Article Making sense of the history of clock-time, reflections on Glennie and Thrift’s Shaping the Day Time & Society 0(0) 1–16 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0961463X15577281 tas.sagepub.com Jonathan Martineau Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada Abstract This paper enquires into the history of clock-time through a critical engagement with Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift’s Shaping the Day. The paper delineates the contours of an approach to the history of clock-time based on an analysis of the parallelism between the historical trajectories of clock-time and market relations. This approach is presented through a four-fold critical engagement with Glennie and Thrift’s book assessing theoretical shortcomings, definitional problems, normative commitments and historical method. Keywords clock-time, social time, capitalism, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, clocks Introduction Scholarship around the history of clock-time has been greatly enhanced by the work of two outstanding contributors, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift. Their latest book, titled Shaping the Day (2009), retraces the history of timekeeping in England and Wales from 1300 to 1800. The authors enquire into clock-time as ‘practices of everyday life’ (2009: 65) in England and Wales over five centuries, focusing mainly on urban centers such as Bristol, but also providing useful data on the spread of clock-time in rural settings. Their empirical findings are important, as well as the Corresponding author: Jonathan Martineau, Department of Sociology, Université du Québec à Montréal, Pavillon HubertAquin A-5055, Montréal, Quebec H2X 3R9, Canada. Email: jonathan.martineau@gmail.com 2 Time & Society 0(0) historical work they synthesize, and on this score they have contributed a great deal in shedding light on the chronology of key processes in the propagation of clocks and clock-time practices in England and Wales. For example, their detailed and often numbered accounts of the propagation of clocks in English parishes, in households and schools, of the increase of recorded references of clock-time practices, of developments in clockmaking techniques, or seafaring time practices, based on sound archival and historical empirical work, provide the field with extremely valuable sets of data. This research work has enabled them to identify two key processes at work in England and Wales in the early modern period: an increase in the penetration of social time by clock-time forms, and an augmentation of the precision of clock-time devices and practices. They have as well identified specialized communities in which the use of clock-time became widespread. This work is an essential tool for any historically informed analysis of clock-time. However, the purpose here is to engage in a theoretical criticism of their work, since the shortcomings of some of their theoretical commitments have important repercussions in how they read their data and on the construction of their narrative of the spread of clock-time. These flaws, I argue, might obscure the relationship between the propagation of clock-time and broader historical transformations at work in this context. One of Glennie and Thrift’s aims in this project is to refine their criticism of EP Thompson’s ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ essay (Thompson, 1993), which they say has not only been widely influential but also flawed in important ways (2009: 43–47; see also Glennie and Thrift, 1996). In fact, they show inherent antagonism towards what they call the ‘standard’ account of the ‘triumph of clock-time’ which, they write, depicts it as unnatural, omnipotent and oppressive, whereas they see clock-time as having been ‘as much a liberatory as an oppressive force’ (2009: 13). For these scholars, while there might be a disciplinary aspect to clock-time, it does not form the pre-eminent basis for everyday clock-time practices (2009: 181–182). One should be looking at ‘clock-times’ as immanent to time practices rather than impositions on them. Relatedly, for them, there is no singular history of clock-time (2009: 66); they propose instead the idea of a cluster of ‘complex’ histories of clock-times practices, which they seek to illuminate ‘episodically’ (2009: 57). The aim of their project is therefore to show the manifold multiplicity of clock-times and temporal consciousness in contrast to the reductionism that they find inherent in Thompson’s and other so-called standard approaches (2009: 47–53). Glennie and Thrift’s commitment to breaking with what they consider a reductionist narrative unfortunately leads them to throw out the baby with the bath water. The historical connections between the rise of clock-time as Martineau 3 the main time relation in the modern time regime and the rise of market relations since the early modern period are not addressed in their account, and consequently a crucial element in the understanding of clock-time is lost. What