path: root/timeforms.otx

‘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). 


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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