so that we become impatient for change. A 
+boring play comes to mind as an example. “At” other times, events 
+seem to rush by at such great speed, that we wonder if we shall ever 
+“catch up” (e.g., the information explosion). Sometimes events are 
+so deliciously pleasant that we hardly notice the passage of time at 
+all (e.g. — sexual ecstacy). Sometimes we hurry, sometimes we 
+dawdle. Sometimess events are so fraught with meaning that we are 
+weighed down by them—we feel heavy, laden. These banal 
+illustrations serve to focus for us the variability of experienced time, 
+and the intellectual provincialism of charting such experiences 
+two-dimensionally. 
+
+
+Although we know that travelling at a constant velocity 
+produces no sensation of motion, we also know that alterations in 
+speed (acceleration, deceleration) are readily detectable. The adven- 
+tures of the astronauts have taught us that a measure of increase in 
+relative mass due to acceleration is called ““G,” and the reciprocal 
+measure of decrease due to deceleration is known as “negative G.” 
+We even know that there are upper “G’’ limits for humans, and that 
+some people can tolerate more “G”’ than others. 
+
+
+The social homologues of these phenomena, in our view, lie 
+behind the intuitions of alienation, anomie, and anxiety. Thus, when 
+the worker’s time is measured by a production schedule over which 
+he has no control, he is alienated from his “natural” time. When the 
+norms no longer or too suddenly define ‘“‘normality”, anomie 
+appears. When timeless fantasies urge gratifications more immedi- 
+ately than the ego can mediate, fixation, regression, or ‘‘free-float- 
+ing” anxiety may result. But these are lamentations concerned only 
+with “‘too slow” or ‘‘too fast,” that is, they employ linear time 
+models. Are there others? 
+
+
+TimeForms' 117 
+
+
+ACHRONY, SYNCHRONY, AND SOCIAL PROCESS 
+
+Since a large number of approaches is open to us,!5 we must 
+attempt brevity. Hypothesizing that social processes occur at various 
+rates, we shall first describe how people feel when caught in 
+circumstances of varying rates of behavior. We will then examine 
+some homological group phenomena, beginning with the familiar 
+linear model but varying rates ‘“‘along it.”” We may then inquire about 
+acceleration and deceleration along the familiar “arrow of 
+time” (customarily drawn as a vector, perhaps because time is 
+irreversible, or perhaps only because we believe it is). We shall then 
+look into other dimensions of time. 
+
+
+Thus, in life cycle terms, birth is beginning, although we know 
+that the infant does not perceive time as “directional.” Similarly, 
+death is an ending (although some hold it to be merely transitional). 
+Freud has taught us much about birth, death, and about fixation and 
+regression, linear temporal metaphors which suggest that the organ- 
+ism may “‘go on” while the psyche “gets stuck” or retrogresses. He 
+said little about those who race, whose feeling when the pace of 
+events exceeds their own is a compulsion to hurry. Sociologically, a 
+two-dimensional linear model has also been used to describe the 
+visionary, the chiliastic sect, the millenialist persuasion, and other 
+futurist orientations,!® their opposite numbers being described as 
+conservatives, reactionaries, contre-temps, or, in Thomas Mann’s 
+phase, ‘“‘children with their heads on backward.”!7 Those who have 
+been “left behind,” those who “‘lag,”’ “losers,” and a host of others 
+
+
+also receive their baptism here. 
+
+
+Since all men are born, pass through the age-statuses recognized 
+by their cultures, and die, we may say that relating to the processes 
+of social time is a cross-cultural necessity, and that every culture 
+organizes these passages of time in some way. But, lest we restrict 
+ourselves to the linearity we criticized above, let us recall our 
+question whether other temporal modes of experience are possible. 
+
+
+Thus, medieval thinkers were accustomed to turn their eyes 
+“upward” to heaven and “downward” to hell, two forms of 
+
+
+118 TimEeFormMs 
+
+
+eternity,)® the one blissful, the other horrendous. Law was said to 
+emanate from “on high,” and an institutionally prescribed ascetic 
+regimen was believed to liberate men from the coarse materiality of 
+terrestial cares and to merit peaceful salvations ‘‘above” and 
+“beyond” the sorrows of earth and its vale of tears. In our own age, 
+we hear these eternalist intonations in the “high” of the narcotic user 
+or in the pronouncements of the totalitarian state, which, claiming to 
+have fathomed the laws of history, and thus being “‘above”’ them, 
+arrogates the power and the right to direct the “destinies” of lesser 
+mortals. Indeed, the association of immortality with upward direc- 
+tionality was as familiar to the Greeks as to our Calvinist forebears. 
+Both located gods ‘“‘on high.” 
+
+
+Conversely, the insulted, the damned, the enslaved, and the 
+oppressed all ask to have their burdens lifted from them. The yoke of 
+tyranny is described as heavy. Those whose lives consist of endless 
+repetitions (cycles, rituals), whose hope of a better future has been 
+foreshortened, whose ‘‘downtrodden”’ plights seem without remedy, 
+are customarily described as suffering in the ‘‘depths” of despair. We 
+call the poor the “lower” class. Satan inhabits the “underworld.” 
+
+
+How to account for the genesis of these vertical metaphors? Let 
+us first relate them to the horizontal vector of time described above. 
+We arrive at a depiction which may be drawn like this: 
+
+
+above time 
+
+
+behind time ahead of time 
+
+
+below time 
+
+
+TimeForms 119 
+
+
+If we add one more dimension, designed to capture a 
+continuum of sensitivity to time, such that we may chart those who 
+are either sensitive to the feel of ‘“‘time’s flow,” or those who are 
+fairly dull with respect to it (and those in between), such that they 
+complain of its heaviness or exalt its lightness, we arrive at something 
+like this (imagine it to be 3 dimensional): 
+
+
+more sensitive 
+
+
+less sensitive 
+
+
+Adding Greek terms to the paradigm, referring to the root “chronos” 
+for time, we derive the following lexicon: 
+
+
+epichronic 
+
+
+hypochronic 
+we yP 
+
+
+anachronic metachronic: 
+
+
+synchrony 
+
+
+hyperchronic 
+
+
+catachronic 
+
+
+120 TimeForMs 
+
+
+We are now ready to describe more fully what each of these terms 
+are designed to convey. 
+
+
+Perhaps the most convenient beginning will be made if we note 
+that there are two perfectly respectable English words corresponding 
+to two of our categories, i.e., synchronize, and anachronism. By 
+anachronism we usually understand someone or something which 
+“time has left behind.”’ 
+
+
+If we inquire now, as Murray and Erikson do,’? whether there 
+resides in each of us a sense of our rate of experience, it follows that 
+we may also sense variations in this rate. If for example, we say that 
+someone is falling behind in his work, we are referring to an 
+anachronistic rate of attainment. Such a statement is possible only 
+on the assumption that there is a rate of attainment which would 
+“keep up with” the rate of expectation. Although this is customarily 
+referred to as ‘“‘normalcy,” we prefer, for reasons which we hope will 
+soon become apparent, to designate that situation in which the rate 
+of attainment is in harmony with the rate of expectation by the 
+word “synchrony.” In the language of the hipster, he who is 
+synchronic is ‘“‘with it.” When “the time is out of joint,’?° we 
+observe achrony.?! Referring to the diagram above, synchrony is the 
+sphere whose diameters are equal. Achrony may be depicted as a 
+misshapen or asymmetric sphere. 
+
+
+How many forms of achrony are there? Although it seems at 
+first sight to be unusual, it is equally possible for someone to be 
+“ahead” of his expectations — to go faster than a “normal” rate of 
+process. The precocious child, the avant-garde painter, the bohemian 
+who feels the entire planet to be populated by reactionaries and 
+squares, are instances of what we call the metachronic orientation. 
+So is the person who must race headlong, all the time; he constantly 
+feels he must go faster than he can, as.if ‘‘time were running out.” He 
+may do this because he wants to decelerate his ‘falling behind” (to 
+prevent becoming an anachronism) by adopting a faster rate, which, 
+unfortunately, he then feels is too fast for comfort (a metachron- 
+
+
+TimeEForms 121 
+
+
+ism). “Sometimes it takes all the running one can do just to stay in 
+one place,” as Alice remarked in Wonderland. The rabbit who was 
+always rushing because he was late, late, late, also describes a 
+typically metachronic orientation. 
+
+
+Sociologically we may observe a metachronic process when, for 
+example, a goal is achieved before the participants are ready for it. 
+Sudden attainment of a position of increased responsibility qualifies 
+as a model frequently encountered im vivo by revolutionaries who 
+rise to find that the ship of state steers heavily now that they have 
+suddenly assumed the helm. Similarly, our interpretation of the 
+“delinquency” literature leads us to view as anachronistic the period 
+between biological and sociological pubescence. Were it not for the 
+fact that “legitimate” property and sex “rights” are conferred on 
+young people long after they are biologically ready to have them, we 
+would have no time known as “‘adolescence.” The time lag between 
+biological and sociological maturity which seems to accompany every 
+urbanization of a formerly agrarian culture is thus, in our view, an 
+anachronizing process for the young.” 
+
+
+Another illustration is. to be found in the predicament of the 
+technologically unemployed. We confront here a strange situation in 
+which millions of workers whose old skills are anachronisms can find 
+no work in an economic system which complains of a shortage of 
+metachronic technicians with new skills. This condition is as neatly 
+paradigmatic of wholesale achrony as we can imagine. The “econ- 
+omy” which metachronically creates new roles faster than it can fill 
+them serves also to illustrate the reciprocity between rushing and 
+lagging rates of social process. 
+
+
+While it would be possible to show that anachronizations may 
+occur anywhere along the continuum of the processes of individual 
+development which Erikson calls the life cycle, systematic elabora- 
+tion of the group process equivalent of these ideas must wait upon a 
+more elaborate formulation which will make it possible to study the 
+paces involved in group phases of development in their sequence and 
+continuity.” 3 
+
+
+122 TimeForms 
+
+
+The anachronic and metachronic orientations are, then, charac- 
+teristic ways of experiencing dyssynchronous rates of experience. 
+They may be used as reciprocal terms, since they are relational 
+concepts. Thus, someone who feels he is behind may rush, and 
+someone who is rushing may feel himself slowing down. Conversely, 
+someone who feels behind may experience relief by speeding up a 
+bit, and someone who feels himself hurtling may feel relief by 
+relaxing a bit. Somewhere between these extremes, people sometimes 
+feel that their rates are comfortable, that they are ‘“‘doing alright,” 
+“making it,” “‘groovin’.”’*4 This horizontal aspect of the paradigm is 
+familiar enough, capturing the linear model to which we have been 
+accustomed. Our terms are the simplest we can devise to focus on 
+rate variations. 
+
+
+The epichronic situation and its reciprocate, the catachronic, 
+refer to feelings of being “above’’ or “below” a given social process. 
+Although we often say that distance may be comfortable (in the face 
+of danger) or uncomforable (when “far” from a desirable outcome), 
+we sometimes say that ‘“‘rising above” a painful situation will alleviate 
+its stressful implications. Thus the ‘‘buzzing blooming confusions” of 
+too complicated a set of roles may take on meaning when seen from 
+(high) above. Although we know that details are often lost in this 
+stance and that pattern is achieved only at the cost of variety and 
+richness, we argue that when pattern is sought, detail must be 
+sacrificed. That will be the view of the epichronic person who tries to 
+rise politically above the bewildering chaos of memberships too 
+complicated for his comfort. He may pronounce that nothing really 
+changes, that all action is illusion, or that cycle and repetition are the 
+co-monarchs of true reality. He may even deny that time is real at all, 
+by erecting unchanging, inflexible dogmas which are true “for all 
+time” over which he now feels the master. Parmenides comes to 
+mind, or the early Plato of the “eternal” forms. Mercia Eliade’s 
+works are especially valuable in this context. Mysticism (of one kind) 
+serves as another illustration of the epichronic attempt to alleviate 
+the slings and arrows of outrageous process by climbing into a 
+timeless realm where eternal order reigns. Paranoia (of one kind) 
+serves as another. 
+
+
+TimeForms§ 123 
+
+
+Socially, we observe the epichronic stance in the application of 
+power to what the powerful regard as a threatening situation. Martial 
+law is its most obvious incarnation, the denial of civil liberties a less 
+obvious but perhaps more insidious replication. The ‘majority” 
+which imposes its will on “minorities” is a familiar case in point, as is 
+Marx’s analysis of the refusal of the capitalists to distribute the 
+rewards of a new mode of production as rapidly as they accumulate. 
+Injustices have never been difficult to catalogue; instances of power, 
+the reciprocate of oppression, are no more difficult to compile. 
+Recondite analysis of power, however, is another question.?*5 We 
+focus here on that frequently noted situation in which those who 
+oppress are angrily envied by those they oppress, a phenomenon 
+
+
+which Anna Freud has named “identification with the aggressor.” It 
+is not entirely dissimilar to Hegels’ analysis of the master-slave 
+antinomy. Others have pointed out that relationships of this sort 
+may also be in evidence in intergenerational conflicts.” ° 
+
+
+The catachronic is not so fortunate. He feels that the process of 
+events which constitute his situation are too heavy to be altered by 
+his poor strengths. He is depressed. He feels that ‘“‘time hangs heavy 
+on his hands,” that life is unjust and unfair. Regulations and edicts, 
+whether official or informal, weigh him down. He is a creature of the 
+depths, insulted, injured, damned. The decisions which effect events 
+are made by those “above” him, but the climb up to that level is too 
+arduous for him. He may despair, sinking lower and lower, possibly 
+into suicide. A milder catachronic will sing “low down” blues. 
+
+
+Just as we see a reciprocity between the anachronic and the 
+metachronic, who seem sometimes to shuttle back and forth along 
+their continuum, so we may observe a reciprocity between the 
+epichronic and the catachronic. Frequently, one who feels himself to 
+be living catachronically will seek release from his depthful prison. 
+Narcotics will turn off feelings of catachrony and transport the user 
+almost magically into an epichronic realm where time moves so 
+slowly (if at all) that the feeling of being “down under” is almost 
+instantly replaced by a feeling of “being high.”?” Alternatively, the 
+
+
+124 TimeEForMS 
+
+
+catachronic may sink into a self-defeating hedonism where every 
+impulse is given free reign. Durkheim’s egoistic suicide is homologi- 
+cal — his altruist resembles our epichronist in that he may feel the 
+ultimate values to be more valuable than his own life, justifying his 
+martyrdom. Joan of Arc comes to mind. For the epichronic, time 
+should move very slowly if at all. For the catachronic, it moves too 
+slowly, if at all. The former wants order, the latter escape. 
+
+
+Durkheim’s ‘“‘fatalistic’”’ suicide is similarly homological to the 
+“fatalism” of the catachronic orientation. Thus, when we asked 
+Oscar Lewis why it seemed to him that the bearers of “culture of 
+poverty”’ always seemed hopeless and resigned, without viable plans 
+of action, he replied that it was because they knew ‘“‘damn well there 
+was little they could do” about the inequitable allocation of the 
+world’s good things.?® Similarly, the low castes, wherever and 
+whenever observed, have traditionally been described as people who 
+do not regard time as benevolent. Among the untouchables of India, 
+time is a ‘‘tooth” which tears away at the flesh of life. Albert 
+Cohen?® described the lower class time orientation of the delinquent 
+as immediate and hedonistic, in contrast to the middle class boy who 
+learns to postpone present gratifications, in the hope of more and 
+better gratifications “‘in the future.” 