follows critically engages with four specific but interrelated points in Glennie and Thrift’s book: a) theoretical commitments, b) the definition of clock-time c) the oppressive and totalizing aspects of clocktime and d) ‘episodic’ history and historical trajectories. Theory, or not theory … In Shaping the Day, Glennie and Thrift read their empirical findings according to a theoretical and methodological commitment to variants of ‘postmodern’ social theory (2009: 65–100). Some problems arise thereof. First, a tension present in many postmodern or poststructuralist endeavours which warn against metanarratives or all-encompassing theoretical models while at the same time reproducing dense and hyper-specialized theoretical and conceptual vocabularies is also found, albeit with its own specificities, in Glennie and Thrift’s contribution. Then, some more specific problems such as a fetishistic treatment of objects and the limited heuristic potential of some of the conceptual tools they champion also deserve some attention. First, contradictions inherent in some so-called ‘postmodern’ social theoretical approaches, between a – potentially beneficial –suspicion toward all-encompassing theoretical narratives on the one hand, and what is indeed a very dense and profoundly pervasive theoretical language and apparatus on the other, are reflected in Glennie and Thrift’s work. This tension manifests itself on several occasions. For example, while they argue on the one hand that the limits of EP Thompson’s work are made clear by recent theoretical ‘innovations’, a claim suggesting that they do take theory seriously, they emphasize their suspicion of ‘metanarratives’ on the other hand, claiming that they do not aim at ‘replacing one theoretical orrery by another’, that they do not want to ‘provide some overarching theoretical framework that can become a new standard’ (2009: 19). This a-theoretical stance is pushed to the point of stating that ‘at all points, we have tried to let the historical record (such as it is) speak’ (2009: 19), and yet, in a reversal of perspectives coming later in the book, the tone changes and theoretical commitments can be seen behind so-called bare historical facts, ‘we do not want to see our work presented as simply a series of partial empirical excursions which have no larger significance. Therefore, in this section, we begin to work towards an account which synthesizes our research into a more general model (. . .) which we think traces out a series of important revolutions in timekeeping practices’ (2009: 93). Glennie and Thrift indeed present here important moments and aspects of the historical propagation 4 Time & Society 0(0) of clock-time, but the work admittedly do aim at ‘larger significance’, and do rely on choices guided by theoretical commitments. A commitment to historical contingency is not a rejection of theory, but rather the result of a theoretical commitment to the allegedly superior or better suited model of episodic history. Therefore, it appears that behind the suspicious and sometimes dismissive tone towards ‘outdated’ theoretical frameworks and theory in general – or rather theory that is not their own – lurks nonetheless a strong set of theoretical commitments which cannot – and should not – be hidden behind problematic claims to merely letting the data ‘speak as it is’. Glennie and Thrift’s theoretical commitments are furthermore faced with their own pitfalls. Here is not the place or time to perform a detailed critique of Michel Serres’ or Bruno Latour’s work. I will simply point to shortcomings of the theoretical outlook they have championed as used in Glennie and Thrift’s study. One of them is found in the articulation of the relationship between technology and society. Glennie and Thrift argue that theoretical approaches – such as Thompson’s – that merely ‘socialize’ technology in order to avoid technological determinism are ‘outdated’ (2009: 72), since they rely on a false separation of society and technique. Such approaches are said to commit the error of ‘social determinism’ (2009: 43). First, it might be noted here that positing these approaches as ‘outdated’ implies a belief in some kind of ‘progress’ in the social sciences, a stance at odds with the avowedly post-positivist commitments of the authors. Second, it is hard to see how they can reach the conclusion that ‘socializing technology’ amounts to dichotomizing society and technique. Marx for one did ‘socialize technology’, in his critique of classical political economy, but he stressed not the dichotomy, but the inseparability between society and technique, underlining for instance that what classical political economy treated as ‘technical factors’ were in fact ‘social factors’ (Marx, 1976, on this question see also Wood, 1995: 21, 104–145). Socializing technology therefore does not stem from a lack of recognition of the ‘technologization’ of human capacities. It rather means that technological development and technological factors are tributary of a social logic and