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
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DOI: 10.1177/0961463X15577281
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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(. . .) 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
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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
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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
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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).
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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
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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. Every society displays a certain form of organization of its time relations, institutionalised to different
degrees according to varying logics of power and property, and social time relations are traversed by struggles between different and often opposed conceptions
and practices of time. In this sense, time is a social as well as a political
phenomenon.
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