+
+
+We turn now to our third axis, the continuum of sensitivity. 
+Here we enter unchartered regions, involving such unknowns as 
+temporal threshholds, rate tolerances, affective sensibilities and 
+insensibilities. Why are some of us more sensitive to time’s passage 
+than others? Why do some of us feel speed to be exhilerating while 
+others abhor it. Some drive a car at a steady pace, comfortably 
+within the speed limit for hours on end, while others enjoy speeding; 
+the temporally timid and the rate rebel, as it were. Why? 
+
+
+Although these are presently imponderables, we include them 
+for several reasons: 1. we recognize these phenomena repeatedly 
+albeit crudely, 2. we have devised an experimental technique for 
+their investigation, 3. they tantalize our theoretical appetite. 
+
+
+TimeForms 125 
+
+
+Certain questions which we cannot at present even ask 
+intelligently (ramifications of point 3 above) motivate us to attempt 
+the construction of a bridge from feelings about rate-of-behavior 
+phenomena to the sociological circumstances which generate them. 
+For example, imagine an era in which the pace of social change is 
+said to be great (i.e., our own). Imagine further, two populations, 
+one of hyperchronics (i.e., people very sensitive to change) and one 
+of hypochronics (i.e., people not particularly bothered by the 
+rapidity of events). Will the hyperchronics become more catachronic 
+sooner? Will the hypochronics “adjust” more easily, becoming 
+willing compulsives in the “‘rat race” for success? We do not at the 
+present know the answers to these questions, nor even whether these 
+are intelligent questions. 
+
+
+Nevertheless, before passing on to the attempts we are making 
+to investigate these phenomena experimentally, three further aspects 
+of the achrony-synchrony paradigm require elaboration. The first is 
+the relation of achrony and synchrony to the general issue of affect 
+and emotionality; the second is the relation of our paradigm to the 
+general issue of dialectical thought; the third is the extent to which 
+the paradigm described above rests on an assumption of uniform 
+acceleration and/or deceleration. That is, we have discussed so far 
+only those aspects of temporal behavior which either increase or 
+decrease at a constant rate of increase or decrease. Before we enter 
+into a discussion of such temporal phenomena as experience which is 
+taking place at a decreasing rate of increase; or conversely, at an 
+increasing rate of decrease (and other such phenomena), let us 
+consider the question of dialectical time. 
+
+
+ON DIALECTICAL TIME??? 
+A. Thesis: 
+Freud wrote: 
+
+
+There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the idea of time; 
+there is no recognition of the passage of time, and — a thing 
+
+
+126 TirmeForms 
+
+
+that is most remarkable and awaits consideration in philosophi- 
+cal thought — no alteration in its mental processes produced by 
+the passage of time. Wishful impulses which have never passed 
+beyond the id, but impressions too, which have been sunk into 
+the id by repression, are virtually immortal; after the passage of 
+decades they behave as if they had just occurred. They can only 
+be recognized as belonging to the past, can only lose their 
+importance and be deprived of their cathexis of energy, when 
+they have been made conscious by the work of analysis, and it 
+is on this that the therapeutic effect of analytic treatment rests 
+to no small extent. 
+
+
+Again and again, I have had the impression that we have made 
+too little theoretical use of the fact, established beyond doubt, 
+of the unalterability by time of the repressed. This seems to 
+offer an approach to the most profound discoveries. Nor have I 
+myself made any progress here.?! 
+
+
+Marcuse accepted the gauntlet thrown down by Freud in the 
+foregoing passage, but it was his genius to perceive that the couch 
+was not and could not be an adequate instrumennt to deal with what 
+he called ‘‘surplus repression:” that is, the extent to which cultures 
+engender far more repression by political oppression than the 
+amount he felt to be minimally necessary. Attempting to forge a 
+synthesis between a Marxian analysis of society and a Freudian 
+analysis of civilization, Marcuse addressed himself to the issue of 
+time in the last five pages of his Eros and Civilization.** There he 
+writes that: 
+
+
+... Death is the final negativity of time, but ‘joy wants 
+eternity.’ Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure. Time has no 
+power over the id, the original domain of the pleasure 
+principle. But the ego, through which alone pleasure 
+becomes real, is in its entirety subject to time. The mere 
+anticipation of the inevitable end, present in every 
+instant, introduces a repressive element into all libidinal 
+
+
+TimEForms 127 
+
+
+relations and renders pleasure itself painful. This primary 
+frustration in the instinctual structure of man becomes the 
+inexhaustible source of all other frustrations — and of their 
+social effectiveness. Man learns that ‘it cannot last 
+anyway,’ that every pleasure is short, that for all finite 
+things the hour of their birth is the hour of their 
+death — that it couldn’t be otherwise. He is resigned before 
+society forces him to practice resignation methodically. 
+The flux of time is society’s most natural ally in 
+maintaining law and order, conformity, and the institu- 
+tions that relegate freedom to a perpetual utopia; the flux 
+of time helps men to forget what was and what can be: it 
+makes them oblivious to the better past and the better 
+future. 
+
+
+This ability to forget — itself the result of a long and 
+terrible education by experience — is an indispensable 
+requirement of mental and physical hygiene without which 
+civilized life would be unbearable; but it is also the mental 
+faculty which sustains submissiveness and renunciation. To 
+forget is also to forgive what should not be forgiven if 
+justice and freedom are to prevail. Such forgiveness 
+reproduces the conditions which reproduce injustice and 
+enslavement: to forget past suffering is to forgive the 
+forces that caused it — without defeating these forces. The 
+wounds that heal in time are also the wounds that contain 
+the poison. Against this surrender to time, the restoration 
+of remembrance to its rights, as a vehicle of liberation, is 
+one of the noblest tasks of thought. 
+
+
+This magnificent passage nonetheless leaves us with a question: “How 
+shall we re-member?”’ (the pun is deliberate). 
+
+
+Freud and Marcuse are united in giving central importance to 
+the notion of time in the task of liberation. To Freud’s relatively 
+bourgeois program, Marcuse, a “left Freudian,” adds the social-poli- 
+tical dimension. But Freud and Marcuse are also united more in 
+
+
+128 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+depicting the plight of the repressed, than in the definition of 
+political prescriptions. They whet our appetite for exploration. 
+
+
+Insofar as he is inspired and provoked by Marx, we may say that 
+Marcuse is not only a left Freudian, but also a “left Hegelian.”’ But 
+even the “right Hegelians’” (e.g., Kierkegaard and many of the 
+existentialists) did not fail to see that insight into temporal process 
+was central to their concerns as well. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit?® is 
+illustrative. It falls short in my view, because, though it stresses that 
+time lies at the root of all consciousness, it construes time in a 
+hopelessly naive linearism, and restricts its attention unnecessarily to 
+what I shall later characterize as “‘mere becoming,” thus effectively 
+precluding attention to the possibilities of what I shall call 
+“transcendent becoming,” i.e., liberation. 
+
+
+The intimate connection between anguish, the existentialist 
+notion of pathos, and linear temporality, is not merely intimate but 
+necessary, because anguish results whenever temporal experience is 
+politically linearized. That is, whenever a society insists that the only 
+viable choice is a millenialist utopia or a contemporary “‘ek-stasis,”’ it 
+does so by oppressively constricting temporal experience to one 
+dimension. Indeed, Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man?* reveals the 
+poverty of this thesis. 
+
+
+The situation is no better when we turn to a group I will call the 
+middle Hegelians, i.e., the advocates, disciples, and students of 
+Husserl’s phenomenology (among the principal figures here I would 
+include Albert Schutz, Maurice Natanson, and others).?* Phenomer- 
+ologists of this sort?® accomplish a valuable inventory of the 
+contents and processes of consciousness, but in so doing, it seems to 
+me, they begin with the temporally fragmented structure of 
+consciousness when it would be preferable to account for it, both 
+genetically and epidemiologically, tasks which too often fall outside 
+of their charted domains. 
+
+
+Nor may we expect promising fulfillment from the “genetic 
+epistemologists,” among whom we must of course name Piaget as the 
+
+
+TimeForms 129 
+
+
+most talented investigator. Piaget’s work on the genesis of the 
+concept of time*’ demonstrates, with the pungent clarity we have 
+come to expect from him, that the notion of time, contrary to 
+Bergson and the phenomenologists, is not ‘an immediate datum of 
+consciousness;”°*® that, for his youthful subjects, there are in fact 
+four distinct steps through which contemporary western children go 
+at various ages before they arrive at the notion of time with which 
+the phenomenologists begin. Piaget’s subjects distinguished: (1) 
+events of arrival; (2) events both of arrival and of departure; (3) 
+distance traversed by moving figures; and (4) measure of the distance 
+between moving figures. Piaget is able to conclude from these and 
+similar experiments by his colleague Paul Fraisse?? that the notions 
+of temporal succession, temporal order, temporal duration, and 
+temporal velocity are initially distinct and subsequently miscible 
+notions. 
+
+
+Nor have clinical enquiries into the pathology of the “time 
+sense” been lacking. The Dutch psychiatrist, Meerloo, has summar- 
+ized this literature*® for us. His review catalogues the extent to 
+which the allegedly normal time sense in western subjects may 
+disintegrate into weird mixtures of the elements described by Piaget 
+and into other strange temporal compositions. However, neither 
+Meerloo nor Piaget examine or take into account the extent to which 
+the pathologies of the time sense derive from political oppression 
+and/or ‘“‘psychological” repression. Indeed, this failing is as often 
+encountered among the phenomenologists, as among experimental 
+and clinical investigators.* * 
+
+
+No such defect characterizes the recent work of Jean-Paul 
+Sartre, whose preface to his Critique de la Raison Dialectique has 
+appeared as ‘Search for a Method.’*? I will not summarize this 
+well-known work since a curt summary could not do justice to its 
+bold and promising character. Suffice it here to say that in it, Sartre 
+attempts to unite and synthesize, and then to go beyond the 
+dialectical heritage of Hegel and Marx, the phenomenological 
+heritage of Heidegger and Husserl, the psychoanalytic heritage of 
+Freud and the new Freudians, and even to carry forward his own 
+
+
+130 TimeEForMs 
+
+
+“existential manifesto.” He does so by giving centrality to the notion 
+of “project,” which goes beyond the Hegelian notion of process in 
+that it is a call to action, and not merely a call to vision. He accepts, 
+it seems to me, Marx’s critique of the Hegelians that the task of 
+philosophy is not to understand the world, but to transform it. He 
+insists that no middling compromise can be reached between the 
+determinations which social forms impose on consciousness, and the 
+character of freedom which his existentialism proudly defends. 
+
+
+I have passed in review the thoughts of the foregoing men to 
+underscore the fact that these leading theoreticians to whom we look 
+for guiding vision, without exception, have focused their principal 
+energies on the notion of temporal experience, and yet none has 
+produced a major tract on the subject. In the paragraphs that follow, 
+I suggest some considerations which seem requisite for a beginning — 
+notes, as it were, toward a new epistemology of experienced 
+process. 
+
+
+B. Antithesis: 
+
+Freud, Marcuse, Heidegger, and Sartre, not to mention Hegel 
+and Marx, did not fail to allude to “the divine Plato,” as Freud calls 
+him. They were not unfamiliar with Plato’s epistemology which, 
+unfortunately, is far too often accepted as sufficiently well-expressed 
+in the famous allegory of the cave. Sartre somewhere (I think in 
+“Anti-Semite and Jew’) tells the charming tale of a young French 
+student, rushing excitedly to his Professeur, asking eagerly, ‘‘Profes- 
+seur, Professeur, have you read Monsieur Freud?” whereupon the old 
+man peers above his spectacles and gently informs the budding 
+metaphysician (approximately): ‘My son — the better part of Freud 
+you will find chez Platon.” 
+
+
+And yet, those who go to Plato’s Republic for the final 
+statement of his epistemology will commit a grievous error in 
+scholarship by failing to study a work which Plato wrote nearly forty 
+years after he wrote the Republic, i.e., his Timaios. Elsewhere, I have 
+shown*® that the epistemology of The Republic was replaced by the 
+sociology of the Timaios, in which the pun on re-membering, to 
+
+
+TimeForms 131 
+
+
+which we alluded previously, receives Plato’s customarily magnificent 
+allegorical depiction. 
+
+
+Plato is at great pains in this work to distinguish mere 
+becoming — the incessant repetition of what went before — from 
+another sort of becoming, in which time serves not merely as the line 
+on which repetition is plotted, but as the mediation by which both 
+memory and society have their being, such that time trans-forms 
+Ideas into realities, which thus become members of the real forms of 
+being. Analogously, time transforms memories into vital social 
+membership. In more classical language, it is Logos that transforms 
+Ananke into Eros. (We will not here discuss the multilation this 
+allegory suffered at the hands of Christian theologists.) 
+
+
+Nor can I emphasize strongly enough the complete error of 
+those interpretations of Plato which impute to him the view that the 
+temporal world here below is merely a copy of the eternal, 
+changeless realm above. This view is expressed in The Republic, but 
+is abandoned and replaced in the Timaios by the view that time 
+transforms mere succession into genuine growth and creativity; in 
+other words, that time is the negation of mere becoming. 
+
+
+What does this mean? It means, in brutal summary, that if we 
+do nothing to change them, things will go on as before; that there is 
+an inertial death (Ananke) in the affairs of men which conspires to 
+keep things as before; and that mere succession holds no promise of 
+change (Logos). And, yet, where we would expect Plato to write that 
+bold imagination paints a future whose compelling beauty pulls us 
+forward into transormative action, we find, on the contrary, that in 
+the Timaios Plato finds the motive for action vot in a naive futurism, 
+but in the vital re-membrance of the past. This is not the reactionary 
+nostalgia so many of his positivist commentators have imputed to 
+him,** because those who remember (re-member) that time and time 
+again, the change whose consummation they devoutly wished did not 
+come about, dooming them to thé sterile repetition again and again 
+of forms of behavior which led nowhere, will not be emboldened by 
+the forecast of another repetition. As long as the time of memory is 
+construed as a linear time, events which succeed prior events cannot 
+
+
+132 TimeForms 
+
+
+be novel; cannot be new; cannot hold the promise of genuine change. 
+It is only when men refuse to repeat what they remember all too 
+bitterly has already occurred, that they “rise above” the one-dimen- 
+
+
+sionality of linear time. 
+
+
+We may illustrate the foregoing with a geometric metaphor, 
+more congenial perhaps to Pythagoras than to Plato. Imagine, if you 
+will, a pencil, moving along a straight line (the familiar “arrow of 
+time”). There is no way for the pencil to include in its movement 
+prior points along the line, as long as the pencil remains on the line. 
+For the successive points on the line to be comprehended (i.e., 
+co-present), it is necessary that we move from one dimension to two, 
+from the line, that is, to the plane. Similarly, to go beyond a merely 
+flat planar surface, all the points on the plane may only be 
+comprehended by adding another dimension, the solid. This much 
+was familiar even to Euclid. It remained for Einstein to show that the 
+three dimensions of the solid may only be transcended in the fourth 
+dimension of time. 