not evolving in a self-enclosed sphere. In order to avoid this dichotomisation themselves, and having rejected Marx’s solution, Glennie and Thrift rely heavily on ‘actor-network theory’ which proposes, among other things, to ‘re-consider’ the role of objects in ‘actor-networks’, most notably by recognizing their ‘partial agency’: ‘actornetwork theory sets great store by the role of objects in the world: objects that are no longer passive. As crucial elements of actants, they have their own partial agency’ (2009: 73). Such a perspective approaches the world as ‘made up of diverse actor-networks which are more or less successful attempts to associate, mobilize, and then make durable human-nonhuman alliances’ (2009: 73). Implied in actor-network theory is on the one hand a Martineau 5 salutary recognition of the complex interactions between materiality and meaning, but also, on the other hand, a fetishistic attribution of a power of agency to objects. In actor-networks, devices are not mere objects, but fundamental participants, ‘actants’, in the network itself; the collective agency of networks is mediated through the objects, or ‘devices’ which form its parts. This stance, however, forgets a fundamental aspect of these ‘objects’ and ‘devices’, namely that they – clocks, watches and other time-devices included – are, in the context of modern market economies, commodities. It is more fundamentally in this sense that objects are not ‘passive’. Their social agency rests ultimately in their property of being material bearers of value. Thus, objects are not indifferent to the social-property regimes in which their existence is embedded. What is lost in the consideration of the agency of objects in Glennie and Thrift’s use of actor-network theory, is that these ‘devices’ already congeal social relations of exploitation and appropriation, that ‘hidden’ in these objects are the value relations of capitalist societies, and the embodiment of alienated human powers in a context of market relations. Behind the ‘partial agency’ of these objects, behind the relationship between humans and these objects, stand relationships between human agencies. As Glennie and Thrift see these devices as integrated in ‘networks of practices’, the intersection of materiality and meaning is therefore addressed from the point of view of human and non-human alliances. However, their origin in social relations that they also help reproduce escapes the analysis, and as such the intersection of materiality and meaning in the activities of human bodies is fetishistically addressed from the perspective of alienated products instead of the perspective of time-making, world-making and meaning-making beings. Ultimately, it is the agency of labouring human beings that is lost in this fetishized objectal-agency. A further theoretical issue concerns the heuristic potential of the concept of ‘communities of practice’, which they mobilize in order to refer to clusters of agents, knowledges and practices in complex social interactions. Among other things, this concept is used to shed light on the diffusion and propagation of techniques and ideas, especially in cases of the existence of specialized networks. However, its explanatory power is difficult to assess, and this is apparent already the very first time it is mobilized (2009: 4–8). Indeed, it seems to be able to explain two opposite outcomes. In the case of Galileo, we are told that his observation of the moons of Jupiter were propagated rapidly (a matter of a few months) in the astronomical ‘community of practice’, while he did not seem to be aware of Tyco Brahe’s geo-heliocentric system. The specialized network formed by the community of practice is supposed to explain the diffusion of ideas, knowledge and technique, but the same specialized network can both have a very rapid and very slow rate of diffusion at the same time, ‘So ideas, did not 6 Time & Society 0(0) always spread very far, or very fast, even when present in a specialized network’ (2009: 6). Perhaps the determining factor in the diffusion of ideas, at least in this case, is not the specialized network, but some other explanans or context that would help us understand why some ideas travel and some do not in the same community of practice? When they try to explain the fact that Galileo did not know about Brahe’s system, they posit that it is because the communities had ‘pronounced geographies’, seemingly not taking into account that they also had pronounced geographies for the diffusion of Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons which happened rapidly (2009: 6–7). This leaves the question open as to what the mobilization of the concept of ‘community of practice’ actually explains and sheds doubt on its explanatory power in other arguments throughout the book. The presence of these theoretical problems further reveals that Glennie and Thrift’s book is as ‘theoretical’ as any other in the field, no matter how theoretical commitments are hidden behind a suspicious attitude towards ‘theory’. As correct and important as many of their criticisms of Thompson’s essay are, when they say elsewhere that in these ‘postFoucault days’, new ways of thinking reveal Thompson’s work as ‘reductionist’ (1996: 290), they also misinterpret Thompson’s critical historical materialist approach in important ways, and put forward an alternative which has its own pitfalls and flaws, most notably the above-mentioned fetishist treatment of objects and the use of explanans with rather vague explanatory power. For all the qualities and sophistication of their work, the fact remains that it does not represent a once-and-for-all relegation of other perspectives to the limbo of an outdated social theoretical or historiographical past; their work is instead inscribed in different theoretical and methodological frameworks that have their own flaws, and that organize their empirical findings in their own ways. The subtle art of defining As David Landes has pointed out, a lot of historiographical controversies around the history of time-keeping have to do with the terminological and technological definitions that are being used by scholars, but also those found in the historical data itself (Landes 1983: 53). Different definitions of a clock, for example, will probably lead to different histories of it (see also Dohrn-van Rossum, 1996: 52–54). In the same line of thought, Glennie and Thrift’s commitment towards multiplicity, fragmentation, complexity, and episodic history, is indeed supported by a looser definition of clocktimes. This looseness however exposes their narrative to problems of analytical rigour. An illustration of this is found in the fact that while they ‘take devices seriously’ as parts of actor-networks, they do not systematically Martineau 7 take into account the different time-senses conveyed by – and through – different instruments. This stems in part from a lack of specification of social relations of power embodied in such instruments. Notwithstanding acknowledgement of Feminist and Marxist contributions to the study of time (e.g. 1996: 281), the questions of who’s timing what, for what purposes, from which class, gender or racializing position, is not systematically addressed. A very large range of ‘immanent’ practices and instruments found in their archival work are lumped together as ‘clock-times’, and the fact that these different devices also might convey different time-senses is not taken into account. However, a sound argument can be made that urban bells and work bells, for example conveyed different temporal meanings and experiences.1 As a result, various devices and various operations that might have been experienced differently and embedded in different time relations, are indiscriminately treated as clocks (2009: 136). Time-signalling, timekeeping and time-measuring, all tend to be blended in a loose understanding of ‘clock-times’, to the extent that any time-cue, including the crowing of a rooster, or a neighbour going out, might be included in their account as part of ‘clock-times’ (2009: 85–86). Their definition of clock-times is probably closer to a definition of time-marking, and that might be why for them clock-times do not necessarily involve clocks (2009: 18, 26). Accordingly, they tend to mix together bells, roosters, clepsydras and clocks – all the while championing an approach that takes devices seriously – in one loose ‘network of practice’ called ‘clock-times’ (see for example 2009: 85). But the time of time-marking is not necessarily the time of clock-time, as seen in the example of the different temporal experiences conveyed by work bells in comparison to other town bells (on this see also Dohrn-van Rossum, 1996: 297). Abstract and concrete temporalities, or evenemential and constant time-signalling, are not differentiated in their account,2 and as a result, as further discussed below, an integrated historical narrative about clock-time becomes indeed very difficult to reconstruct. As such, historical milestones such as the crucial qualitative change between pre-capitalist clock-time and capitalist clock-time escape their analysis. Clock-time, multiplicity and oppression For Glennie and Thrift, clock-times emerge from everyday practices, instead of being related to specific social developments producing and reproducing forms of social power and property with specific characteristics of abstraction and impersonality. Everyday practices, in themselves, spontaneously generate and use clock-time (2009: 261). Accordingly, there is not necessarily imposition, opposition, or struggles involved, as clock-times become ‘integral elements of everyday lives, social relations, and localities 8 Time & Society 0(0) (. . .) whether or not people were subject to explicit disciplinary impulses to explicit clock timekeeping’ (2009: 411). As such, Glennie and Thrift spend much energy criticizing the narrative of the ‘triumph of clock-time’ (2009: 47–53). In doing so, they problematically lump together disparate figures such as Marx, Spengler and Heidegger (2009: 