Every age, including the postcolony, is in reality a combination of several temporalities.1
—Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony
On a late July day in 1858, Mr. March’s court case was scheduled take place before judge Baron Watson in Dorchester, England. That morning, Judge Watson arrived at the court “punctually at 10 by the clock in the Judges’ room, which was set at Greenwich time.”2 When he called the court into session, neither the defendant nor the defendant’s counsel was present, so Judge Watson decided against poor Mr. March. Soon after, Mr. Cole, who represented March, entered the courtroom and protested Judge Watson’s decision. Mr. Cole argued that the court had sat and made the decision before ten o’clock, the scheduled time for the trial. He then demonstrated that he had entered the courtroom at 10:00 AM according to Dorchester’s town clock. This led to a discussion of what the true time was—Dorchester time or Greenwich time.
Dorchester is 2.4 degrees of longitude west of Greenwich. Before there were time zones, every degree of longitude represented a four-minute time difference. This meant that before Greenwich Mean Time became the time standard for Britain (which happened in 1880), the local time in Dorchester was about ten minutes behind the time in Greenwich—that is why the town clock and the clock in the judge’s chamber disagreed.
To his credit, Judge Watson recognized the problem posed by Mr. Cole, but the plaintiff’s attorney had already left the courthouse, so the case could not be retried at that moment. As a compromise, Judge Watson agreed to Mr. Cole’s request to have the case heard by a higher court.3
In November, the case came before the Dorchester assizes. The court noted that such differences of public clocks indicating different times created confusion that had legal ramifications. Judge C. B. Pollock determined that the case should be retried without costs to Mr. March. He concluded his ruling stating, “Ten o’clock is 10 o’clock according to the time of the place.” He further ruled the no town council or railroad could change the time of the place.4 In other words, the legal time was the local mean solar time, not the mean time at Greenwich.
“What time is it?” This is a mundane question. Unlike that 1858 summer in Dorchester, today, few people dispute the answer to that question. This is because we live in a world where many carry electronic devices that synchronize automatically. In fact, this is very strange. At no other point in human history have clocks been so closely synchronized and consequently placed above question. Yet, disagreement between timepieces used to be common. For instance, the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope wrote:
‘Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.5
Now it seems that the time is one of the few things about which everyone agrees. Many clocks and watches set themselves even when there is a shift between standard time and daylight saving time, or when one travels across time zones. Technology makes our clocks and watches go alike. Clock users do not need awareness of how the time on the clock is determined. The time is beyond challenge, in part because everybody seems to have the same time represented on their clocks, watches, and devices.
Even as such synchronization requires little effort by clock users, it involves great effort among those who manage time metrology and time-synchronization practices. These individuals manage suites of atomic clocks, implement time-synchronization protocols, and shape policies for time standards. They seek to improve the precision and accuracy of the clocks they manage, as well as the precision and accuracy of the time available to all of us who rely on those clocks. When those who oversee current time standards, time metrologists, refer to precision, they refer to the measurement of small increments of time. When they refer to accuracy, they mean the ability of the clock to reliably keep the correct time. One can have an atomic clock that measures billionths of a second (nanoseconds), but if it is set incorrectly, it is still not accurate. Ideally, clocks should be both accurate and precise.
As scientists push for new levels of precision, this precision creates challenges, including a new permutation of Pope’s point—clocks still do not run alike. This is not apparent when one looks at a clock, yet if one peels away the veneer of agreement, as this book seeks to do, one can see that clock time is not settled. Whereas in Pope’s day, the differences might be minutes or even hours, now the differences are at the level of nanoseconds or less. While such tiny differences exist outside of the notice of most clock users, they are significant to those in charge of maintaining time standards, such as the Time Service of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM).