+
+
+Let us translate this geometry into political language. When the 
+laws of an era dictate that the shoemaker must stick to his last, the 
+shoemaker is doomed to the repetitious monotony of performing 
+again and again his act of making shoes. Should he remember that his 
+wish to move beyond what he has already done so many times 
+before, has, so many times before, been prevented by the law, which 
+restricts him to the obdurate repetition of his activity, he may seek 
+recourse to one of two illusory releases: the one, a post-historical 
+heaven in which all injustices will be rectified; or, a contemporaneous 
+“ek-stasis” in which he rises illusorily above his present, only to find 
+himself sole occupant of an empty mysticism. From his prison of 
+incessant repetition, he seeks release either in a post-temporal 
+illusion, or in a transtemporal (epichronic) escape. We should not be 
+surprised to find that it is often the same law which compresses his 
+temporality which is at the same time the staunchest advocate of his 
+post- and trans-temporal illusions, i.e., religion. 
+
+
+TrmEForms 133 
+
+
+It is not without bearing to note that the cobbler’s attempt to 
+“rise above” the compressed time perspective which his repetitive 
+work inflicts on him leads him to the image of a vertical time 
+dimension, as it should. The sadness of the cobbler’s plight is not his 
+imagination of the vertical dimension. This is valid. But no 
+transcendence comes from an illusory attainment of a dimension of 
+time which rises genuinely above mere compressed linearity. 
+
+
+But even Plato does not tell us why some shoemakers refuse to 
+stick to their lasts when their memories inform them that they have 
+never done anything else, and why others do not protest at all. This 
+question, in my view, is absolutely central to the critique of 
+dialectical consciousness, because we cannot be satisfied with 
+insisting that vertical time has value if we do not distinguish when it 
+is illusory from when it is real. We must pass beyond bland assertion 
+that there are kinds of time, that linear time is alienated time, that 
+vertical time is the dimension in which genuine protest occurs. We 
+must enquire not only why some protest, but when. 
+
+
+We may begin our enquiry by focusing on an aspect of time 
+which has unfortunately received more attention by the physicists 
+than by philosophers, the notion of rate of time. Just as Hegel and 
+Marx wrote of the transformation of quantity into quality, so we 
+may explore the transformation of succession into transcendence by 
+enquiring whether an experience is the same when it occurs at 
+different rates. For example, is anger anger when it is sudden and 
+intense, or does anger become violence under these circumstances? Is 
+the industrialization which the United States accomplished in a 
+hundred years comparable to the 50 year industrialization of Russia? 
+The 15 year industrialization of China? Or are these experiences 
+quite different — (one is tempted to say essentially different) because 
+they occur at differing rates? When Marx’s proletarian sells his time 
+per hour in completely repeatable units, is his oppression identical to 
+that of the computer-programmer who processes billions of bits of 
+identical information per second? Is the civil rights activist who 
+demands power now no different than the gradualist, who counsels 
+patience, even though both enlist their efforts in the same cause? 
+
+
+134. TimeForms 
+
+
+We think not. Nor is the death of thousands of unknown 
+soldiers in the war between Athens and Sparta the same as the death 
+of thousands of unremembered Japanese in one hour at Hiroshima. 
+For death is not dying — death, if it be more than a concept, simply 
+occurs, but dying is a process which takes time, as do oppression and 
+liberation. Just as oppression prevents dialectical transformation by 
+compressing experience into monotony, so does a liberating dialectic 
+require a different kind of time, “vertical time.” 
+
+
+If vertical time exists, the beginning of an answer to our 
+question “When do some revolt and others submit?” now begins to 
+emerge. Revolt occurs not simply when oppression exists, but when 
+hope increases and, ‘“‘at’’ the same time, the rate of oppression 
+mounts, such that even post-temporal illusory hopes are dashed. 
+When people begin to sense that the very pace of their oppression is 
+so rapid that it exceeds the pace of their hope for transcendence, 
+such that their efforts at change will be outpaced, when even their 
+illusory hopes become untenable. 
+
+
+This kind of sensitivity is exquisitely delicate. It resembles the 
+perception of a man about to be toppled by winds of gale force, who 
+in one moment will lean forward ever so slightly to brace himself for 
+the next onslaught; and in the next moment, bend a little to deflect 
+the head-on force he faces. Unlike the fly who pounds again and 
+again against the window pane, a man remembers and comprehends 
+the last rush of wind in his attempt to face the next one. So to speak, 
+he negates the mere pastness by creating a new effort in which the 
+meaning of the past is dialectically transformed. The name of this 
+quality is courage, without which time merely buries memory — with 
+it, memory may be transformed into vision. 
+
+
+Simply stated, then, we must learn to see not only that 
+enforced repetition is lifeless and mechanical, but that the negation 
+of mere repetition is provoked when the rate discrepancy between 
+repetition and transcendence (losing and gaining) becomes impos- 
+sibly oppressive. Yet we must move into a new dimension of 
+temporality in our efforts to transform mere repetition, since 
+
+
+TimeForms 135 
+
+
+otherwise we leave behind the angry memory of mere repetition on 
+which bold imagination feeds. 
+
+
+Freud was not unaware of this. Does he not portray the 
+compulsion to repeat as due to the “inability” of the repressed to 
+enter consciousness, i.e., to enter real time? 
+
+
+Conflict theorists will be quick to point out that such a 
+portrayal of courage would be an exercise in romantic existentialism, 
+if the time dimensions discussed pertained only to an asocial 
+experience. ‘‘What,”’ they will ask, ‘have you to say when, from the 
+halls of leisure, the lawmakers send an edict that the oppressed will 
+be disloyal if they do not continue as before?” The point of this 
+objection may be re-phrased in the following way: When, from their 
+position of pseudo-eternal power in vertical time, masters insist that 
+slaves remain on the line — that it is in the nature of slaves not to 
+transcend — we begin to see that the shaping of temporal experience 
+is the central instrument of political oppression. 
+
+
+Let us take two contemporary examples: the drug subculture in 
+the United States and the Red Guards in China. It is well-known that 
+the most terrible rates of drug addiction in the United States are to 
+be found in the inner ghettos of its huge cities, and that to the extent 
+that addiction is prevalent, to the same extent need little violence be 
+feared. It is as if narcotics anesthetized violence for those whose 
+oppression is nearly complete, since not merely generations of 
+poverty have been inflicted on the residents of these areas, but in 
+fact there has come into being a whole culture of alienation which 
+oppresses them faster than ever. As Laing has written: 
+
+
+From my own clinical practice, I have had the impression 
+on a number of occasions that the use of heroin might be 
+forestalling a schizophrenic-like psychosis. For some 
+people, heroin seems to enable them to step from the 
+whirling periphery of the gyroscope, as it were, nearer to 
+the still centre within themselves.* 
+
+
+136 TimeForms 
+
+
+We might pose a question here of the following sort: If the gyroscope 
+is whirling so rapidly that those in the periphery of its arms will be 
+thrown off with centrifugal force, perhaps heroin creates a tenr 
+porary feeling of temporal stillness. But the poverty of this sort of 
+temporality lies exactly in its short-lived “temporary” duration. 
+
+
+The pitiful attempts to reduce the incidence of addiction by 
+temporizing with offers of equal opportunity for monotonous 
+degrading work emerges in this connection for what it is — an 
+attempt on the part of the establishment to preserve the status quo 
+by tossing a few bones to the mad dogs without altering one whit the 
+barbarous cages in which they are forced to live. Addiction in 
+America is overwhelmingly the condition of black adolescent males. 
+It subsists in a hugely lucrative market situation which not only 
+prescribes but asks the victims to pay for a temporizing peace above 
+and beyond a faltering civilization. 
+
+
+The same may not be said of the Red Guards, who cannot be 
+accused of attempting to retreat into an epichronic illusion. They 
+were not prevented from efforts to participate politically in their 
+society. But we must ponder two questions: 1. Shall we endorse 
+their “violence”? 2. Is their vision of a post-contemporary China 
+illusory in any degree, ie., do they, like the early Christians, seek 
+heaven forever after? 
+
+
+In both cases we confront an intergenerational stratification 
+wherein age, not production, becomes the stratifying criterion. It is 
+by now a commonplace to observe that teenagers the world over are 
+resorting to one or another of the strategies cited above: some resort 
+to revolution, others resort to anaesthetic drugs. This is because the 
+rate of change of their civilization now exceeds the rate at which 
+they are socialized. They, like he who faces into the winds of change, 
+perceive exquisitely that the styles of becoming which gave birth to 
+their growing personalities are out of synchrony with the world they 
+must experience. They perceive, in short, that they are required to 
+repeat forms of life which are outmoded, i.e., dead. 
+
+
+TimeForms 1387 
+
+
+In all of the illustrations presented above, we may observe the 
+phenomenon of rate discrepancy. In each of them, a group has 
+arrogated to itself the pseudo-eternal right to decide which kinds of 
+time belong to whom. But we must question the banality of the 
+perspective which says that slow anger is tolerable, but quick 
+violence is not; that gradual industrialization is democratic but rapid 
+industrialization is totalitarian; that civil rights will gradually be 
+achieved, but not now. We may also see that some drugs serve only 
+too well to anesthetize the violence of bourgeois values; and we must 
+ponder whether there are alternatives to the forms of violence which 
+seem necessarily to accompany full political participation. 
+
+
+Perhaps an interim summary of this doctrine which holds that 
+rate discrepancies constitute a new form of oppression, to which we 
+have given the name acbhrony, is in order. It might read approximate- 
+ly as follows: We have a sense of rate in our experience which derives 
+equally from vital memory and imaginative vision. When the pace of 
+experience gains on hopes for transformative and vital change, men 
+see genuine goals and bend their labours toward them. When, 
+however, men perceive the rate of receding visions to exceed the 
+rates of their own powers, they are tempted either to revolution or 
+to despair. The fine line between those who protest and those who 
+submit must be drawn not along a path of mere becoming, but must 
+be envisioned in a time context in which the different kinds and 
+dimensions of time are fully drawn. Persons, institutions, genera- 
+tions — indeed, whole cultures may torture themselves and each 
+other by failing to attend, not merely to dialectical alternatives, but 
+to the rates at which dialectical transformations must exceed the 
+rates of anti-dialectical temporal compressions. 
+
+
+If anxiety demands too much time between the impulse and the 
+gratification; if blind alienation prevents dialectical growth; if 
+anguish describes the impossibility of ‘‘ek-stasis;’ then achrony 
+depicts the destruction of the sense of lived process. Synchrony — 
+“being with it’ —is the experience of dialectical growth, of 
+contemporal transcendence. 
+
+
+138 TrmmeFormMs 
+
+
+C. Synthesis: 
+
+We may begin to account now for Freud’s admitted lack of 
+“progress” when confronted with the issue of time. His was a linear 
+perspective. And yet, in his paper, “On Negation,’*® he made 
+unknowing headway into the field he thought had baffled him. 
+
+
+Similarly, despite his courage in attempting to forge a dialectical 
+Freud on the anvil of Marxian insight, Marcuse has not yet explicitly 
+focused his dialectical genius on a theory of time. 
+
+
+The existentialists rightly wish to rescue human freedom from 
+the linear determinations of a mechanical causality, but in viewing all 
+time as linear and mechanical they were able to preserve a kind of 
+freedom only at the expense of dialectical thought. The genetic 
+epistemologists achieve a richness of descriptive power no less vivid 
+than the phenomenologists, but since both define their spheres in 
+large measure apolitically, they build a certain irrelevance into their 
+work. 
+
+
+These are not the faults of Sartre’s work. Sartre insists that the 
+projects in which men engage be defined in terms of present 
+memories and present goals which are determined by personal and 
+social pastness as well as personal and social futurity — not by a 
+transtemp oral (ecstatic) mysticism, nor by a post-temporal (millenial- 
+ist) illusion. For Sartre as for Marx, the automatic dialectic they 
+attribute to the Hegelian Absolute is false and untenable. Without 
+vital membership in a project-class, history cannot be enacted, nor 
+can the polis be transformed. These, he rightly insists, are the sine 
+qua non of liberation. Unlike those scholars who claim that we must 
+see what is to be done before we do what must be done, Sartre 
+rightly reveals that we cannot see what must be done until we begin 
+to do what must be done. 
+
+
+With the utmost respect for the dignity with which Sartre has 
+assumed the burden of creating the critique of dialectical reason, | 
+suggest that it will be necessary, if his critique is to enjoy theoretical 
+viability, for him to include a critique of non-dialectical time. That 
+
+
+TimeForms 139 
+
+
+is, a hard and courageous attempt must be made to liberate ourselves 
+from the outmoded Western conception that (political) life takes 
+place only in linear chronological time. We must insist that the 
+dimensions of time may be even more numerous and far more rich 
+than the customary depiction of three dimensions of space. We must 
+cease borrowing from bankrupt physicalist philosophies which 
+assume that time is exhausted by the naming of the past, present, 
+and future. We must allow ourselves to be stimulated and provoked 
+by the possibilities of intergalactic voyages which must, somehow, 
+transcend the speed of light (which I, for one, resent). It may be 
+impossible for an electron to be other than it is “at” any given 
+instant. It is not impossible for a man. Nor, for that matter, for a 
+positron.” 
+
+
+Men transcend mere succession when they remember their 
+membership in political classes whose traditions they transform in 
+political projects. It does not suffice mechanically to dogmatize that 
+political events consist of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. It is 
+now more than ever apparent that the concept of time, which Hegel 
+first inserted into Aristotle’s principle of contradiction in a gigantic 
+intellectual leap spanning two thousand years of historical time, must 
+be carried forward another step. For Aristotle, a thing could not 
+both be and not be at the same time. For Hegel, since things both are 
+and are not, they could not simply be ‘‘at” the same time. Marx, like 
+Plato, saw being as historical challenge. Sartre sees being as historical 
+projects. We must begin to fashion a perspective which reveals not 
+merely the necessity to negate mere succession, but to seize power 
+over the rates at which liberations must come about. 
+
+
+Sartre pronounced that existence must precede essence, lest 
+freedom be an absurdity. We must learn to assert that recurrence 
+precedes occurrence; that both remembering and imagination nourish 
+action; that membership is liberating; and that those who demand 
+that we participate too slowly, oppress us. 
+
+
+VERTICAL TIME* ® 
+But does “vertical time” exist? What do the phrases “the 
+
+
+140 TimeForms 
+
+
+vertical dimension of time” and “vertical time’’ mean? The sugges- 
+tion is that Westerners who can snuggle comfortably in the view that 
+space “‘has” three dimensions (line, plane, and sphere) should try to 
+conceive the possibility that time, like space, may have more 
+dimensions than the two which define it as a line. (Past, present, and 
+future are points o7 the line.) 
+
+
+Let us focus.now on the experience of the vertical dimension, 
+and attempt to depict how it is inherently dialectical. It lies in the 
+very heart of that process we call “generalization” to array a large 
+number of common “instances” under one idea, to which we 
+commonly affix a name, which labels it as the class, or set, of all such 
+objects. We usually perform this magic on classes of objects we can 
+see, visually, and for similar reasons, have come to believe that only 
+visible objects lend themselves to the process of generalization. And, 
+since time is something we don’t see, visually, we have come to 
+believe that it is not a member of the class of generalizeable objects. 
+
+
+But this is false, as the astronauts of more than one nation 
+continue to visibly demonstrate. Their trips are vivid proof that a 
+very substantial theory of temporal generalizations does in fact exist. 