48–49), who saw clock-time as ‘homogenous’, ‘inauthentic’ and/or ‘oppressive’, and they counterpose to these ‘homogenous views’ their own notion of a ‘multiplicity’ of times. They pluralize their object of study as clock-times, and they argue that these are not dominant, nor solely oppressive, but rather merely ‘general’ (2009: 16, 96). In their own words, they seek ‘to build an alternative account of clock-time as a series of practices that have become general, but not necessarily ascendant’ (2009: 65). The danger involved here is not only of a theoretical nature, i.e. to overlook the relationship between clock-time and forms of social property and power, or to downplay the dialectical character of clock-time – of which it can be said that the oppressive element is asymmetrically positioned with regard to its potentially progressive element due to its embedment in capitalist value formation and appropriation (on time and capitalism see Fischbach, 2011; Martineau, 2015; Postone, 1993; Tomba, 2012; Tombazos, 2013). The danger is also to treat clock-time as so ‘ordinary’ as to be neutral, therefore losing a key component of the sociological understanding of clock-time built around the notion of its intersections with exploitative and oppressive social relations. In addressing the processes governing clock-time’s ‘generalization’, one needs to address issues of social conflict and social power. Here, as David Harvey pointed out, the class, gender, cultural, religious and political differentiation in conceptions of time and space ‘frequently become arenas of social conflict’, the ‘concepts of space and time and the practices associated with them are far from socially neutral in human affairs’ (Harvey, 1990: 420, 424). In a similar line of thought, Peter Osborne has succinctly formulated the political aspect of social time and the temporal aspect of politics: I write of a ‘politics of time’; indeed, of all politics as centrally involving struggles over the experience of time. How do the practices in which we engage structure and produce, enable or distort, different senses of time possibility? What kinds of experience of history do they make possible or impede? Whose futures do they ensure? These are the questions to which a politics of time would attend, interrogating temporal structures about the possibilities they encode or foreclose, in specific temporal modes (Osborne, 1995: 199–200). In short, clock-time practices, as any form of social time, do not escape the influence of social relations of power and property. The logic of Martineau 9 domination and resistance embedded in clock-time relations is articulated around dynamics of class exploitation as well as gender and racial oppression. The resistance of women to dictates of clock-time standards in the case of pregnancy and childbirth, the resistance of workers to time and motion studies, the resistance of Australian aborigines to attempts from British colonizers to impose clock-time discipline, these are all exemplifying the conflictual dynamics stemming from clock-time’s alienating and oppressive tendencies (see Adam, 1995: 48–51; Braverman, 1974; Donaldson, 1996; Martineau, 2015: 147–162). In a sense, Glennie and Thrift’s wish to point towards other temporalities is a critical gesture in itself. However if the oppressive character of what ‘others’ these temporalities in the first place is washed away, silenced, erased behind a somehow neutral ‘generality’, the critical edge of the account might get lost. A real gesture of openness towards ‘otherness’ cannot do away with critically engaging with oppressive forces. Recognizing the totalizing logic of capitalist clock-time does not necessarily entail a radical ‘othering’ of different temporalities: it rather points critically at, as well as denounces, the ‘othering’ in the first place. It points at the oppression of ‘other’ temporalities in social life under the colonizing logic of market mediated social time relations.3 As such, the multiplicity of times can be addressed not as pure and isolated conceptions and practice of time, but as idiosyncratic blends testifying of the tension between concrete times and abstract clock-time forms. Furthermore along those lines, according to Glennie and Thrift, the oppressive character of clock-time is not directly apparent in the historical record. Therefore, questions of ‘how contemporaries understood the signals that communicated clock-time are of considerable interest, but are remarkably difficult to answer’ (2009: 235). However, it is in fact the case that in many documented historical instances, clock-time has been understood explicitly as an oppressive force. Examples just mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg. Oppositions to clock-time have in fact existed in conceptions and practices of time, even in non-capitalist settings, for instance in the popular medieval culture’s processual concrete time, which was antagonistic to official times (Bakhtin, 1984: 1–25; Martineau, 2015: 82–84). The very nature of