Temporal regimes & imaginaries: The role of the clock in Western development

Submission to the clock and the reverence of temporal exactitude is a decidedly Western contemporary fetish. Its cultural (and historical) specificity is immediately apparent upon surveying other conceptions of the temporal and time-dividing practices found around the world. To cite just one example, Pierre Bourdieu (1990, p. 221) noted how the Kabyle in Algeria profess an attitude of “nonchalant indifference to the passage of time” and harbour a temporal imaginary in which haste is seen “as a lack of decorum combined with diabolical ambition.” More poignantly, for the Kabyle, life is lived “free from the limitations of the timetable” including “work which ignores all obsession with productivity and yields.”

As Mumford (1934) notes, the first modern mechanical clock was invented by a monk towards the end of the 10th century, reflecting the imperative to order the routine of the monastery, which itself reflected the general idea of a ordered universe made by God  (pp. 12-13). By the 20th century, the regimentation of life by the clock had become deeply ingrained, at least in the West, so as to become “second nature” (p. 16). Pivotal to the regimentation of time were the development of machines and their ability to dramatically increase productive output: in speed, and therefore scale. Indeed, these enormous increases in power sped up the tempo of production, communicating the commensurate relationship between time and labour: seen through the lens of industry, time had become a commodity, like labour power, and “time-saving now became an important part of labor-saving” (Mumford, 1934, p. 197). In efforts to extract more labour from their employees, early employers even “stole” time from their workers by manipulating the clock and work whistle to lengthen the working day and shorten the breaks. Moreover, accumulated time in the form of saved labour time was reinvested in new forms of exploitation, just like regular money capital (Mumford, 1934, p. 197). It is from this historical period that we get the phrase “time is money.”

The proliferation of the clock into the realm of labour was accompanied by its foray into other areas of life, and by the mid-18th century, the “clock had penetrated to more intimate levels” such as the home (Thompson, 1967, p. 57).  The increasing penetration of the clock into the Western intellectual and artistic world between the 14th and 17th centuries was accompanied by a corresponding change in the apprehension of time itself, leading to a gradual emergence of a culture deeply aware of – and regimented by – time (Cipolla, 1978; Thompson, 1967, pp. 56-57). Of course, this imaginative remodelling of time-sense also restructured the world of work and labour. In the half-light of an emerging industrial society only recently unfettered from the bonds of feudal society and set free from the restrictive chains of manorialism, entire disciplines, incentives, and even a new human nature were inscribed on the social (Thompson, 1967, p. 57).

This existential reimagining of human nature and set of new practices centred around this new division and measurement of time and its regulation of the day. Indeed, the mapping of the 8-hour work day on a single spin of planet was like a cookie-cutter that marked the working day and everything left behind was allocated as leisure. This signifies the important element of time in both work and leisure.

To be continued…