+
+
+And, as has been argued elsewhere,*® the LSD trips of those 
+astronauts of inner space we call ‘“‘heads”’ also provide us with proof 
+that times too are experientially generalizeable, that tripping is an 
+experience of temporal generalization, in which the exponents of 
+time, or rates of temporal change, and not simply mechanical 
+succession, are deliberately enjoyed for their own sake. Heads who 
+manage to trip successfully and without discernible damage, are 
+perfectly comfortable with shifting rates of joy. Indeed the more rate 
+changes one enjoys, the better the trip. This is so because acid, for 
+‘theads,”’ seems to confer the mysterious ability to expand the 
+apperception of time, such that, when you have more time to enjoy 
+what you're into, you enjoy it for a longer time.* ° 
+
+
+TimeForms 141 
+
+
+To put it another way — if you experience your experience 
+occurring at a slower rate than your wristwatch, you will feel like 
+you have more time to spend on each experience. However, you 
+aren’t experiencing slower than your wristwatch. In fact, you’re 
+processing more information than usual (for example, your eyes are 
+dilated, letting more light in). Thus, while it helps a little to say that 
+it feels like you’re going slow and your watch is going fast, it is more 
+accurate to say, as heads do, that you’re “high”, as in a higher level 
+of generalization. Another metaphor describing the high is this: 
+imagine walking on your knees, underwater about four feet deep, 
+then standing up into the fresh air and blue sky. Now imagine that 
+the water is clock time, (or, as Heidigger called it, Das Element) and 
+that time is to us what water is to a fish. Now ask yourself — what is 
+this fresh air and blue sky above? It must be another kind of 
+temporal experience. One which generalizes clock time, hence both 
+transcends and illumines it, as a generalization illumines a particular. 
+Clock time is seen as only one of the kinds of temporal experience 
+you can have when you become aware of other kinds. 
+
+
+But how is this possible? Isn’t there only one kind of time, the 
+succession of one moment after another, that is, what Bergson called 
+duration? Perhaps the physicists are the right people to answer this 
+question. But be prepared even there for a surprising answer, since 
+some physicists are now accustoming themselves to the idea that 
+time is not an invariant, and that not all fundamental qualities (e.g., 
+the positron) are, as they say, anisotropic,** or one directional. And 
+it just may be that there are otber kinds of time if we but knew how 
+to look for them. 
+
+
+But, whatever the physicists find, theoretical and clinical 
+scientists do not have to pore over abstruse mathematical equations 
+to become aware of an experience in themselves and in their 
+constituency of a very common experience, namely, that some- 
+times(!) experience seems to drag, so that minutes seem like hours, 
+and, ‘‘at” other times, experience is so joyful that hours seem like 
+minutes. 
+
+
+142 TimeForms 
+
+
+What I am asking you to imagine, if you have not had a 
+psychedelic experience, is a region of consciousness in which time 
+becomes so elastic that both expanding and contracting time become 
+only two of the qualities of another whole region of temporal 
+experience. In addition, I not only ask you to imagine it, but I 
+suggest that the experience of this region is absolutely commonplace, 
+a common characteristic of every day life. 
+
+
+To understand this, you have but to reflect that a generaliza- 
+tion, amy generalization, consists of arbitrarily drawing an imaginary 
+temporal parenthesis around a number of remembered experiences 
+you have had before, so that you say, in effect, these are all kind 
+“A” and all the rest are kind “‘not A.” That is, as Hegel noted long 
+ago, negation is constitutive of assertion. You must say this is one of 
+these and not those in order to say this is this. You must, as Plato 
+noted long before Hegel, re-cognize in order to cognize at all. 
+
+
+Dialectical theorists are wholly familiar with this line of 
+reasoning, which was sufficient unto the task of describing how we 
+generalize as long as the world moved by at a relatively slow and 
+manageable pace. In such a world, the frequency with which a 
+number of A’s came by was relatively comfortable, and one was 
+under no special press to construct categories to subsume all such 
+A’s. Recall that Aristotle constructed a metaphysic in which 10 
+categories subsumed the entire cosmos. 
+
+
+But now, when the pace at which new A’s enter experience is so 
+fast and furious that we must become specialists in order to manage 
+ever smaller quadrants of daily life, the situation is almost totally 
+different. Marx described an industrial revolution that took a 
+hundred years to elapse. We now process experience via computer- 
+ized machines that change the nature of the environment every ten 
+years. 
+
+
+And heads devise environments in which a dozen movies, 2 
+dozen symphonies and a dozen Kaleidoscopic strobe lights barrage 
+
+
+TimeForms 143 
+
+
+their consciousness with sensations as awesome in number and kind 
+as the birth of a galaxy billions of light years in “‘size.’’ 
+
+
+Confronted by a rate of experience of such stupendous (or 
+mind blowing) complexity, the human kind must attempt to 
+re-cognize faster than ever before. To do so requires wholly new 
+kinds of generalizations. Therefore, we should not be surprised that 
+many people in diverse regions of society have begun to move 
+beyond generalizing only visible objects, by attempting to generalize 
+(invisible) times. Many are beginning to learn how to have such 
+experiences comfortably and joyfully because they know that just as 
+duration generalizes rest, as velocity generalizes duration, as accelera- 
+tion generalizes velocity, so there are other kinds of temporal 
+experience which have as their particulars, changes in the rate of 
+. change. They confirm William James’ view that there are regions of 
+mind as unusually different from our waking consciousness as our 
+waking consciousness differs from our dreams.*? 
+
+
+One of these regions, I hold, is filled with that kind of time 
+heads call “high,” a region which consists of the generalizations of 
+our more banal experiences of duration, velocity, and acceleration. I 
+think we have become aware of it recently, because the number and 
+kind of change-experiences thrust on us by our hurtling cybernetic 
+environment, has made obsolete our usual methods of making 
+generalizations, that is, of recognizing our world in traditional spatial 
+categories. 
+
+
+This view gives us the basis of an answer to our central inquiry, 
+which may now be rephrased as follows. Could it be that a higher 
+more general kind of time may be in conflict with a lower more 
+special time as a meta-message may be in conflict with a message, as 
+in the double bind theory of schizophrenia? That a bum trip consists 
+of the annihilating terror of being in what feels like two different 
+times at once? Could it be that time, which we thought at its very 
+interior core to be of the rate of things, might consist of levels of 
+itself characterized by differing rates of occurrence, such that clock 
+time is only one specific form of experience? 
+
+
+144 TimeForms 
+
+
+The hypothesis is attractive, since it helps to explain why some 
+schizophrenics are described as stuck in “concrete (linear) thinking” 
+while others seem lost in a strange world of racing images. It helps to 
+explain why “talking somebody down from a bum trip” consists 
+essentially in telling him to “go with it” — “get into it” — “ride it” 
+“follow it” “‘it’s allright — it’s all valid experience.” It even helps to 
+explain why it’s called a trip, as if it were a voyage in time. 
+
+
+In this connection, it is instructive to recall the theoretical 
+paradigm of the double-blind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson and 
+his co-workers wrote: 
+
+
+Our. approach is based on that part of communication 
+theory which Russell has called the theory of logical types. 
+The central thesis of this theory is that there is a 
+discontinuity between a class and its members.*? 
+
+
+If we recall that the genesis of a logical class is a generalization made 
+to re-member all experiences of a given kind, it begins to be clear 
+that double-bound (schizophrenic) persons are those told simultan- 
+eously to experience a particular and yet deny validity to the 
+experience of its class. In other words, the bind prohibits the 
+experience of generalization (uniting past and present experiences in 
+a synthesis) yet commands the present experience to be familiar. 
+This annihilation of memory negates the very process of present 
+experience. 
+
+
+Bum trips, like schizophrenia, are therefore well described as 
+failed dialectics, since their pathology results from the negation (of 
+“normalcy”’) not itself being negated. Some therapists encourage the 
+schizophrenic to “‘go on through” the process of madness, since they 
+believe, and, I think correctly, that madness is only the second 
+moment in a dialectical process, that madness itself must be negated 
+after it negates “‘sanity.”°4 The above is only a very fancy way of 
+defining the word “freaky” in the context of a ‘“‘freak out” 
+philosophy, which regards episodes of madness as prerequisite to the 
+achievement of a “‘higher’’ synthesis. 
+
+
+TimEForms 145 
+
+
+In the instance of schizophrenia, our hypothesis suggests that 
+there is indeed a double bind at work in its genesis, but that double. 
+binds are a very special sort of temporal contradiction in which the 
+person is not only asked to remember what he is commanded to 
+forget: he is also asked to experience two different times simultan- 
+eously. Yet this is a patent impossibility unless the person can be 
+made aware that he will not lose his mind but gain another 
+dimension of it by entering a region of experience in which such time 
+conflicts are only special cases of another kind of time, which, if he 
+chooses, he can inhabit comfortably. Unfortunately, few therapists 
+are aware that there is such a region, and therefore find it impossible 
+to offer support and encouragement to a patient who is trying to 
+find it. Therapists addicted to the view that there is only one kind of 
+time, clock time, will obviously not be able to avail themselves of 
+this clinical prerogative. 
+
+
+Vertical time, then, although depicted spatially in our paradigm 
+as a perpendicular to the linear arrow of time, bears the same relation 
+to linear time as the plane bears to the line it generalizes. It is the 
+dimension of all linear times, as well as a kind of time of another 
+sort. Are there even other sorts? The question leads to an 
+examination of the sociology of emotion. 
+
+
+SOCIOGENESIS OF AFFECTIVE PROCESS 
+
+Sociology, at present, seems to be without a theory of 
+emotion.55 We find occasional descriptions of socioeconomic pre 
+dicaments and correlated ‘‘states” of feeling in what are customarily 
+described as cross-sectional studies, i.e., sociological slices of life. But 
+we are still very far from the day when we shall be able to say, with a 
+comfortable degree of certainty, that people in situation “A’’, will 
+probably feel emotion ‘‘a’”’, in ““B’”, “‘b”. etc. When, for example, we 
+speak of an “angry mob,” we do not necessarily mean that each 
+numerical individual feels anger. As Freud aptly demonstrated in 
+Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,°® an angry mob may 
+consist of a few angry men and a majority of decompensated 
+followers. Reductionism of type | looms as a danger here, because, in 
+our day, a feeling is said to be the property of an individual, not a 
+
+
+146 TimeForms 
+
+
+quality of social entities. And yet we say that feelings motivate 
+groups. Thus we may speak of a “restless” people, a “ferocious” 
+people, a “quiet peace-loving” people, and of ‘‘warlike’’ peoples, 
+only by pretending not to reduce the sociological phenomenon to an 
+arithmetic of individuals.* 7 
+
+
+Emotions and feelings, in our view, are the feedback of 
+anticipated actions, the registry of the future, as it were, of altered 
+conditions of social readiness (or unreadiness) in the face of new 
+stimuli, be they fantasies or cultures.6*® Groups, in our view, consist 
+of the patterns of the behaviors of people whose relations to each 
+other are patterned by the groups they form. Thus, what a given 
+individual feels when he behaves in a group is relevent to the 
+question of the social genesis of affect exactly insofar as his feeling is 
+defined as a feeling by those behaviorally concerned with his 
+behavior, including himself. To be sure, the feelings which the person 
+and his “‘others” each feel also shape the patterned interactions in 
+which they engage, but the extent to which there is something like 
+. an emotion feedback which characterizes the pattern in which they 
+are engaged (let us imagine it as a “tough company to work for”’), 
+and the extent to which this pattern priorly shapes what they feel is, 
+it seems to us, much in need of exploration as well as terminology. It 
+was toward the cognitive aspect of this issue, we believe, that 
+Durkheim was moving when he employed the term “collective 
+representation.” Although reductionism is always bothersome it was 
+not the reductionism of his formulation, we believe, but the 
+difficulty of the problem of social affect which seems to have 
+perplexed him, his contemporaries, and his disciples. Thus it received 
+minimal attention. No argument is offered here that we are any more 
+able to tackle the question. We do make a brief, however, for the 
+possibility of investigating the phenomenon of social affect in the 
+context of a temporalist orientation, since, if people have feelings 
+about the quality of their life-processes, and if, as we have suggested, 
+the social conditions which determine the extent to which their lives 
+proceed at satisfactory or unsatisfactory rates simultaneously deter- 
+mine what we are calling social affect, then perhaps the time has 
+come to begin a proper investigation of social affects.° ° 
+
+
+TimeForms 147 
+
+
+Again, our everyday vocabulary provides us with a beginning. 
+We say, for example, that the “mood” of a meeting was “sullen,” 
+‘“anxious;” that a party was exciting, a play, depressing, etc. These 
+macroscopic determinations of the ‘‘emotional” qualities of social 
+groups do not permit of reductionist descriptions. Thus, a cocktail 
+party may be experienced as exciting even if one or two individuals 
+were down and out. If we insist on asking how many people have to 
+be counted as dull before a whole party is said to be dull (type II 
+
+
+reductionism) we barely begin to recognize that groups have 
+_ properties analogous to individual feelings. Yet, somebow, we intuit 
+these holistic estimates. Were we more systematically to investigate 
+the social circumstances of these intuitions, we might find that there 
+are patterns of “group affect.” That these are difficult conditions to 
+“operationalize” no one will deny, but difficulty is not impossibility; 
+let us begin to move beyond static dissections and “snap-shot”’ 
+studies. Since a lengthy exegesis would be inappropriate here, a few 
+introductory remarks about the emotional relation between dialec- 
+tical conceptualizations and the achrony-synchrony paradigm will 
+have to suffice.°° Some clarity is achieved if we ask ‘does 
+acceleration ameliorate the anachronic situation?” or Conversely, “does 
+deceleration ameliorate the metachronic condition?” Do they make it 
+“feel” better? 
+
+
+We are tempted to respond with a categorical ‘“‘no” but that 
+would be aprioristic. The reasoning behind our temptation is as 
+follows: Hegel and Marx, the best protagonists of dialectical 
+thinking, were nonetheless (actually, all the more) creatures of their 
+age, which, it will be remembered, were the halcyon days of 
+Newtonian physics. Newtonian time is linear, regarding past, present, 
+and future as a sufficiently elaborate formulation of ‘“‘actual time.” 
+Yet, even for Hegel and Marx, the extent to which the dialectic of 
+Being — non-Being was resolved in Becoming implicitly involved 
+more than linear continuity. After “A” receives its mediation by 
+“B”’, the new reality, ‘'C’’, is not merely more of “A” or more of 
+“B” or even some sort of “A plus B.” To the extent that synthesis of 
+the antinomy between ‘‘A”’ and ‘‘B” has taken place, to that same 
+
+
+148 TimeForMs 
+
+
+extent, they alleged, did a transcendence, (i.e., a new reality of a 
+“higher order”) emerge.° ! 
+
+
+More concretely, Marx did not write that the condition of the 
+alienated was improved merely because it continued to endure into 
+the future. Actually, the converse is true: the “longer” alienation 
+lasts, the worse does it become.®? Nor, in his view, was it possible 
+merely to accelerate the pace at which “profits’’ were distributed 
+more equitably, since the conditions which motivated the ‘‘capital- 
+ist’’ to retain at the rates at which they retained were as constitutive 
+of their class structure as injustice was constitutive of the class 
+structure of the proletariat. The dialectical negation (revolution) of 
+the oppressive thesis (profit motive) must bring about a mew order 
+- (synthesis), a pattern of social reality whose seeds were sown in the 
+former, but whose fruits are to be reaped only in a wholly new set of 
+social realities. 