social time relations implies resistance and even, in some cases, sheer revolt against dominant time-forms. Even if Glennie and Thrift argue that ‘all classes of people’ practiced and used clock-times from as early as the 15th century, it might be pointed out that as ‘late’ as July 1830, in revolutionary Paris, the rebellious popular classes of the capital attacked, independently and simultaneously, clock-towers all over the city. They knew, so it seems, whose interests clock-time served – not theirs –, they felt the uniformization of social temporalities under clock-time as an 10 Time & Society 0(0) oppressive process, a target for revolutionary violence. Walter Benjamin relates Barthélémy and Méry’s poetic account of these events, Who would believe it! It is said that, incensed at the hour, / Latter-days Joshuas, at the foot of every clocktower, / were firing on clock faces to make the day stand still. (. . .) This is a unique feature in the history of the insurrection: it is the only act of vandalism carried out by the people against public monuments (. . .) What was most singular about this episode was that it was observed, at the very same hour, in different parts of the city. This was the expression not of an aberrant notion, an isolated whim, but a widespread, nearly general sentiment (Benjamin, 1999: 737). Now, such a ‘widespread, nearly general sentiment’ against clock-time, which was translated in the actual attack by gunfire on public clocks, might suggest that it was, at least in such circumstances, indeed experienced as an oppressive force by these people. Echoing the point made by David Harvey and many others, Jeremy Rifkin’s also insisted on the fundamentally conflict-ridden nature of social time. As he depicted environmental, biological agriculture, holistic health, eco-feminist, bioregionalist and economic democratic movements, among others, as ‘time-rebels’ (Rifkin, 1987: 13), Rifkin also pointed out that social time is inherently a question of social power, that social forms of time-reckoning such as calendars and clocks have historically been used ‘to bind the human community to the dictates of those on top of the social ladder’ (1987: 14). Glennie and Thrift’s idea that clock-time is a ‘generalized’ practice, and not necessarily an oppressive one, might be thought of differently by workers’ resisting the imposition of capitalist time-discipline in the period of industrialization (Rifkin, 1987: 30; see also Beaud, 2001: 147, 151, 170). Of course, Glennie and Thrift’s point that popular practices also reproduce and even embrace clock-time is well taken, and actually highlights the positive valence of clock-time which perhaps has not been emphasized enough in some accounts. EP Thompson and Max Weber were also well aware of this, and emphasized the process of subjective internalization that accompanied the spread of the clock-time regime. Thompson notably pointed out in how in the space of but a few generations, workers had learned to fight not against the clock-time regime, but about it (Thompson, 1993: 388). Weber had shown the connections between religious doctrines and particular subjective relationships to time in which it became a resource to be maximised and used productively (Weber, 1964). Moreover, the very first introduction of clocks in the context of wagelabouring practices in the textile industry at the turn of the 13th century Martineau 11 seemed to have been embraced both by producers and appropriators since it appears to have allowed for a more neutral delimitation of work time than work-bells that were more or less arbitrarily rang by employers (Le Goff, 1977). Recognizing these instances, however, does not change the fact that the rise to hegemony of clock-time in capitalist societies has meant the exacerbation of its abstract and impersonal character. These very characteristics participate in the integration of concrete times into value relations through market mechanisms, since markets can only equate otherwise incommensurable qualitative concrete times with quantitative time-forms by negating their very qualitative temporal unicity. Emphasizing the multiplicity of concrete times does not mean one has to lose sight of abstract clock-time’s drive to integrate them into value time relations. Both aspects of the dialectic of time specific to market-mediated social relations need to be addressed. This means that clock-time relations are embedded in exploitative, alienating and oppressive social relations, even if it so happens that people often make use of clock-time in apparently neutral ways. This does not mean that clock-time installs a strict and inescapable set of temporal constraints on people. Clock-time rather delineates a series of limits and pressures on human individual and collective temporal agency that tends to narrow the array of possibilities of temporal experiences and to push for the conformity of temporal practices with the abstract forms of clock-time, often at the expense of concrete time-experiences and lived temporalities. Humans