The Emergence of Time as a Social Force
Photograph Source: Alex Lehner – CC BY 2.0
In 1336, Milan was expanding to become one of the richest and most important cities in all of Europe. From the end of the 13th century, it was ruled by a powerful dynasty that would go on to found the Duchy of Milan, a major state that would remain intact until Napoleon’s armies swept across Europe centuries later. That year, Milan cemented its position as a burgeoning technological powerhouse by introducing “the first documented hour-striking clock in a public setting.” Milan’s spectacular clock was an international sensation and “has been described as the first true automat in Europe and the locking wheel as a precursor of the computer.” The hourly ringing of its bells heralded the modern world, the world we know today, dominated by the power of time, where nothing would fall outside of its ambit. It was spellbinding, the cutting edge breakthrough of its day. Until then, time was conceived not as fixed and linear, as a standardized grid within which to situate the tasks of daily life—rather the tasks of daily life were the clock, dictating and defining time rather than the inverse. The prevailing model of time was as something relativistic, informed by patterns in nature that were not rigid and unmoving. But time assumed a new form and social energy. From the early modern period on, “time” becomes one of the most frequently used words, tightening its grip on the social order and our imaginations. Time of this new kind is an artifice that must be produced through social norms and institutions. It is neither natural nor necessary, but is rather a development from complex material realities and the interests of an emerging ruling class.
After these developments in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, in which time is invented or at least socially reinvented, the concept undergoes a series of refinements that deepen its penetration of social and economic life. Until today, when the reification of time into a powerful tool of social control and domination seems almost complete. Ever more precise instruments for measuring time and smaller and more exact units of measurement have created a new and distinctly modern understanding of and relationship with time. Time continued to magnify its power, and the separation of production into smaller and more discrete steps tracks the invention and development of time. But it did more than just reshape patterns of production; it reshaped the human subject and her conception of herself and her physical and social environment. The subject would now always understand herself as being within time, adopting its purposes and logics, justifying her decisions in its terms. Later, with the social relationships and patterns of the industrial age, time is reconceived as yardstick, taskmaster, and disciplinarian, as a new God to which unending sacrifices are owed. Increasingly, every waking minute must be filled to propitiate the insatiable gods of productivity and efficiency—every activity and minute required to complete it must be scheduled and optimized. “The growth of a sense of time—the acceptance of time—is a process of adaptation to an ever more reified world.” We have become the subjects of highly refined, historically contingent new absolutism. One can express himself in any way, adopt any lifestyle in private, just insofar as he can never exercise any meaningful control over his time. The inexorability of time makes it “the ultimate model of domination,” fragmenting and dispersing everything before it by artificially separating us from the reality of experience as continuous, unified, and fluid. By breaking time into ever smaller units, we are disintegrating human life and experience itself, creating abstract, unnecessary distinctions between fundamental aspects of human life. Once meaningless and essentially unknowable, time as a social construct and system is now inescapable, “mirroring blind authority itself.”
Our lifelong relationships with time under capitalism are emotionally fraught. Time presses upon us with increasing energy and persistence in the age of the smartphone, as our calendars and other “productivity” applications ensure a steady outpouring of reminders and alerts. Time is there and it is running out fast, grains of sand piling up on the floor of the hourglass. In our era of ever-increasing pace, in which our culture places enormous value on speed, precision, and efficiency, there is the temptation to inspect each grain. Was that unit of time spent wisely? Now we have wearable devices that can provide us with information about the user’s heart rate, sleep patterns and quality, and exercise habits. Review the data and optimize the system—that’s the message, and it carries with it an indispensable temporal quality, because what is maximally efficient in any given case is dependent on time and how much of the precious commodity one has. Time is now conceived of in its pure commodity form, perfectly reducible and fungible. Andrew Niccol’s 2011 film In Time, though widely panned, explored an interesting iteration of this idea: the story plays out in a future where time has become the standard currency, and how long you can stay alive is determined by how rich you are. People are separated into segregated “Time Zones,” where the poor live out their short lives in ghettos. Even in our so-called free society, the lives of workers and the poor are necessarily shortened, for even if they are long, the amount of time free from toil—that is, the real life of the individual—is painfully and tragically short.
Several thinkers have drawn historical connections between the technologies that give us time as we know it and the social mechanisms of domination today associated with it. If we have been tempted to treat such technological advances as necessarily opening the way to increasing convenience and improved quality of life, then they give us reasons to at least subject this story to scrutiny. The work of eminent historian E.P. Thompson provides us with one of the seminal treatments of the cultural transformation wrought by the “new immediacy and insistence” of time as “[t]he clock steps on to the Elizabethan stage.” In his 1967 article “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Thompson argues that new technologies for tracking time were attended by dramatic shifts in “the inward apprehension of time of working people” and thus by “a severe restructuring of working habits—new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively.” Time crept into every corner of life, as the day was bent into conformity with the needs of the economic system. In a short but fascinating aside, underlining the connection between these new ways of conceptualizing time and the most private and intimate aspects of human life, Thompson observes that, for a time, “winding the clock” took hold as a slang term for sexual activity following the 1759 publication of the popular and influential novel Tristram Shandy. Among the humorous scenes early in the novel is a question from the protagonist’s mother, put to his father during the carnal act resulting in Tristram’s conception: “have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” Everything is susceptible to commodification and exchange, time and sex included. The advent of time as we know it gave us small, discrete units capable of being alienated (in the sense of a conveyance or transferral); it fit perfectly with commodity capitalism.