+
+
+Similarly, retraining today’s unemployed by allocating monies 
+from today’s profits would, it is argued, present an insuperable (Le., 
+more cost than profit) barrier to “progress” (more profit than cost). 
+Or, in the instance of the adolescent, it is argued that a social 
+structure in which puberty actually brought with it the privileges of 
+adulthood would topple the present social structure of age-status 
+stratification. 
+
+
+Thus, an anachronistic situation is not transformed into a 
+synchronous one merely by hurrying. When the rates of behavior are 
+too slow, acceleration makes them go -faster, not feel better. 
+Someone who goes too slowly doesn’t feel slow, he feels “bad.” 
+Someone who goes too fast doesn’t feel rapidly, he feels distressed. 
+In short, the feelings which characterize the various achronistic 
+orientations are those which characterize an incompleted dialectic. 
+Hegel described “the unhappy consciousness; Marx described 
+prolonged estrangement. 
+
+
+Synchrony, then, is not the middle road between turgidity and 
+rapidity — it is the apperception of harmony which accompanies 
+
+
+TimeForms' 149 
+
+
+generalization. The painter who says “It is going well’ describes a 
+process in which synthesis is occurring at a pace comfortable for his 
+talents, be they mean or inspired. When no generalization, creativity, 
+synthesis, transcendence, growth, development (call it what you will) 
+is experienced, ‘life disintegrates into the dimensions of achrony, 1.€., 
+too fast, too slow, too high, too low, too good, too dull. 
+Synchronization, then, is the dialectical resolution of achrony; 
+achrony is the disintegration of synchrony. When it “goes well,” 
+paradox of paradoxes, we do not notice the time passing. The 
+“interval” between creative urge and creative act lies unmarked: we 
+do not need to “‘pass the time” nor “long for the day” when our 
+hopes will be fulfilled. In short, when we dwell upon the rate of 
+satisfaction, we do not enjoy the process — we criticize it. 
+
+
+Religions have made much of “‘timelessness.” So have Freud 
+and Eliade.°? The perfect simultaneity of desire and fulfillment has 
+been universally extolled as the ultimate happiness of man. This is so, 
+not, in our view, because there is a ‘‘place’’ where this kind of 
+process is actual (whether it be heaven or the id), but because, for 
+each of us, though far too rarely in our lives, we have experienced 
+“times”? in which we needed to note no duration, no passage, no 
+motion. The extreme rarity of these experiences, and conversely, the 
+all too frequent occurrence of forms of achrony, is coterminous with 
+the extent of human pathology. 
+
+
+This helps us to understand how each of the achronistic 
+orientations contains an illusion of synchrony in its portrait. The 
+epichronic timeless heaven seems synchronic, as does the anachronic 
+blissful nirvana. The metachronic utopia resembles the catachronic 
+relief in suicide. In each orientation, there is an attempt to 
+compensate for the lost time, whether it be the “‘injustice of 
+birth’’®* or the attempt to recapture “innocence” or ‘‘paradise lost.” 
+Sensitivities are sometimes modified in such ways to lessen the pain 
+of loss®*® inflicted by death. 
+
+
+It has commonly been observed that cultures very in their 
+definitions of the ultimate good. But the proliferation of the cultures 
+
+
+150 TimeForms 
+
+
+of man need not blind us to the fact that no man, be he “primitive” 
+or contemporary, enjoys mere endurance. All men, it seems, though 
+they variously describe it, have experienced what we here call 
+synchrony, that is, moments in their lives when a harmony of paces 
+was felt so pleasantly that they did not need to ‘‘mark”’ the passage 
+of time. 
+
+
+Thus, synchrony is a dialectical experience, and the various 
+forms of achrony, tentatively described here, represent moments of 
+pain when the pace of experience is without genuine mediation. It is 
+as if there were a beautiful pace of feeling natively within us, the 
+result of the concatenation of our biological, social, and cultural 
+development, which we alter only at our peril. 
+
+
+VARYING VARIATIONS 
+
+We have clocks to measure linear time, “biological clocks” 
+which regulate and synchronize physiological times; are there 
+psychological and sociological clocks as well,®® which measure 
+variant sensibilities to the tempo of experience? How many 
+‘‘dimensions”’ of temporal experience are there? 
+
+
+These inquiries, however basic they seem, are themselves based 
+on the assumption of a uniform, i.e., invariant rate of experience. 
+There are still others. 
+
+
+Let us turn then to the question of non-uniform increases and 
+decreases in the timing of experience. We may begin by inquiring 
+whether we sometimes feel accelerations in the pace of experience 
+which we nevertheless somehow feel to be decreasing accelerations; 
+in other words we know that we are quickening the pace of our 
+achievement, but that the rate of quickening itself is slowing down. 
+The curve of sexual ecstasy reaching orgasm is an example. Another 
+example occurs when we tromp on the accelerator of a very finely 
+tuned car. We first experience an increasing rate of acceleration, in 
+what statisticians refer to as a ‘‘J‘‘ curve. But as we approach the 
+limit of acceleration within that gear, although we are still 
+accelerating, we are picking up speed at a slower rate. Were we to 
+
+
+TimeForms 151 
+
+
+remain in this gear, the statistical description of our speed and rate of 
+acceleration would begin to reverse its slope and taper off, and 
+gradually resemble a plateau. Thus: 
+
+
+To continue the metaphor: If we were engaged in an explora- 
+tion of the performance characteristics of this gear range and of no 
+other, we would begin to apply the brakes in order to bring the car 
+to an eventual halt. And, as any racing driver knows, in our effort to 
+decelerate the vehicle, we do not apply a uniform pressure to the 
+brake pedal, which means that while it is true to say that the vehicle 
+is decelerating, we know that it is not decelerating at a uniform rate. 
+When our foot is on the brake, we are increasing the rate of 
+deceleration, and when our foot is off the brake, although we are still 
+decelerating, we are decelerating less rapidly. Thus: 
+
+
+In this situation anachronizing and metachronizing occur at 
+non-uniform rates. In other words, we may perceive increasing or 
+decreasing acceleration or deceleration. The perceptive reader will 
+note that we have so far restricted our attention to the customary 
+linear dimension of time captured in differential equations. It 
+remains to demonstrate that homological phenomena occur along the 
+other two axes of our paradigm. We present schematically all 
+such possibilities on page 152. 
+
+
+The situation in which the racing car initially accelerates 
+acceleratedly corresponds to our cell ‘‘2b,” that is, it metachronizes 
+metachrony. When it begins to slow down its rate of acceleration, it 
+corresponds to our cell “2a,” that is, it anachronizes metachrony. 
+Similarly, when it slows down initially, more rapidly than it slows 
+down later on, we observe a metachronizing anachrony and 
+eventually, an anachronizing anachrony: (“1b” to “1a” respec- 
+tively). 
+
+
+152. TrmeForMs 
+
+
+ie) 
+ev) Y 
+1o) Z, Z, z S 
+Zz | io) = N & 
+Nn IS Z Z N 
+5 z N z 9 Zz 
+ie) = eo} wa fe) 
+22 |g |2 |z |g 
+om 6) a S) xz rs 
+Gj¢ |£ !2 |8 5 
+s |e |e |e | |é 
+<(@lF b/s @Ol/GM@/=z els fH 
+
+
+» 
+-h 
+
+
+ANACHRONY (1) 
+
+
+oy 
+
+
+ala ia i le 
+wm aN i) an 
+in o Co ion 
+
+
+LS) 
+Qa. 
+N 
+i) 
+rh 
+
+
+METACHRONY (2) | 2a 
+
+
+EPICHRONY (3) 
+
+
+aN 
+aN 
+a. 
+p 
+aN 
+Hh 
+
+
+mn = 
+a a re) a 
+w NS - 
+a a. 
+w mt 
+o o o o 
+
+w 
+
+-h 
+
+
+CATACHRONY (4) |4a 
+
+
+wm 
+eh 
+
+
+HYPERCHRONY (5) 
+
+
+6f 
+
+
+an 
+Qa 
+
+
+HYPOCHRONY (6) 
+
+
+Let us attempt tu describe sociologically related phenomena 
+along the other axes. Imagine a culture in which there is a gradual 
+(i.e. uniform) accumulation of oligarchical political power. One 
+thinks of the coalition of wealthy families who arrogated to 
+themselves the powers of the citizenry of glorious Athens. This 
+“trend” was perceived. In order to “bring down’ the rate at which 
+this oppression of the Athenian population was taking place, the 
+politically jealous would have either to dissipate the rate of 
+power-concentration, or seize power themselves before it was too 
+late: that is, either catachronize the epichrony, or epichronize 
+themselves. (3d, or 3c respectively). More prosaically, we might 
+describe this situation as one in which the pace of political evolution 
+is felt to require either devolution or revolution. 
+
+A full description ot each of tnese achronistic interactions lies 
+beyond the scope of this paradigmatic analysis, and must await the 
+concatenation of data from studies now in progress. However, one 
+further illustration seems in order, since the two examples we have 
+given each illustrate only one dimension of our paradigm. 
+
+
+TimeForms' 153 
+
+
+Imagine a situation in which a young man is “looking forward 
+anxiously’’ to a date with a pretty young woman who has recently 
+entered his ambience. As the appointed hour approaches he becomes 
+increasingly “anxious,” but since the eventual consummation is 
+“nearer” than before, his anticipation is now mixed with a mildly 
+pleasurable eroticism. For a few brief moments he entertains the 
+(paranoid) suspicion that the assignation may not come to pass, 
+which “chills” him momentarily. But he “puts this thought from his 
+mind,”’ and returns to the pleasure of his original fantasy with 
+“heightened”’ anticipation. 
+
+
+We see here an initial increase in his “anticipatory anxiety” 
+which he hypochronizes by envisaging a more pleasurable erotic 
+effect. This fantasy, however, unleashes an even greater torrent of 
+hyperchronic ‘‘anxiety”’ which he handles by increasing the degree of 
+his hypochronization, i.e., denial of ‘“‘anxiety.” He attempts to 
+achieve, as it were, a “euchronistic” equilibrium. 
+
+
+It will be noted that without the actual experience which he so 
+fondly awaits, a genuinely “synchronous experience” will not be 
+had. This serves to refocus our attention on the abstract character of 
+the above illustrations, since, quite obviously, not only the diagonal, 
+but the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of the paradigm are 
+requisite for a fully synchronous experience. As noted above, the 
+empirical description of complicated life processes which demon- 
+strate the co-constitutive mutuality of the axes of paradigm remains 
+to be accomplished. It should not be necessary to point out that 
+actual occasions will not be easily described only by resorting to 
+simple pairs of adjectives; we expect that social processes will trace a 
+crooked line through our neat and hence naive categorizations. That 
+this is the predictable fate of ‘‘ideal types’’ is well known. 
+
+
+For example, accelerating decelerations and decelerating accel- 
+erations are far simpler phenomena than those we find incarnated in 
+the cross-cultural universal we call music. Were we to devote some 
+attention here to repeating rates and varying durations between 
+
+
+154 TimeForms 
+
+
+them, and to some of the archetypes of rhythm, tempo, cycles, and 
+other forms of periodicity, we would risk opening the temporal 
+typologist’s pandora’s box. 
+
+
+It is sometimes speculated that the first form of time which the 
+unborn organism experiences is the maternal heartbeat, of which the 
+organism becomes ‘“‘aware’’ through the periodic surgings and 
+swellings in its intrauterine abode. Others are of the opinion that the 
+prenatal organism is made aware of the beats of its own heart 
+through its own periodic swellings and pulsations. Thus, in the 
+“preemy” nurseries which are charged with the responsibility of 
+providing the neonates with an environment which most resembles 
+the uterine paradise from which it may feel “untimely ripped” it has 
+been found that the placement of clocks, metronomes, or other 
+rhythmic devices correlates very highly with apparent decreases in 
+infant discomfort and increases in metabolic well-being. Similar 
+experiments with animals have resulted in similar findings.® 7 
+
+
+Graphically, we depict such recurrences as “‘periodic functions” 
+and we are accustomed to measuring the intervals between peaks and 
+troughs of such mathematical entities as sine curves, and of other less 
+uniform functions, such as brain waves. We draw attention here to 
+the fact that little attention has been paid to related phenomena in a 
+sociological way. Moore’s work is instructive.°® Pareto’s cyclical 
+theory of history is also a case in point, as is Sorokin’s typology of 
+civilization processes. So is Gurvitch’s work.°? Some have alleged 
+that the cyclical theory of “eternal return” was opened out in the 
+“Judeo-Christian” conception of history wherein man, from his 
+transcendental beginning in the Godhead, proceeds through a linear 
+history toward his ultimate transcendental transfiguration; others see 
+in this only a larger circle. Even Engels seemed unable to defeat this 
+image, falling into an interpretation that the Universe endlessly 
+repeats itself, the corollary of which seems to be that man has been 
+before and will be again, yet strive we must for THIS dialectic must 
+be fulfilled. From such a frame of reference, even Spengler’s dreadful 
+anatomy of human times seems a relief. In short, although the 
+
+
+TimeForms 155 
+
+
+phenomenon of periodicity has been paid attention in fields of 
+endeavor as far removed as embryology and the so-called “philos- 
+ophy of history,” yet little attention has been devoted to non-linear 
+patterns of occurrence on small group levels of analysis,?° or, for 
+example, in large organization analysis. 
+
+
+And yet, the units in which we measure time for ourselves are 
+ALL recurrent, since recurrence lies at the very heart of what we call 
+time. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, 
+each, in our language, recur. It was this need to recognize the unit of 
+measure which drove Plato to paint his theory of knowledge as an 
+allegory in which the soul was enabled to know a reality because it 
+remembered the true reality (of which the present was only a copy) 
+originally experienced in the eternal (unrecurring) realm of “Truth.” 
+(We pass over the fact that this allegorical depiction has been seized 
+upon by the literal-minded, as Plato’s final words on the subject of 
+cognition.) We meet here a terribly difficult epistemological paradox 
+which has not been resolved even in the wonderfully sophisticated 
+laboratories of the learning theorists, for (to paraphrase Heraclitus) if 
+we have never confronted the phenomenon before, we seem to be 
+without standards for its recognition. Yet, if we have met the 
+unknown thing on some other occasion, it is not unknown. In the 
+former instance, the phenomenon is unintelligible; in the latter, 
+trivial. Even the psychoanalysts, who assert that we compare new 
+experiences to phantasies in order not to be overwhelmed by their 
+novelty, have not been able to establish to their mutual satisfaction, 
+how we handle “original” phantasies. That Jung’s “archetypes” were 
+offered as a solution to this problem is as well known as its many 
+criticisms. Equally well-known is Sartre’s rebellion from the position 
+which asserted that the models (nee essences) of realities, were they 
+to pre-exist the realities themselves, would foredoom man to a sterile 
+repetition of already blueprinted situations, thus making human 
+freedom a mockery and an illusion. 