cope with and resist the imposition of such standards and push those limits back and forth. Temporal oppression therefore does not always appear distinctly as direct coercion, in fact it is one of the most subtle forms of social discipline: social time regimes in today’s societies hardly need the threat of physical violence or the presence of the army in the streets to function effectively, and yet everyone is subject to it and must conform to its dictates in order to function in society, and, in many cases, in order to survive. People’s clock-time practices occur in a context where abstract and impersonal clock-time not only alienates people’s concrete temporal experiences, but reproduce social relations – value relations – that benefit appropriating classes. In this sense, the ‘generality’ of clock-time practices is inseparable from its disciplining functions, as the ‘generalized’ abstraction and alienation of time has been and still is fuelled by the reproduction of exploitative value relations which are also traversed by gendered and racialized forms of oppression. Making sense of history As a result of their reliance on fragmentation and complexity, Glennie and Thrift assert that ‘no singular history of clock-time exists’ (2009: 14). 12 Time & Society 0(0) Implied in that statement is the relinquishment and abandonment of any form of meaningful integrated historical narrative about clock-time. This is another aspect of the inability of Glennie and Thrift to actually identify the totalizing and oppressive logic of clock-time, and it is based in part on their theoretical apriori commitment to ‘multiplicity’, ‘fragmentation’ and ‘complexity’. Their ‘fragmented’ narrative cannot do justice to how temporalities are parts of the social whole and are embedded in dynamics of social power and property. Lost in the manifold determinations of time sense, they fail to grasp the relationship between these multiple determinations and the totalizing logic which stems from market mediated social time relations. So much so that they cannot identify the logic behind their own account of the ‘complex histories’ of clock-times (2009: 23). ‘Mature’ clock-time for them is a cluster of complexly evolved sets of everyday practices, but they fail to explain why such a cluster has indeed historically evolved, or in other words what logic guided the ‘maturation’ of clock-time into what it has indeed historically become. Their ‘episodic history’ leaves us with a statement that defies any attempt at making historical sense of the historical trajectory of clock-time, ‘Modern, ‘‘obviously right’’, elements of clocks and hour systems came about through extended processes of experimentation, selection, influence and pure chance, rather than as inevitable consequences of some intrinsically superior ‘‘design’’’ (2009: 28). Leaving us with a choice between ‘pure chance’ and ‘superior design’ to explain the trajectory of clock-time, Glennie and Thrift place us in front of a false problem, since historical logic and contingency play a role in human history. As such, it is more heuristically pertinent to analyse and decipher one or several social driving forces behind the spread of clock-time, instead of mobilizing equally mystical notions of ‘pure chance’ and ‘superior design’. Such attempts at analysis might even detect a real, and identifiable, ‘socio-historical process’ in which ‘experimentation, selection and influence’ actually took place, and which might also have gone through processes and developments of a more contingent nature. One telling illustration of how market mediated social time relations have been shaped by the totalizing tendencies of value relations is found in the development of World Standard Time (Adam, 1995: 113–114; Kern, 1983: 11–16; Martineau, 2015: 125–131; Nguyen, 1992: 33; Zerubavel, 1982: 14– 16). Indeed, the limits of counter-intuition might be reached in an argument denying that a process of standardization of time affecting the totality of the globe, is not fuelled or mediated by totalizing tendencies. The point here is precisely that complex histories of manifold temporal practices have been, and still are, affected by the totalizing logic of market relations. In this case, myriads of local times have been annihilated, subsumed under standard abstract time-forms following the push of railway time standards and the Martineau 13 outcomes of the 1884 Meridian Conference. Clock-time is not a creation of capitalism, and its embedment in social time relations differs in pre-capitalist and capitalist settings. However, the rise of clock-time to the status of hegemonic social time relation in modern social time regimes follows closely the rise of value relations as hegemonic forms of social relations. Clock-time practices are part and parcel of the reproduction of value relations, and as such they are traversed by its alienated – and totalizing – character. Pushed and mediated by the logic of the market, modern clock-time practices have been institutionalized in