Calls for Papers by Justin T Clark
Early Popular Visual Culture
Just as it is clear that temporalities are historically contingent and socially and culturally co... more Just as it is clear that temporalities are historically contingent and socially and culturally constructed, it is also clear that time has taken different guises in the past and particularly in popular visual culture. Although scholars differ in dating the origins of popular visual culture, much of its development coincided with epochal transformations in timekeeping and time awareness itself. From roughly the eighteenth century onward, the form and content of widely circulated, often mechanically reproduced, images and objects reflected a growing global preoccupation with clock time, deep geological time, historical time, and other temporal modes. While scholars of early popular visual culture have examined the ways in which specific media have embodied and represented new ideas and practices of time, the same question is asked more rarely of popular visual culture before 1930. To what extent were the temporal manipulations of photography and cinema enmeshed or reflect in less quintessentially "modern" media such as engravings and theatre? What was the effect on visual culture of the increasing ubiquity, mechanization, and standardization of time prior to high modernism in the arts and the discovery of relativity in the sciences? Did it register as presence or absence, or a mixture of the two in popular visual culture? How was time re-imagined, produced, and consumed in museums, popular magazines, vaudeville theatres, advertisements, and other popular media? What was the effect on coalescing temporal modalities of increasingly ubiquitous forms of popular visual culture? The peer-reviewed journal Early Popular Visual Culture seeks original research contributions on these and related questions for an interdisciplinary special issue, "
The “Beyond the Clock” Symposium brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences... more The “Beyond the Clock” Symposium brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences for two days of presentations and discussions on what might be called the third generation of temporality studies.
Before the 1990s, most scholars of temporality followed Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel in focusing on abstract, rationalized time as a unifying central force of modern social life and its cultural productions. In the 1960s, E.P. Thompson famously placed this force on historical footing by contrasting pre-modern task-oriented society with post-industrial timed-labor society. A generation later, Benedict Anderson envisioned an “empty, homogenous time” as the foundation of the modern nation state. These thinkers established the importance of rationalized time to modern labor practices, to the postcolonial social imagination, and to art and literature, among other scholarly concerns.
In the new millennium, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary scholars have pioneered more pluralistic approaches to time, challenging the assumption that a single model of time prevails in any given society or nation. In the last decade, scholars in particular have shifted their attention from rationalized and synchronous clock time to the mobile, compressed, and/or dilated time of the knowledge economy or the anthropocene. This new approach is evident across a staggering range of disciplines: critical theorists Harmut Rosa and Sarah Sharma’s consideration of the problem of “social acceleration,” sociologist Benjamin Snyder’s exploration of “flexible time” in the post-Taylorist workplace, engineer and historian of science Jimena Canales’ deconstruction of physics’ reliance on metaphorical clocks, and historian Stephen Kern’s re-examination of the “culture of time and space” in the electronic age. This symposium aims to bring these parallel social, cultural, and philosophical engagements into a collective conversation on time in its irrational, disparate, and fascinating forms.
Books by Justin T Clark
Articles by Justin T Clark
Early Popular Visual Culture
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2022
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2022
Time & Society, 2020
In the early 20th century, mental speed became a dominant measure of intelligence in the United S... more In the early 20th century, mental speed became a dominant measure of intelligence in the United States. For both cultural and technical reasons, this had not always been the case. For 19th-century Americans, quickness of speech and thought often signified lack of self-discipline. Unlike with other objects of temporal measurement and rationalization such as factory work, little scientific or popular consensus existed over how to clock the invisible phenomenon of thought. The cultural and scientific ascent of mental speed thus poses an unsolved historical problem: how and why did Americans adopt this new ideal of intelligence? This essay offers an answer in the introduction and pop-ularization of a new and controversial practice: the timed test. The first timed tests did not so much formalize an existing conception of mental efficiency as establish a new one, using one of the key tools of measurement available to experimental psychology, the mechanical timekeeper. Initially frustrated in their efforts to correlate their subjects' laboratory-measured reaction time with socially recognized achievements such as academic grades, psychologists in the late 1890s borrowed a still-obscure concept from stenography and teleg-raphy: words per minute. At first, few scientists or members of the public equated reading, speaking, writing, and listening rate with intelligence. Only after American educators, military recruiters, and vocational guidance experts began to adopt timed testing in the 1910s for administrative convenience did mental speed begin to indicate intelligence and knowledge. What began as a way
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2019
Journal of American Studies, 2018
The New England Quarterly, 2014
American Journalism, May 2017
Book Chapters by Justin T Clark
Reviews by Justin T Clark
American Historical Review, 2020
Reviews in American History, 2019
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Calls for Papers by Justin T Clark
Before the 1990s, most scholars of temporality followed Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel in focusing on abstract, rationalized time as a unifying central force of modern social life and its cultural productions. In the 1960s, E.P. Thompson famously placed this force on historical footing by contrasting pre-modern task-oriented society with post-industrial timed-labor society. A generation later, Benedict Anderson envisioned an “empty, homogenous time” as the foundation of the modern nation state. These thinkers established the importance of rationalized time to modern labor practices, to the postcolonial social imagination, and to art and literature, among other scholarly concerns.
In the new millennium, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary scholars have pioneered more pluralistic approaches to time, challenging the assumption that a single model of time prevails in any given society or nation. In the last decade, scholars in particular have shifted their attention from rationalized and synchronous clock time to the mobile, compressed, and/or dilated time of the knowledge economy or the anthropocene. This new approach is evident across a staggering range of disciplines: critical theorists Harmut Rosa and Sarah Sharma’s consideration of the problem of “social acceleration,” sociologist Benjamin Snyder’s exploration of “flexible time” in the post-Taylorist workplace, engineer and historian of science Jimena Canales’ deconstruction of physics’ reliance on metaphorical clocks, and historian Stephen Kern’s re-examination of the “culture of time and space” in the electronic age. This symposium aims to bring these parallel social, cultural, and philosophical engagements into a collective conversation on time in its irrational, disparate, and fascinating forms.
Books by Justin T Clark
Articles by Justin T Clark
Book Chapters by Justin T Clark
Reviews by Justin T Clark
Before the 1990s, most scholars of temporality followed Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel in focusing on abstract, rationalized time as a unifying central force of modern social life and its cultural productions. In the 1960s, E.P. Thompson famously placed this force on historical footing by contrasting pre-modern task-oriented society with post-industrial timed-labor society. A generation later, Benedict Anderson envisioned an “empty, homogenous time” as the foundation of the modern nation state. These thinkers established the importance of rationalized time to modern labor practices, to the postcolonial social imagination, and to art and literature, among other scholarly concerns.
In the new millennium, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary scholars have pioneered more pluralistic approaches to time, challenging the assumption that a single model of time prevails in any given society or nation. In the last decade, scholars in particular have shifted their attention from rationalized and synchronous clock time to the mobile, compressed, and/or dilated time of the knowledge economy or the anthropocene. This new approach is evident across a staggering range of disciplines: critical theorists Harmut Rosa and Sarah Sharma’s consideration of the problem of “social acceleration,” sociologist Benjamin Snyder’s exploration of “flexible time” in the post-Taylorist workplace, engineer and historian of science Jimena Canales’ deconstruction of physics’ reliance on metaphorical clocks, and historian Stephen Kern’s re-examination of the “culture of time and space” in the electronic age. This symposium aims to bring these parallel social, cultural, and philosophical engagements into a collective conversation on time in its irrational, disparate, and fascinating forms.