+
+
+In short, if we do not accede to a prior criterion of 
+measurement, we cannot measure; yet, if we accede, we seem to 
+preclude novel measures. Of course, this theoretical trap does not 
+
+
+156 TimeForms 
+
+
+ensnare our actual experience, since there is a huge difference 
+between understanding what we do and actually doing it. We make 
+“serendipitous” discoveries all the time, without having a theory of 
+serendipity. Our purpose in outlining these theoretic pitfalls is 
+precisely to point out that the familiar and the linearly recurrent are 
+not the sole criterion but a criterion, so that we may the more 
+readily distinguish between the two. It is well known that Einstein 
+had to define anew in order to transcend the limits of Newtonian 
+physics. Equally familiar is the description of the conservative wis a 
+vis the progressive: the one “holds onto” the familiar, the other 
+“embraces” novelty. In Mertonian terms, these are the ritualist versus 
+the innovator. In our view, special attention needs to be devoted to 
+the time-sense of these personnel, since it may well be that the 
+specific content clung to or sought for is irrelevant to the social 
+dynamics of those who prefer the recurrent to, shall we say, the 
+occurrent. 
+
+
+Let us pass from these cerebral devices to an illustration more 
+appealing to the viscera. In matters of music, we confront a richness 
+of variation in temporality unsurpassed, it seems to us, in any other 
+field of human effort. Until very recently, music was written with an 
+indication to the performer that a certain measured tempo was to be 
+followed throughout, and that the insertions of artistry permissible 
+to the performer and the conductor were to be made within such 
+composerly limitations as were contained in such phrases as “‘allegro 
+con vivo’ or “crescendo molto vivace”’ etc. More generally, we know 
+that some cultures seem to have a preference for slow and moody 
+symphonies, others seem taken with Jazz; some prefer marches, 
+other, festival dances. It would seem that there are favorite rhythms, 
+not only in individuals but in whole social entities, such as cultures, 
+sub-cultures, and even smaller groups which we occasionally desig- 
+nate as afficionados. 
+
+
+These poor illustrations serve to focus our attention on the fact, 
+well known but little studied, that people seem to have variant 
+experiences of periodicity, and that we might do well to investigate 
+
+
+TimEForms 157 
+
+
+the relations between the durations and recurrences which character- 
+ize what we might call social rhythms. From Freud’s “repetition 
+compulsion” to Pareto’s cycle of elites, there is a very large area of 
+virtually unexplored territory. Nietzsche’s eternal return may not, in 
+some future study, turn out to be very different in motive energy 
+from Rank’s postulated wish to rebecome the placid foetus, nor may 
+it be unlikely that the Utopian linearist differs significantly in 
+temporal form from his younger brother, the adolescent impatient 
+for adult sexual privilege. 
+
+
+To phrase these matters in our own language, we might write 
+that human life seems to embody not only variant speeds, variant 
+accelerations and decelerations, and variations in the uniformity or 
+non-uniformity of these parameters of observation, but seems also to 
+consist of recurrences of events of varying intervals and periodicities. 
+Were this not so, we might derive views of the real world as utterly 
+repetitious and therefore uninteresting, boring, even fatally irrelevant 
+to experience, or, on the other hand, so filled with novel unfamiliar- 
+ity that the very attempt to find pattern and order is doomed to 
+failure.?* In language which some will deem more properly 
+sociological we might point out that, so to speak, the “function” of a 
+norm is to render predictable in some degree a behavior which would 
+otherwise be unpatterned, chaotic, and hence, a-social. To the extent 
+that the stranger speaks in words we have learned to recognize as our 
+own, is he not strange; to the extent that events are commensurate 
+with our expectations, to that extent may we direct our behavior to 
+whatever outcome we desire. However, the converses are also true: 
+the stranger with whom we cannot communicate stirs up a 
+restlessness; the scene in which we may not in any sense predict the 
+outcome of our behavior will demolish our behavioral repertory. In 
+sum, recurrence precedes occurrence; it isn’t “logical,” but it’s true. 
+When it doesn’t, in the ways we have outlined above, we have 
+achrony, in varying degrees and types. And yet, as we have outlined 
+above, synchrony includes novelty; creativity, paradoxically, is never 
+ex nihilo but always de novo. 
+
+
+158 TimreForms 
+
+
+THE VIDECHRON 
+
+Two sets of experiments we have been conducting constitute 
+pilot studies designed to investigate these phenomena. One is frankly 
+modelled after Sherif’s now classic studies in the ‘‘auto-kinetic 
+phenomena.”7? In his design, subjects in a dark room were asked to 
+report how far a light was moving. It was found that isolated subjects 
+could be induced to cluster their responses around a group mean, 
+that the mean was variable and subject to experimental alteration by 
+the introduction of “‘liars.”’ 
+
+
+We proceed as follows. Subjects are seated (alone, in groups; we 
+vary it) in a room, for a standard interval (say 10 minutes). They are 
+then asked how long they think they were in there. Some subjects 
+are given busywork (routine tasks), others are given important work 
+(this takes a little interviewing). They are asked about durations. 
+“Liars” are introduced to alter means. Differences are highly 
+interesting, and will be reported as soon as we can write them up 
+systematically. We were looking for differences in hypothecated rate 
+thresholds, and we found them. So much for Box III. 
+
+
+We were bothered, however, by the artificiality of the experi- 
+mental situation. What we needed was a situation in which small 
+groups were engaged in actual (not experimentally induced) interac- 
+tions, whose pace we could modify without creating an unlifelike 
+situation. 
+
+
+As luck would have it, we were invited to investigate the 
+patterned interactions that took place in what was called ‘‘Multiple 
+Family Therapy,”7? a situation in which several families together 
+with their identified adolescent schizophrenic patients, a therapist 
+and an observer (ourself) experienced 90- minute therapy sessions. 
+
+
+Hypothesizing that varying rates of interaction would fit our 
+paradigm, we naively tried to make intelligent observations during 
+the sessions. We were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer complexity 
+of the data. Tucking our catachronic tails between our legs, we slunk 
+away for simpler pastures.” 4 
+
+
+TimeForms 159 
+
+
+We were aware that Cornellison’® and his co-workers had done 
+some interesting things in psychiatric research, such as showing the 
+film “Snake Pit” to a back ward of schizophrenic patients, i.e., a 
+snake pit. They liked it. Cornellison also showed snapshots of 
+patients, taken during therapeutic interviews, to the patients. 
+Catatonics who had long been severly withdrawn responded dramati- 
+cally, reentered the arena of social communication, and began the 
+long road to recovery. 
+
+
+Henry Murray has reported on some aspects of a series of 
+experiments in which he and his associates engaged.7® As usual, the 
+design of Murray’s study is fascinating, and as usual, he attempts to 
+study those aspects of personality which everyone agrees are most 
+intriguing but which seem to most investigators to be least amenable 
+to experimental observation. 
+
+
+Briefly, Murray and his co-workers have devised a dialogue to be 
+filmed and then shown to the participants. Each of the two members 
+of this proceeding have exchanged written autobiographical state- 
+ments which pretend to reveal deep values and other philosophical 
+reflections on the conduct of experience. During the discussions of 
+these values, one member of the dialogue suddenly descends into a 
+vituperative polemic, much to the other’s astonishment. Presumably 
+(or perhaps axiomatically), this switch in plan from a pleasant 
+discussion of life’s values to an anxiety-laden defense of one’s 
+metaphysics provokes behavior which will correlate with rises and 
+falls in ‘‘measurable” anxiety levels. Because the subject (he upon 
+whom the barrage of insult falls) is asked to write what he 
+remembers of the session at various time intervals after it has 
+happened, and because he is confronted with tape recorded and 
+filmed documents of this actual occasion,’?’ the experimenters are 
+able to estimate the relation between re-exposures and retention, 
+redintegration, retroactive inhibition, etc. Although this seems to be 
+the best of all possible worlds in which to measure anxiety and its 
+consequences, an experimental design on which we have been 
+working during the course of a series of pilot studies conducted 
+during the last few years, embodies a principle very similar to 
+
+
+160 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+Murray’s, yet offers some peculiarly Murrayian advantages lacking in 
+Murray’s own original design. 
+
+
+Instead of filming a proceeding which involves only two 
+persons, we have been recording proceedings at various levels of 
+numerical and sociological complexity on television tape.’*® This has 
+several advantages of which the following is perhaps the most 
+noteworthy. Since television machines record instantly on electro- 
+magnetic tape, there is no film developing tme required for the 
+playback. In effect, this means that a group may re-experience the 
+proceeding immediately after (indeed, during) a session or at variable 
+time intervals thereafter. By telerecording their re-experience as 
+many times as we wish or by editing the playback for sound or 
+speed, we may begin to investigate the temporal aspects of group 
+process in a temporal way. To put the matter differently, we may 
+vary the temporal aspects of the proceeding in order to observe the 
+subjects’ estimates of the temporal aspects of the proceeding. In 
+short, the telerecording design allows the investigator to vary time, 
+instead of pretending that time is a constant for all interactions. The 
+fact that we may then record proceedings of variable ‘‘times’”’ and 
+measure their inexperienced duration comes to us as an added 
+benefit. The decision to allow subjects to witness their behavior 
+during the playback has led to some interesting tests of the extent to 
+which an individual’s anxiety is a function of the group apperception 
+of time. 
+
+
+It is usually claimed that the record of a therapeutic session 
+presents the patients with the reality of the situation, and that 
+repeated re-exposure acquaints him with it in a healthy way. If it 
+should emerge that repeated exposure to a proceeding in which one 
+is involved (what Cornellison has called “self-image experience’) is of 
+potential clinical application, we would not be unhappy. 
+
+
+Perhaps a slightly more technical paragraph will be permitted. 
+We are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the use of “projective 
+tests.” We know that people will ‘‘distort’”’ photographs, drawings, 
+stories, sentences, in proportion as they need to do so. This helps us 
+
+
+TimeForms 161 
+
+
+to understand their needs and ‘“‘press’”, since we assume we 
+understand the projective devices. If we represent an audio-visual 
+record of an actual proceeding, we may find that some significantly 
+
+
+new temporal dimensions of the personality become visible to the 
+researcher. 
+
+
+More specifically, our pilot studies indicate that the assemblage 
+of television equipment, including a fixed camera which transmits to 
+a tape recorder, which transmits to a monitor (an assemblage we call 
+the Videchron), permits us to vary one aspect of experienced time for 
+
+
+the experimenial study of actual occasions. The theory is relatively 
+simple. 
+
+
+Note that while you speak, you listen to your speech, editing, as 
+it were, as you go along. You can’t see your facial gestures, even if 
+you try, unless you see a murror. But the mirror is simultaneous 
+editing. Unless you are uncommonly “reflective,” you may not 
+notice that you sometimes talk and gesticulate very rapidly, at other 
+times very slowly. With the Videchron you have the opportunity. 
+
+
+Now imagine that you are witnessing a group discussion in 
+which you were a participant, but that the playback is taking place at 
+a very slow rate. You will now have more time to feel what you felt 
+then at clock-time. Conversely, if we play back faster than the-rate at 
+which we originally recorded, you now have less time to feel what 
+you then felt. By varying the rates of playback, we can find when 
+you’re comfortable, when you’re not. And if we ask you how you 
+felt, you don’t have to re-behave, which would re-introduce your 
+
+
+editing. 
+
+
+Next we put you in a fast-moving group, a slow-moving group, 
+an alternating group, etc., until we find a pace, or a pattern in which 
+you feel comfortable. We expect, by clever interviewing, to find the 
+circumstances in which you adopt varriouus achronistic orientations. 
+Although it is too soon to report significant statistics, the trend 
+seems to be that individuals have mean pace-thresholds which groups 
+can vary somewhat, that groups have mean pace-thresholds that 
+
+
+162 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+individuals can vary, somewhat, and that pace sometimes acts as an 
+independent variable, sometimes dependent. 
+
+
+The Videchron enables us to experimentally investigate aliena- 
+tion, anomie, and anxiety on the small group level. By devising 
+production-distribution-consumption schedules as tasks for small 
+groups, we may induce alienation by the application of injustice. 
+Whether such investigations, which might eventually reveal methods 
+of reducing alienation (other than “violent” revolution), are there- 
+fore moral is an issue which disturbs us. Similarly, by anachronizing 
+the normative structure of a group, or by metachronizing sudden 
+norm changes, we may induce anomie. The moral issue looms here as 
+well. The induction of anxiety, however, has been pronounced 
+ethical by our society, if and when it takes place in professionally 
+conducted therapy sessions. Here social legitimation has been 
+granted, presumably because the therapist permits no more anxiety 
+than the patients can tolerate. But even here, “‘the human kind 
+cannot bear very much reality,” as T.S. Eliot said.” ° 
+
+
+Space does not permit a more exact description of the 
+experimental ramifications of the achrony-synchrony paradigm. 
+Among the issues which we must leave to another time are the 
+relationship between the forms of anxiety (e.g. “separation,” 
+“castration”) at phase-appropriate stages in the socialization of the 
+child, and the achronistic orientations which develop as ‘‘defenses” 
+against them. We intend also to explore the notions of immortality, 
+timelessness, and their relation to the experience of mortality and 
+death. Freud himself wrote: 
+
+
+Again and again I have had the impression that we have 
+made too little theoretical use of the fact, established 
+beyond doubt, of the unalterability by time of the 
+repressed. This seems to offer an approach to the most 
+profound discoveries. Nor unfortunately have I myself 
+made any progress here.® ° 
+
+
+Thus Freud invites inquiry into the relation of time and anxiety 
+
+
+TimeForms' 163 
+
+
+explicitly, while Marx and Durkheim do not. The relevance of the 
+achrony-synchrony paradigm to the notions of alienation, anguish, 
+and anomie, hinted at above, require further exploration. We are 
+presently engaged in this undertaking, under the hypothesis that 
+discrepant rates of behavior in different sectors of the social system 
+
+
+may serve as indices for predicting when human pathology will 
+occur. 
+
+
+SUMMARY: 
+
+By focusing on experienced time and on rates of behavior, a 
+paradigm of variants of time-experience was presented. An experi- 
+mental technique for the investigation of varieties of felt time was 
+discussed, as were correlations with the concepts of alienation, 
+anomie, and anxiety. Pilot studies in this area were described, as were 
+possible implications for further research. 
+
+
+EPILOGUE 
+
+If the reader who found himself made uncomfortable by the 
+anacoluthic style of my work, which hops from one discipline to 
+another frequently without benefit of logical nexus, will bear with 
+me for a few more paragraphs, I would like him to know whereof it 
+comes. That my principal mentor is Galileo was made apparent in my 
+point of departure. But my hubris is larger, since I take my task to be 
+the founding of a new cross-disciplinary science, which I would like 
+to call “chronetics.’”’ Groping toward that purpose, I have drawn 
+considerable consolation from Einstein’s forward to the “Dialogue 
+concerning the two Chief World Systems,” where he wrote: 
+
+
+It has often been maintained that Galileo became the 
+father of modern science by replacing the speculative 
+deductive method with the empirical experimental meth- 
+od. I believe, however, that this interpretation would not 
+stand close scrutiny. There is no empirical method without 
+speculative concepts and systems: and there is no specula- 
+tive thinking whose concepts do not reveal, on closer 
+investigation, the empirical material from which they stem. 
+To put into sharp contrast the empirical and the deductive 
+
+
+164 TimeForms 
+
+
+Galileo’s disposal were so imperfect that only the boldest 
+speculation could possible bridge the gaps between the 
+empirical data. (For example, there existed no means to 
+measure time shorter than a second)... His endeavors are 
+not so much directed at ‘factual knowledge” as at 
+“‘comprehension.’’®! 
