Tuesday, August 25, 2009

When Time Became Money

I am doing research for the new book and reading the most amazing material on the emergence of modern time consciousness in Europe of the Middle Ages. The key development was, of course, the distribution of public clocks. The beginning was the town square - the bell tower. Then, as the centuries progress, clocks make their way into manufacturing institutions and homes and finally onto our bodies in the form of pocket watches. The transition was slow but with it came a sweeping, radical and all encompassing re-imagining of time that has accelerated into the crazed life-in-15-minute-intervals human universe we inhabit today.

Perhaps the most important transition in all of this was the lifting of time from the natural cycles of daylight and human or animal work/exhaustion. In its place came an abstract time, the hour was a unit devoid of context and with this stripping of embodied duration came the ability to turn time into a commodity. Time could become money in a simple equation that equated two abstract de-contextualised units (duration and currency). So began wage slaving and the world, our world, has never been the same. Time economies emerged and with it a wave of "isms": Taylorism; Marxism; Existentialism (no, I don't think the last one is a stretch).

Now here comes the interesting point - that same abstracted time was the very lifeblood that allowed the new science of Newton, Laplace and others to recreate both heaven and Earth in the image of a powerful all-encompassing universal physics. The time of celestial mechanics and the time of the mill worker were the same - both new, both invented, both transformative.

Human invention and human discovery. Cultural artifacts and scientific truth. How do these overlap? Does one always lead the other or can they change places like horses on the track?

Please feel free to share this column with others but please cite the source. These things take work after all.
Thank you.

9 comments:

  1. Living and working in a third world country has brought home to me that African rural peoples have essentially a cyclic view of time while for us time is linear. This has important consequences for our respective behaviour. With a linear time model a lost instant of time is never recovered, which acts as an impetus to use time efficiently. While a cyclic model of time has no such imperative since an instant of time is not lost when it can be covered in the future at the next cycle.

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  2. Nice work, when thought were metered by clocks, I like that...

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  3. @Occasional - I think your perspective on this is critical given that those of us completely lost in urban "developed" time economies have little chance to see alternative ways of ways of creating time. One of the books that brought me to this subject years ago was "The Myth of Eternal Return" by Eliade. Apparently the cyclic model was the dominant view of time for much of our collective history.

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  4. @Ben - greetings. What I am wondering about out loud here is the way experience is mediated by the social construct. In particular, as a physicist I wonder about how the "model" of physical reality we grow up with (conditioned for us through all the stuff we use via technology) shapes the way we can think. Hence the "thoughts metered by clocks"

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  5. nice question, the intro of clocks seems to objectify every action thru qualitative time/ value. This difference is expressd by " occasional reporter" and describes the distance between the first and third world. Measuring immediate experience all the time, individualizing the moment for everybody, with all of us the epicenter....

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  6. Yes, I think the key point is your idea of all of us at the epicenter. I doubt we will every do away with the linear clocktime because of its usefulness but we have come to ruled by it in all domains of human activity. it is one of the main causes of what Elide called the "desacrilization" of the world (sp?).

    The move need is a return to phenomeological realm of lived time, a revaluing of it as something more than just "recreation" or "downtime". It is, afterall, the time we really inhabit.

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  7. Well, as " rites of passage" changes, terms of adulthood does too: linear clocktime is the raptor/ wolf ready to pounce, "lived time" is our defense.

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