There is a sense in which freedom is reducible to free time, in which domination and unfreedom are bound to the historical establishment of control over the time of others. Today, there is an overwhelming feeling “that people shouldn’t really have control over their time—that they can’t be trusted with it, that they need to be dominated in order for there to be some social order.” From the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) we receive one of the most trenchant looks at the concept of time in its current social dimensions. Adorno’s 1969 essay “Free Time” attempts to ground a critique of our approaches to free time under contemporary conditions, contending that our relationships with it are shaped in decisive ways, “functionally determined” by “relations of production into which people are born.” Adorno believes fundamentally that we are living within an “age of truly unparalleled social integration,” in which institutional cohesion and consolidated power are such that the individual is functionally trapped, unable to contend with the almost total subjugation of free time. Adorno thinks this means “that ‘free time’ is tending toward its own opposite, and is becoming a parody of itself.” Adorno’s arguments, though filled with a kind of curmudgeonly condescension, cut into the inescapable social totality created by capitalism: “The miracles which people expect from their holidays or from other special treats in their free time, are subject to endless spiteful ridicule, since even here they never get beyond the threshold of the eversame … .” For Adorno, there is a deep sense in which the cultural fixation on and celebration of not being at work, of engaging in carefully curated and choreographed hobbies and leisure activities, itself shows the extent to which capitalism and its characteristic program of time discipline has come to dominate all of life. “If people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not caught up in the realm of the eversame, they would not have to be bored.”
Adorno demonstrates that, by themselves, the technological mechanisms necessary for the distillation of time were insufficient to bring about the new power of the clock; also necessary were the social and economic predicates. Successive advances in the sophistication and accuracy of timekeeping coincided with efforts to rationalize uses of land and labor. When the English ruling class engrossed the land, they engrossed the time of the peasantry along with it as a matter of course. The political world, its problems and possibilities, are inconceivable absent their temporal character; we cannot imagine the political world without reference to time. We could almost index political categories by their attitudes toward time and the ceaseless flow of history, where conservatives “stand athwart history,” hoping to slow in some way the passage of time. For their part, progressives associate movement into an unknown future with social and technological developments and steady advancement. In the current moment, when capital continues to concentrate and the crisis realities of this growing inequality visit us with increasing frequency, capitalism seems to have conceptually preempted the future: even as we live under its domination and see its innate tensions play out, there is a sense that the system of global capitalism cannot end. Progressives and liberals have made their peace with capitalism, quietly resigning efforts to imagine and build alternatives. We’re stuck at the end of history, without the tools to go beyond the dead end.
But even as we’re stuck, we seem to be moving faster and faster, careening even. The incredible salience and ever-increasing speed of these cultural and technological changes has been such that they have changed the way we talk about history and time. Long before the spread of the consumer internet pushed us into a new Information Age, generations of modern people had noticed that the technological developments and scientific discoveries and advances were increasingly frequent. Contemporary scholarship on the Anthropocene and the global impact of human civilization across multiple domains has introduced the concept of the Great Acceleration, “twin surges, of energy use and population growth.” This notion of an ongoing age of Great Acceleration can be generalized as a framework for analysis. Today we observe unprecedented, transformational acceleration in general technological development, the overwhelming pace of work, the frenetic information flows and consumption patterns, the ominous concentration of capital, and unsustainable environmental degradation. Everything has been picking up speed. Just as more granular company data provide a clearer picture and thus more focused and complete control over workers and the processes of production generally, so did increasingly precise time measurement mean stronger and more inescapable control over workers and society at large. As capitalist society has grown more complex and fast-paced, the amount of information we are being asked to confront, analyze, and produce every day has grown tremendously, informing and changing our subjective impressions of the passage of time: we can think of the increasing compression and density of information as accelerating time, an adjustment to our experience of time phenomenologically.
If time is experienced as the constant, irreversible outpouring of changes in the state of the system, higher degrees of information density may be experienced as an acceleration of time. Our most scientifically sophisticated concepts of time are intimately bound up with the fact of our limited knowledge and understanding, of its slippery, relativistic nature. We cannot define time without reference to physical space, without a description of its relative, flexible coextension with space. This relationship holds in politics and philosophy no less than in physics. Several related concepts from these fields help give form and substance to the notion of time. One common way of thinking about time presents it as an arrow—always pointed in one direction, toward the future, away from the past, always moving in that direction. But why does time run only in one direction? Our understanding of time is connected to models of thermodynamics, in particular the Second Law, which is the idea that the measure of disorder in a given closed physical system tends to increase. This measure of disorder is called entropy, where a higher entropy value expresses the lack of organization that grows as the component parts of the system attempt to move toward a state of equilibrium. More precisely, entropy is a measure of the number of states the overall system could produce while maintaining the same overall energy profile. “Entropy,” according to leading theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, “is a way of characterizing our ignorance about the system.” As disorder and disorganization spread through a system, it becomes increasingly difficult to describe in formal, mathematical terms. The emergence and multiplication of these asymmetries are experienced as the passage of time.
We live in a time when many of our most advanced scientific minds wonder aloud whether we will be replaced entirely by computers—and, more than that, whether such a replacement might be desirable and good. Many of our leading technophiles and techno-optimists believe that in inventing AI, we have accelerated evolution and inaugurated a new age. And if all that matters to us is speed and efficiency, then perhaps they are right. But if there is more to measure than efficiency, narrowly constructed in terms of capitalist logics, then we need tools to pass beyond the dead end and reimagine time socially. We have inherited varied critiques of time as a social reality, and these can help us render both better concepts of time and new ways to counter its power in social and economic life. Without full and complete access to our time, we are deprived of our lives themselves. The real mystery is “that there is not more active resistance to this state of affairs,” that people have come to see the total conquest of their time on earth as a condition both natural and inevitable.