The Time Service of the BIPM receives reports from forty-five national time laboratories across the globe. It uses these reports to calculate International Atomic Time (TAI),6 which is then used to determine the globally distributed time standard, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The Time Service periodically publishes an online document called Circular T, which indicates how far off each time laboratory’s clock is from UTC. Not only does Circular T indicate deviation from the standard, but it displays differences between these laboratories. On 26 September 2024, the clocks of the United States Naval Observatory were -1.6 nanoseconds behind the standard. The best-performing time laboratories on that date were the United States’ National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Institute of Metrology in China, although a week before, the time laboratory of the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica in Italy performed the best. Such variation from week to week is one reason why no single metrological laboratory is relied upon by the BIPM.
Clock drift and uncertainty—these issues vex time metrologists seeking synchronization, but not many other people. For most people, all clocks are the same and represent an unquestioned clock time. Instead of making choices about time, many people accept the time on their clocks as ontologically given. This reflects an unquestioning faith in an assumption of an ideal clock that is always correct and keeps uniform, continuous time. The imagined ideal clock is so pervasive that even histories of timekeeping almost treat this idea as an inevitable outcome. In contrast to faith in the ideal clock, because of historically documented and contemporary multiple temporalities found in everyday practice, Larissa Pschetz suggests that there is a need to think about time and timekeeping in new ways.7 She suggests that we have inherited a set of ideas about time ossified in objects, and that the ideas associated with the perfect clock are no longer designed to meet present needs. Instead, clocks become a technology that dictates behavior to suit their design. They suppress diverse social rhythms,8 and I add that they obscure the diversity of environmental cycles.9 The implication of Pschetz’s point is that clock users adapt themselves to clocks rather than clocks somehow adapting themselves to users’ needs.
By projecting the ideas of uniformity and standardization of the ideal clock onto material objects, material clocks gain remarkable authority. If one moves the other direction by relating material clocks needing synchronization to how the ideal clock is imagined, the idea of an ideal clock becomes unsettled. The use of the term “unsettled” is meant to emphasize the quality of a lack of stability and fixedness.
William James observed, “Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality.”10 While the concept of the ideal clock fosters faith in clocks, in fact clocks are objects that materialize conflicts. They need to be reset, synchronized, or steered. Otherwise, they contradict one another. Awareness of that needs to be hidden or at least suspended in order for clocks to be believed as faithful representations of time. In fact, conflating the time of material clocks with an imagined ideal clock elides the messiness of timekeeping and grants an unwarranted authority to the material object. Henri Bergson did this in his debate with Albert Einstein over the issue of simultaneity.11 For Einstein, a clock was enmeshed in its frame of reference—there were only clocks, and nothing like a perfect clock. The phenomenon of time dilation was a result of different relative velocities of different frames of reference.12 For Bergson, every clock in every frame of reference theoretically ran at the same tempo for the clock user, and because of that, he denied Einstein’s view of time as relative.13 Deleuze sorted this out as a contrast of multiplicities—the multiplicity of measurements (Einstein) versus the multiplicities of the experience of subjective durations (Bergson).14 The compromise between the two positions allows for clocks running at the same tempo, but for time measurement between frames of reference to be relative.
In this compromise, clocks’ homogeneous, uniform time is a myth. It is not a myth in the sense of being false, but in the sense of a foundational story around which experience gets organized. It is a sacred story. Granting this, Bergson imagined a material homogeneity of performance of clocks that time metrologists do not accept.
In this context, how should the time standard be set? The time produced by these time laboratories varies in accuracy from one week to the next, so privileging one above the others makes no sense. On the other hand, if one uses an average, what should the algorithm be? Should it weigh all clocks equally, including poor-performing clocks? After all, on 26 September 2024, the Time and Frequency Lab at Cagliari was -16170.6 nanoseconds off UTC, and such variances could skew the average. Actually, in the face of clocks not running quite alike, the BIPM uses a weighted average, but even then, the determination of the relative weights of the different reporting time laboratories is political—whose time gets weighted the most? Do countries with multiple time laboratories, such as the United States and China, get to shape global time more than other nations? In effect, behind the apparent uniformity of clock time is a multitude of competing clocks indicating slightly different times that result in different opinions about how time standards should be defined and publicly distributed.
