Meditações - eficiência, pontualidade

Acceptance of the temporal norm has taken a form which, having passed through a long series of historical transformations, through civilizing and uncivilizing waves, and still in constant flux, is typical of the contemporary world: it has become continuous, uniform, almost without moments of high intensity but very demanding and pervasive. Above all, it has somehow hidden itself from the individual conscience and become perceived subjectively as a personal psychological inclination. [Norbert] Elias notes that those who declare themselves incapable of breaking the rules of punctuality have the impression that they are describing a personal idiosyncrasy rather than admitting the extent to which they have completely internalized a social habitus concerning coordination of times. ‘The time experience of people who belong to firmly time-regulated societies is one of many examples of personality structure which are compelling as biological characteristics, yet socially acquired’ (Elias, 1992: 141). This habitus of worrying about efficiency and punctuality has grown over a long period of history along with other sensitivities and rejections which, put together, are the result of what Elias has analysed as the ‘civilizing process’. In the contemporary world, external temporal restraint transforms itself into self-restraint, an all-pervading acute sensibility to all aspects of the temporal regulation of life.

Simonetta Tabboni