+
+
+Chronetics should consist of both. And more. Much more. 
+
+
+TimEPorms’~= 165 
+
+
+NOTES 
+
+
+166 ‘TimEForRMS 
+
+
+Chapter 1: 
+
+
+L; 
+
+
+10. 
+
+
+Leuner, H., “President State of Psycholytic Therapy and Its 
+Possibilities” in The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcohol- 
+ism, H. Abramson (ed.). Bobbs Merrill, New York, 1967. 
+
+
+. Becker, H., “History, Culture, and Subjective Experience: an 
+
+
+exploration of the social bases of drug induced experiences,” 
+Journal of Health and Social Behavior (1969). 
+
+
+. Cheek, F., “Exploratory Study of Drugs and Interaction,” 
+
+
+Archives of General Psychiatry, 9:566-574, 1963. 
+
+
+. Mechaneck, R., Feldstein, S., Dahlberg, C. and Jaffe, J., 
+
+
+“Experimental Investigation of LSD as a Psychotherapeutic 
+Adjunct.” Paper read at 1967 AOA meeting. 
+
+
+. Linton, H. and Lang, R., “Subjective Reactions to LSD-25,” 
+
+
+Archives of General Psychiatry, 6:352-368, 1962. 
+
+
+. Blum, R., et al., Utopiates. Atherton Press, New York, 1964. 
+. Cohen, S. Personal communication. 
+
+
+. Masters, E. and Huston, J., The Varieties of Psychedelic 
+
+
+Experience. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1966. 
+
+
+. Gioscia, V., “Adolescence, Addiction, and Achrony” in Person- 
+
+
+ality and Social Life, R. Endleman (ed.). Random House, New 
+York, 1967. 
+
+
+Laing, R. D., The Politics of Experience. Penguin Books, New 
+York, 1967. 
+
+
+TimEForms 167 
+
+
+Chapter 2: 
+
+
+A, 
+
+
+2. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘““Adolescence, Addiction, and Achrony,” op. cit. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., “Glue Sniffing: Exploratory Hypotheses on the 
+Psychosocial Dynamics of Respiratory Introjection’” in proceed- 
+ings of a conference on Inhalation of Glue Fumes and Other 
+Substance Abuse Practices Among Adolescents, Office of Juvenile 
+Delinquency and Youth Development, U. S. Dept. of Health, 
+Education and Welfare, Washington, D. C., 1967. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘‘Psychological and Sociological Proneness to Drug 
+Use in Young People.”’ Paper presented to Amherst College 
+Symposium “The Drug Scene,” 1967. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., “LSD Subcultures: Acidoxy Versus Orthodoxy.” See 
+Chapter 1, this volume. 
+
+
+. Marcuse, H., Eros and Civilization. Beacon Press, Boston, 1955. 
+
+
+. Marcuse, H., One Dimensional Man. Tavistock Publications, 
+
+
+London, 1967. 
+
+
+Chapter 3: 
+
+
+1, 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., “LSD Subcultures: Acidoxy Versus Orthodoxy.” 
+See Chapter 1, this volume. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘Groovin’ on Time.” See Chapter 2, this volume. 
+Gioscia, V., “On Dialectical Time.” See Metalog, this volume. 
+Status Report #1 of The Village Project, a social agency for 
+
+
+alienated youth sponsored by Jewish Family Service of New 
+York. September, 1968 (mimeo). 
+
+
+168 
+
+
+3s 
+
+
+10. 
+
+
+i 
+
+
+12. 
+
+
+13. 
+
+
+14. 
+
+
+LS. 
+
+
+16. 
+
+
+TimeForMs 
+
+
+Kenniston, K., “Heads and Seekers: Drugs on Campus, Counter 
+Cultures in American Society,” American Scholar, vol. 28, no. 
+1:97-112, 1969. 
+
+
+. Mayday, January 20, 1969, #14. 
+. Gioscia, V., “On Social Time.” See Metalog, this volume. 
+. Gioscia, V., ‘Adolescence, Addiction, and Achrony,” op. cit. 
+
+
+. Dunaif, C. and Gioscia, V., ‘““Violence and Family Process.” 
+
+
+Report to the National Crime Commission, in archives of 
+President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Adminis- 
+tration of Justice, Washington, 1966. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., “Sources of Violence in Contemporary America.” 
+Paper presented to Farmingdale Public Library Association, 
+October, 1968 (mimeo). 
+
+
+Kurland, A. and Unger, S., “The Present Status and Future 
+Direction of Psychedelic LSD Research with Special Reference 
+to the Spring Grove Studies,” January, 1969 (mimeo). 
+
+
+Whitrow, G. J., The Natural Philosophy of Time. Harper 
+(Torchbook), New York, 1963. 
+
+
+Hegel, G. W. F., Logik, 2 volumes. 
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘“‘Plato’s Image of Time.” Ann Arbor, University 
+Microfilms, 1963. 
+
+James. W., Varieties of Religious Experience, various editions. 
+Bateson, G., Jackson, Weakland, D., Hally, J., ‘““Toward a Theory 
+
+
+of Schizophrenia.” Reprint from Behavioral Science, vol. 1. no. 
+4:251-264, 1956. 
+
+
+17. 
+
+
+18. 
+
+
+TrmEForms 169 
+
+
+Laing, R. D., The Politics of Experience. Penguin Books, 
+London, 1966. 
+
+
+Feuer, L., “What is Alienation? The Career of a Concept” 
+Sociology on Trial, M. atom and A. Vidich (eds.), Prentice- ‘Hal, 
+New York, 1963. 
+
+
+Chapter 4: 
+
+
+1. 
+
+
+2. 
+
+
+10. 
+
+
+11. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ““Groovin’ on Time.” See Chapter 2, this volume. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., “On Social Time.” See Metalog, this volume. 
+
+
+. Whitehead, A. N., Science in the Modern World. New American 
+
+
+Library (Various editions). 
+
+
+. Gioscia, V., “Groovin’ on Time.” See Chapter 2, this volume. 
+
+
+. McCluhan, M. and Fiore, Q., The Global Village. McGraw-Hill, 
+
+
+New York, 1968. 
+
+
+. Roszak, T., The Making of a Counter-Culture. Doubleday, New 
+York, 1969. 
+
+. Gioscia, V., “Time, Pathos, and Synchrony.”’ See Chapter 3, this 
+volume. 
+
+
+. Marcuse, H., Negations. Beacon Press, Boston, 1968. 
+
+
+. Ryan, P., ‘‘Cable Television and the Schools,” in Birth, Death 
+
+
+and Cybernation. Gordon and Breach, New York, 1972. 
+
+
+New York Times, January 6, 1969. 
+
+
+With the cooperation of Frank Gillette and others who then 
+constituted The Raindance Corporation. 
+
+
+170 
+
+
+12. 
+
+
+13. 
+
+
+14. 
+
+
+15. 
+
+
+16. 
+
+
+17. 
+
+
+18. 
+
+
+19. 
+
+
+TIMEFoORMS 
+
+
+Ragosine, V., ‘Magnetic Recording,” Scientific American, No- 
+vember, 1969. See also Dow Digest, July, 1969 for a description 
+of Precision Instrument’s ‘Unicorn System.” 
+
+
+The New York Times recently contained the news that the 
+Republic of India was installing just such a system to foster 
+literacy in some 10,000 villages. (This project has since been 
+‘‘cancelled.’’) 
+
+
+Pribram, K., ‘““The Neurophysiology of Remembering,” Scientif- 
+ic American, January, 1969. 
+
+
+New York Times, circa September, 1969. 
+Time Magazine, July 18, 1969. 
+
+
+I am indebted to Dr. Warren Brodey for a stimulating discussion 
+of his “play” (as opposed to “work”) at the Environmental 
+Ecology Laboratory in Boston, and for his presentation at 
+“Grand Rounds” at The Roosevelt Hospital under the auspices 
+of The Center for the Study of Social Change, on October 23, 
+1969. 
+
+
+“Chronetics” is the field which investigates temporal processes. 
+For a fuller description, see ‘‘On Social Time,” Metalog, this 
+volume. 
+
+
+” 
+
+
+e.g. Bateson, G., “Cybernetic Explanation,’ The American 
+
+
+Behavioral Scientist, vol. 10, no. 8, April 1967. 
+
+
+Chapter 5: 
+
+
+a; 
+
+
+ys 
+
+
+Keniston, K., “Notes on Young Radicals,” Change, vol. 1, no. 
+6:25 et seq., 1969. 
+
+
+Grimshaw, A. D., ‘Sociolinguistics and the Sociologist,” Amer- 
+can Sociologist, vol. 4, no. 4:312 et seq., 1969. 
+
+
+10. 
+
+
+12. 
+
+
+13, 
+
+
+14. 
+
+
+TimEForms'§ 171 
+
+
+. Kluckhohn, C., Murray, H. and Schneider, Culture and Personal- 
+
+
+ity. Knopf, New York, 1953. 
+
+
+. Gioscia, V., ‘““LSD Subcultures: Acidoxy Versus Orthodoxy.” 
+
+
+See Chapter 1, this volume. 
+
+
+. Simmons, J. and Winograd, B., It’s Happening. Mark-Laird 
+
+
+Publications, Santa Barbara, California, 1966. 
+
+
+. Shands, H., Semiotic Approaches to Psychiatry. Mouton, The 
+
+
+Hague, 1970. See also Shands, H., War with Words, Mouton, 
+The Hague, 1971. 
+
+
+. Gioscia, V., “The Coming Synthesis: Chronetics and Cybernet- 
+
+
+ics.”” Paper presented to the International Convocation entitled 
+“The Revolution in Values— The Response of the Healer”, 
+sponsored by the American Academy of Religion and Psychia- 
+try, November 14, 1969. See Metalog, this volume. 
+
+
+. McLuhan, M., The Global Village. McGraw-Hill, New York, 
+
+
+1968. 
+
+
+. Gioscia, V., ‘Groovin’ on Time.” See Chapter 2, this volume. 
+
+
+McLuhan, op. cit. 
+
+
+. Gioscia, V., “Time, Pathos and Synchrony.”’ Paper presented to 
+
+
+the Annual Convention of the American Orthopsychiatric 
+Association, April, 1969. See Chapter 3, this volume. 
+
+
+Rabkin, R., “Do You See Things That Aren’t There?” in Origin 
+and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, W. Keup, ed. Plenum Press, 
+New York-London, 1970. pp. 115-124. 
+
+
+Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus logico-philosophicus 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘Groovin’ on Time.” See Chapter 2, this volume. 
+
+
+172 TimeEFormMs 
+
+
+15. The imprinting literature is extensive; see especially Tinbergen 
+and/or Lorenz. 
+
+16. Scheflen, A. E., “On the Structuring of Human Communica- 
+tion,” American Bebavioral Scientist, 10:8-12, 1967. Scheflen, 
+A. E., ‘‘Human Communication, Behavioral Programs and their 
+Integration in Interaction,” Behavioral Science, 13:44-55, 1968. 
+Scheflen, A. E., How Behavior Means, Gordon and Breach, New 
+
+
+York, 1972. See also Birdwhistle, R., Introduction to Kinesics, 
+University of Kentucky Press, Louisville, 1955. 
+
+
+17. McClean, P. D., “The Paranoid Streak in Man,” in Beyond 
+Reductionism. Hutchinson & Co. 
+
+
+18. Mead, M. Culture and Commitment, Doubleday, 1970. 
+
+
+Chapter 6: 
+1. Whitehead, A. N., Modes of Thought. 1938, p. 129. 
+Mead, M., Culture and Commitment. 1970, p. 64, op. cit. 
+Fuller, Buckminster, Utopia or Oblivion. 1970, p. 310, Bantam. 
+4, Fuller, Buckminster, op. cit., epilogue. 
+Chapter 9: 
+
+
+1. Whitrow, G. J., The Natural Philosophy of Time. Harper, New 
+York, 1963. 
+
+
+2. Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, E. S. 
+Haldane (ed. and transl.), 3 vol. Humanities Press, New York, 
+1955. 
+
+
+10. 
+
+
+11. 
+
+
+12, 
+
+
+3. 
+
+
+TimEForms 173 
+
+
+. Durkheim, E., Suicide, J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (eds. and 
+
+
+transl.). Free Press, Glencoe, 1951. 
+
+
+. Freud, S., “Civilization and its Discontents,” Standard Edition, 
+
+
+The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. 
+Strachey (ed. and transl.), vol. XXI. Hogarth Press, London, 
+1964. 
+
+
+. Marcuse, H., Eros and Civilization. Vintage Books, New York, 
+
+
+1962. 
+
+
+. Brown, N. O., Life Against Death. Vintage Books, New York, 
+
+
+1959. 
+
+
+. Indeed the impact of these words was to fashion better, not less 
+
+
+socialization. 
+
+
+. Whitehead, A. N., Science in the Modern World. Macmillan, New 
+
+
+York, 1926. 
+
+
+. The following section is a modified version of a paper entitled 
+
+
+“Typology Construction’”’ delivered at the Eastern Sociological 
+Society, Boston, 1963. 
+
+
+Whitehead, A. N. Process and Reality. Social Science Publishers, 
+New York, 1929. Cf. espec. chapter 2. 
+
+
+Heidegger, M., Being and Time, J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson 
+(transl. from the 7th edition of Sein and Zeit). SCM Press, 
+London, 1962. 
+
+
+De Benedetti, S., ‘‘The Mossbauer Effect,” Scientific American, 
+April, 1960, p. 72 et seq. 
+
+
+Like the Eskimo who has many words for snow, we seem to 
+need literally hundreds of phrases with the word “time” in them 
+to capture the varieties of temporal experience. Professor 
+
+
+174 TimeForms 
+
+
+14. 
+
+
+13: 
+
+
+16. 
+
+
+by 
+
+
+18. 
+
+
+19, 
+
+
+Murray and I discovered, to our mutual surprise, that we were 
+each making a compilation of such phrases (personal communi- 
+cation, 1965). 
+
+
+Kiang Kang-Hu, “How Time and Space Appear to Chinese 
+Poets,” chapter 2 in On Chinese Studies. Commercial Press, 
+Shanghai, China, 1934. (I am grateful to my former colleague 
+Prof. B. Solomon for this reference.) 
+
+
+See for example: V. Gioscia, Plato’s Image of Time: An Essay 
+in Philosophical Sociology, Fordham University, 1962, unpub. 
+Ph.D. dissertation. G. J. Whitrow, op. cit. R. Maclver, The 
+Challenge of the Passing Years: My Encounter with Time, 
+Simon and Shuster, New York, 1962. G. Gurvitch, The 
+Spectrum of Social Time, Reidel Co., Stuttgart, 1963. Coser and 
+Coser, “‘Time Perspective and Social Structure,” in Gouldner, 
+Modern Sociology, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1963, pp. 
+638-646. H. Meyerhoff, Time in Literature, University of 
+California Press, Berkeley, 1955. M. Heidegger, ed., The Phe- 
+nomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, J. Churchill, 
+transl., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1964. See also, M. Wallace, 
+“Temporal Experience,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 57, no. 
+3:213-237, 1960, et al. 
+
+
+Coser and Coser, ‘‘Time Perspective and Social Structure,” in 
+Gouldner, op. cit. for a good initial bibliography. 