totalizing standard time-forms with global reach. Against the idea of the maturation of clock-time as a matter of ‘pure chance’, or complex and multiple social practices that become impossible to disentangle and condemn us to an episodic history, it is crucial to recognize that the history of clock-time is not linear precisely because it has been embedded in different sets of social time relations. Originating in precapitalist settings, clock-time remained one among many time-forms in such social time relations. The spread of market relations has entailed a repositioning of clock-time in social time relations following ‘mature’ clocktime’s historical fusion with fundamental characteristics of the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist economies. From then on, it is not so much that some ‘superior’ design shaped clock-time, but that the market logic drove for a universalization of its time-form, making clock-time socially hegemonic. The history of colonialism and imperialism also clearly show that, as Adam puts it, ‘time has been a most effective colonizing tool’ (Adam, 2004: 136–137), and the idiosyncratic results of the impositions of the Western time regime on other parts of the globe display at the same time its totalizing logic and its non-linear historical trajectory. It therefore seems possible, in contrast to Glennie and Thrift’s contention, to explain why the historical and social diversity of multiple time-senses has been under attack by ‘abstract clock-time’. Identifying concrete sociohistorical relations that drive historical forces and process therefore contribute to establishing connections of historical significance between events and processes. While Glennie and Thrift, by their own admission, end up threading a historiographical fabric that resembles more a fishing net than a tapestry, recognizing the interdependence between time relations and value relations in modern market societies allows for a tightening up of the net, in order to keep historical meaning from escaping through its holes. Conclusion Glennie and Thrift’s work is important for the field, especially in terms of the empirical richness of their research. However, accounts of clock-time 14 Time & Society 0(0) that disengage with its embedment in power and property relations on grounds of celebrating temporal multiplicity might end up losing sight of key forces and process that threaten the very multiplicity of time-experiences being celebrated. One of such key process is the spread of market relations in England and parts of Western Europe in the early modern period and then to the globe later on. Market relations and economic processes based on the production of goods for exchange, the generalization of wage-labour and the privatization of land and means of production have created a specific form of valorization in which abstract time units such as are found historically only in clock-time play a fundamental role of quantifying the expense of human labour and harmonizing the temporalities of the cycles of value formation, appropriation and realization. The preponderance of market mechanisms as the main resource allocators and the inescapable market mediation between agents and their own reproduction has propelled clock-time to a preponderant and hegemonic position in social time relations. Such broader historical forces which have evolved in tandem with the spread of clock-time and which might help explain clock-time’s rise as the main time relation in modern societies risk being undetectable when recourse is made to strategies of ‘episodic’ historical analysis and fragmented social analysis. Acknowledgements This article was in part made possible by postdoctoral research funding awarded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Frederick Guillaume Dufour for his comments on an earlier draft of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers from Time and Society for their insightful comments. Conflict of interest None declared. Funding This study was financially supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Notes 1. They do not seem to want to push further the insight that they got from their observation that some bells signals and clock-time might have manifested a difference between practical and abstract signals (Glennie and Thrift, 2009: 37). 2. In a nutshell, abstract time is an independent variable, while concrete time is a dependent variable. Constant time-signalling, for example by a clock, marks the passage of abstract time, evenemential time-signalling, for example by a curfew bell, marks episodic points and manifestations of events. These distinctions are Martineau 15 made elsewhere in the literature, see for instance Dohrn-van Rossum (1996: 297ff.), Postone (1993: 211). 3. By ‘social time relations’ I mean a given set of conceptions and practices of time that shapes and organizes people’s temporal relations with each other, with their world, as well as informs personal time-experience. 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