+
+
+Mann, T., The Holy Sinners, H. T. Lowe-Porter (transl.). Knopf, 
+New York, 1951. 
+
+
+I am indebted to Prof. B. Nelson of the New School for Social 
+Research for the observation that these eternalists qualify as cell 
+IV types. My view on this appears infra. 
+
+
+Murray, H. and Kluckhohn, C. (eds.), Personality in Nature, 
+Society and Culture (2nd ed.), Knopf, New York, 1954; and 
+Erikson, E., ‘Identity and the Lifecycle,” Monograph, Psycho- 
+
+
+20. 
+
+
+21. 
+
+
+22. 
+
+
+23: 
+
+
+24. 
+
+
+25. 
+
+
+26. 
+
+
+27. 
+
+
+TimeForms’ 175 
+
+
+logical Issues, vol. 1, no. 1, International Universities Press, New 
+York, 1959. 
+
+
+Shakespeare, W., Hamlet (variously reprinted), Act I, Scene V, 
+11, 188-189: “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite. 
+That ever I was born to set it right!” 
+
+
+We hook up an accelerometer, as it were, to the Mertonian 
+paradigm. Cf. R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure. 
+Free Press, Glencoe, 1955. 
+
+
+See “The Pseudo-Successful Adult: A Case Study of the 
+Metachronic Orientation,”’ by V. Gioscia, paper delivered to the 
+17th annual meeting of the New York Society of Clinical 
+Psychologists, New York, 1965. 
+
+
+See, however, the brilliant paper by P. Slater, “On Social 
+Regression,” American Sociological Review, 28:339-364, 1963. 
+
+
+Cf. V. Gioscia, “Groovin’ on Time,” paper presented to the 
+Hahneman Medical College Conference on Psychedelic Drugs, 
+November, 1968. See Chapter 2, this volume. 
+
+
+An advance toward a more empirical analysis of this question 
+has recently been made by my former colleague Herbert Danzger 
+in “Community Power Structure: Problems and Continuities,” 
+American Sociological Review, 29:707-717, 1964. 
+
+
+Eisenstadt, S., From Generation to Generation. Free Press, 
+Glencoe, 1955. See also, A. Van Gennep, Rites de Passage, M. 
+Vizedom and G. Caffee (transl.). University of Chicago Press, 
+Chicago, 1960. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘“Adolescence, Addiction and Achrony,” in Person- 
+ality and Social Life, R. Endleman (ed.). Random House, New 
+York, 1965. 
+
+
+176 TimeFormMs 
+
+
+28. 
+
+
+29. 
+
+
+30. 
+
+
+31, 
+
+
+32. 
+
+
+33: 
+
+
+34. 
+
+
+35: 
+
+
+36. 
+
+
+57, 
+
+
+38. 
+
+
+Remarks elicited on the occasion of a colloquium which 
+Professor Lewis gave at Queens College of the City University of 
+New York on Oct. 30, 1964. 
+
+
+Cohen, A., Delinquent Boys. Free Press, Glencoe, 1955. See 
+also, R. J. Barndt and D. M. Johnson, “Time Orientation in 
+Delinquents,” Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, 
+51:343-345, 1955. 
+
+
+This section is a slightly edited version of a paper presented to 
+the International Congress — Dialectics of Liberation, London, 
+July, 1967. 
+
+
+Freud, S., ‘New Introductory Lectures,” Standard Edition, op. 
+cit., vol. XXII, p. 14. 
+
+
+Marcuse, H., op. cit., pp. 211-212. 
+
+
+For a particularly instructive exigesis of Heidegger’s view of 
+time, see, for example, William Barrett, ‘“The Flow of Time,” in 
+R. M. Gale (ed.), The Philosophy of Time. Doubleday Anchor, 
+New York, 1967. 
+
+
+Marcuse, H., One Dimensional Man. Tavistock, London, 1967. 
+
+
+Cf. M. Natanson (ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 
+Random House, New York, 1963. 
+
+
+For a recent history of the varieties of phenomenological 
+philosophies, cf. H. Spiegelberg, (ed.), The Phenomenological 
+Movement, 2 vols. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1968. 
+
+
+See, for example, his chapter, ‘‘Time Perception in Children,” in 
+J. Fraser (ed.), The Voices of Time. George Brazillier, New 
+York, 1966. 
+
+
+See Bergson, Time and Free Will. London, 1910. 
+
+
+39. 
+
+
+40. 
+
+
+41. 
+
+
+42. 
+
+
+43. 
+
+
+44. 
+
+
+45. 
+
+
+46. 
+
+
+47. 
+
+
+48. 
+
+
+49. 
+
+
+50. 
+
+
+i 
+
+
+52. 
+
+
+TimMEForMs' 177 
+
+
+Fraisse, P. The Psychology of Time. Harper, New York, 1963. 
+
+
+Meerloo, ‘‘The Time Sense in Psychiatry,” in Fraser, Op. cit., pp. 
+235 et seq. 
+
+
+Cf., however, R. Wallis, Time: Fourth Dimension of the Mind, 
+Harcourt Brace and World, New York, 1968, for a cy bernetic 
+treatment without this failing. 
+
+Sartre, J. P., Search for a Method. Knopf, New York, 1963. 
+Gioscia, V. Plato’s Image of Time, op. cit. 
+
+Cf. Popper, K., The Poverty of Historicism. 
+
+Private communication, cited in P. Laurie, Drugs — Medical, 
+Psychological and Social Facts. Penguin Books, New York, 
+1967. 
+
+Standard Edition, op. cit., vol. XIX, p. 235 et seq. 
+
+
+Cf. Wallis, R., op cit. 
+
+
+Portions of this section derive from the paper, “Time, Pathos, 
+and Synchrony.” See Chapter 3, this volume. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘Groovin’ on Time.’’ See Chapter 2, this volume. 
+
+
+Kurland, A. and Unger S., “The Present Status and Future 
+Direction of Psychedelic LSD Research,” with special reference 
+to the Spring Grove Studies, January, 1969 (mimeo). 
+
+
+Whitrow, op. cit., provides the best definition of this term. See 
+also Wallis, op: cit. 
+
+
+James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience, various 
+editions. 
+
+
+178 
+
+
+D3. 
+
+
+54. 
+
+
+55: 
+
+
+56. 
+
+
+57. 
+
+
+58. 
+
+
+59. 
+
+
+60. 
+
+
+TiMEFoRMS 
+
+
+Bateson, G., Jackson, D., Haley, J. and Weekland, J., ““Toward a 
+Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioral Science, vol. 1, no. 
+4:251-264, 1956. See also ‘“‘A Note on the Double Bind — 
+1962” by the same authors in Family Process, vol. 2, no. 1, 
+1963, and Watzlawick, P., “A Review of the Double Bind 
+Theory,” Family Process, vol. 2, no. 1, 1963. 
+
+
+Laing, R., The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 
+Penguin Books, London, 1967, and the other works by the man 
+whom Time magazine calls ‘““The Metaphysician of Madness” 
+(issue of Feb. 7, 1969). 
+
+
+My colleague Richard Rabkin has taken a significant step in this 
+direction, however, in his “Affect as a Social Process,’’ American 
+Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 125, no. 6:85-91, 1968. 
+
+
+Freud, S., “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” 
+Standard Edition, op. cit., vol. XIX. 
+
+
+Gioscia, V., ‘‘Perspective for Role Theory,” American Catholic 
+Sociological Review, vol. 22, no. 2:142-150, 1961. See also, 
+Gioscia, V., “Types of Types” in Expanding Theory and Practice 
+in Family Therapy, N. Ackerman et al. (eds.) Family Service 
+Association of America, New York, 1967. 
+
+
+See M. Marx (ed.), Theories in Contemporary Psychology, 
+Macmillan, New York, 1964, chapter 28: “Affect and Emo- 
+tion,” H. Peters, espec. pp. 440-442. See also: P. H. Knapp, 
+Expression of the Emotions in Man, International Universities 
+Press, New York, 1963. 
+
+
+See, for example, the beginnings of such an_ investigation 
+employing the clinical method in N. Ackerman, Psychodynamics 
+of Family Life, Basic Books, New York, 1958. But also see P. 
+Slater, op. cit. 
+
+
+We intend to spell out these relations more fully in a work now 
+in preparation. 
+
+
+61. 
+
+
+62. 
+
+
+63. 
+
+
+64. 
+
+
+65. 
+
+
+66. 
+
+
+67. 
+
+
+68. 
+
+
+69. 
+
+
+70. 
+
+
+TimEForms' 179 
+
+
+Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Mind, Sir J. Baillie (transl.), 
+2nd ed. rev. Macmillan, New York, 1949. See also Hegel’s 
+Science of Logic, 2 vol. Macmillan, New York, 1929. 
+
+
+See L. Feuer, “Alienation — The Career of a Concept” in 
+Sociology on Trial, M. Stein and A. Vidich (eds.), Prentice-Hall, 
+New York, 1963, pp. 127 et seg. See also P. Berger and S. 
+Pullberg, “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Con- 
+sciousness,” in History and Theory, vol. 4, no. 2:196 et seq., 
+1965. 
+
+
+Cf. M. Eliade, Cosmos and History — The Myth of the Eternal 
+Return. Harper, New York, 1954. 
+
+
+This phrase is one of a number of translations of a fragment of 
+Anaximander. See, for example, The Greek Philosophers, R. 
+Warner. Mentor, New York, 1958, p. 24. 
+
+
+Choron, J., Death in Western Thought. Collier Books, New 
+York, 1963. 
+
+
+The New York Academy of Science recently convened an 
+Interdisciplinary Conference on time, in which the matter of 
+“natural clocks’? received nearly definitive treatment. See their 
+“Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Time,” Proceedings, Journal 
+of the American Academy of Science, 1967. 
+
+
+See, for example, H. F. Harlow, “The Heterosexual Affectional 
+System in Monkeys,” American Psychologist, 17:1 
+
+
+Moore, W., Man, Time and Society. Wiley, New York, 1963. 
+Gurvitch, G., The Spectrum of Social Time, F. Reidel, Dord- 
+recht, Holland, 1964, a work whose intelligibility is hidden 
+
+
+behind an almost impenetrably private vocabulary. 
+
+
+Slater, P., Microcosm. Wiley, New York 1966. Those who seek a 
+
+
+180 TimeForms 
+
+
+“i. 
+
+
+Ts 
+
+
+73. 
+
+
+74. 
+
+
+12. 
+
+
+76. 
+
+
+Td: 
+
+
+78. 
+
+
+paradigm of excellence in their quest for understanding of group 
+affect will find it in Slater’s work. See also his Pursuit of 
+Loneliness, Beacon Press, Boston, 1970. 
+
+
+Cf. Harley Shands, “Coping with Novelty,” Archives of General 
+Psychiatry, vol. 20, no. 1:64-70, 1969. 
+
+
+Sherif, M., “A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception,” 
+Archives of Psychology, no. 187, 1935. 
+
+
+See Laqueuer, H. P., Morong, E., and LaBurt, H., “Multiple 
+Therapy: Further Developments,” International Journal of 
+Social Psychiatry, August, 1964. 
+
+
+Nevertheless, we shall report on these observations eventually. 
+
+
+Cornellison, F. and Arsenian, J., ‘‘A Study of Psychotic Patients 
+
+
+(exposure) to Self-Image Experience,” Psychiatric Quarterly, 34: 
+1-8, 1960. 
+
+
+Murray, H., “Studies of Stressful Interpersonal Disputations,” 
+American Psychologist, 18: 28-36, 1963. See also, Nielson, G., 
+Studies of Self-Confrontation, Munksgaard, Copenhagen, 1962, 
+pp. 221 et seq. 
+
+
+The relevance of these ‘‘moving images” of the self to the 
+theories of Mead, Cooley, and their contemporary “self-image” 
+protagonists remains to be elaborated. 
+
+
+Although videotherapy technique has since come into its own, 
+the theory seems to be emerging far slower than the process. The 
+work of Albert Scheflen is likely soon to remedy this situation. 
+See however, Berger, M. M. (ed.), Videotape Techniques in 
+
+
+Psychiatric Training and Treatment, Brunner/Mazel, New York, 
+1970. 
+
+
+77: 
+
+
+80. 
+
+
+81. 
+
+
+TimMEForms 181 
+
+
+Eliot, T. S. (from “Burnt Norton’’) in Four Quarters, Harcourt, 
+Brace and World, New York, 1943, p. 4. 
+
+
+Freud, S., ‘New Introductory Lectures,” Standard Edition, op. 
+cit., vol. XXII, p. 74. 
+
+
+Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 
+Stillman Drake (transl.), forward by Albert Einstein. University 
+of California Press, Berkeley, 1967. 
+
+
+CONTENTS 
+
+
+Foreword —— Philip Slater 
+
+
+Prologue 
+
+
+1 
+
+
+Is 
+
+
+8. 
+
+
+LSD Subcultures: Acidoxy versus Orthodoxy 
+
+
+. Groovin’ on Time: Fragments of a Sociology of the 
+
+
+Psychedelic Experience 
+
+
+. Time, Pathos, and Synchrony: Accelerating Alienation 
+
+
+. The Coming Synthesis: Chronetics and Cybernation—The 
+
+
+Architecture of Social Time 
+
+
+. Psychedelic Myths, Metaphors and Fantasies 
+
+
+. Metarap: Who You Are Is How You Change 
+
+
+Drugs as Chronetic Agents 
+
+
+Frequency and Form 
+
+
+Metalog—On Social Time II 
+
+
+Notes 
+
+
+PHILIP SLATER, author of /n Pursuit of Loneliness, says 
+that “TimeForms is... 
+
+
+. . an essential work for anyone trying to understand our 
+era, its changes, the counterculture, the future. 
+
+
+... “Clearly, this is the direction in which the exploration 
+of ultimate concerns must go. All events which seem 
+mysterious to us-psychic phenomena, unexplainable forms 
+of communication, transcendental experiences—lend them- 
+selves to explanation in temporal terms. 
+
+
+... “The sense of the interconnectedness of all living things, 
+of the exquisite timing necessary to maintain and express this 
+harmony, has largely atrophied. Hopefully, this volume will 
+assist its reawakening.” 
+
+
+caacmmmemanes. 
+
+
+“SOCIAL CHANGE” SERIES, edited by Victor Gioscia 
+
+
+This series of Gordon and Breach books is edited in tandem 
+with the journal entitled Social Change. The series includes the 
+following books 
+
+
+VARIETIES OF TEMPORAL EXPERIENCE (in four volumes) by Victor 
+Gioscia 
+
+
+BETWEEN PARADIGMS The Mood and its Purpose by Frank Gillette 
+HOW BEHAVIOR MEANS by Albert E. Scheflen 
+
+FOOTHOLDS by Philip Slater 
+
+EARTHCHILD Glories of the Asphixiated Spectrum by Warren Brodey 
+
+
+BIRTH AND DEATH AND CYBERNATION _ The Cybernetics of the 
+Sacred by Paul Ryan 
+
+
+GALAXIES OF LIFE The Human Aura in Acupuncture and Kirlian 
+Photography edited by Stanley Krippner and Daniel Rubin 
+
+
+TOWARD A RADICAL THERAPY Alternate Services for Personal and 
+Social Change by Ted Clark and Dennis T. Jaffe 
+
+
+Other books in the series will be announced as they approach completion 
+
+