This is not just about measuring time. People use concepts of time to organize and regulate social activities. Power over time is power over people. Throughout most of human history, time has been debated and multiple ways of reckoning time have coexisted. Even with the advent of clocks and a seemingly agreed-upon timescale, disagreement between clocks has been used strategically to gain an edge in relationships.
For instance, a friend of mine in Trinidad relayed an anecdote that continues to provoke my thinking. He worked as a foreman supervising crews that maintained roads. One of his responsibilities was to keep track of the time to ensure that the workers under his supervision worked a full day. Each morning, he would set his pocket watch to that of the supervising engineer before taking his crew to the assigned location. He recounted that one day he decided to let everyone go home early, but shortly after, the supervising engineer arrived. The engineer accused my friend of letting the workers go home before quitting time, but when my friend pulled out his pocket watch and showed it to his supervisor, the watch indicated that the time was slightly after quitting time. As he did so, he added, “This is the time I work by.” His boss could do little more than suggest that the watch get checked out.
The watch was a reliable timekeeper, but my friend had mastered the art of pulling out the watch’s stem and changing the time displayed while the watch was still in his pocket. By using this trick my friend got the engineer to treat the watch as an authoritative source of time even when it disagreed with the engineer’s own watch. As a result, my friend got away with letting his crew go home early while only receiving a rebuke from the engineer to get the watch checked. This is an example of time pluralism, a term coined by the anthropologist Carol Greenhouse to mean “the coexistence of multiple time constructions within social fields.”15
My Trinidadian friend’s story stands in contrast to the rhetoric, but not the reality, of current time standards. These standards and the infrastructure used to maintain them seek to eliminate the possibility of multiple, coexisting clock times—a form of temporal pluralism tied to time-keeping technology. Instead, the goal is a single, uniform, universal time that clocks reliably display. Cross-culturally and historically, time pluralism has been the most common state of affairs. The uniform, standardized system under which the world currently lives is a recent innovation, if not an aberration.
Today, it is hard for many people to imagine a society without synchronized time indicators, much less a society that employs multiple, different ways of reckoning time. On the other hand, as Emily Keightley demonstrates, when one focuses on the human agent rather than the technology, the time provided by technology does not suit many experiences of time enmeshed in local power relations.16
A common example is jet lag. One can fly across many time zones and one’s smartphone will synchronize with the time zone where one lands, but one’s body does not. Humans are diurnal mammals with pronounced circadian cycles; clocks are examples of a technology that strives to be continuous and uniform.
The homogenizing of time across modern nation-states hides the reality that most of the world’s population lives under some form of time pluralism. The most obvious examples are calendars. The Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Chinese calendars differ from the “secular” Gregorian calendar (a bit of an oxymoron when one considers that the calendar was imposed by the Roman Catholic Church and only later adopted by the world). Some societies are bi-calendrical. The anthropologist Janet Hoskins observes that Kodi ritual calendars used on the island of Sumba in Indonesia are at odds with the calendar of the Indonesian state.17 The Ottomans kept both an administrative solar calendar and the Islamic lunar calendar.18 In the use of the Gregorian calendar, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Chinese see their holidays as “moving” from one year to the next. Truth be told, their holidays do not move. For instance, every year Passover is the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan. It never changes. If history had been different, and the Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, or Hindu calendar had been dominant, New Year’s Day in the Gregorian calendar would move in the dominant calendar. The majority of the world’s population lives with time pluralism and refers to multiple calendars, and when combined, there are more Jews, Hindus, Chinese, and Muslims than there are people who use only a single calendar.
This book focuses on the topic of time pluralism in daily timekeeping, and does so by looking at examples from the past and the continued existence of such pluralism. Current clocks are deceptive in their apparent uniformity and synchronization, but such uniformity and synchronization is fragile because of several unresolved questions. Can a single time standard be imposed on the world? Should a single time standard be imposed? Is time pluralism really a threat? Looking at time in this way undoes the standard tale of progress from early clocks through the atomic clock but instead looks at the reality that time measurement is a consequence of human choices about techniques, methods, and technologies. At different points in the past, these choices have allowed for multiple public times. At other points, such as now, diversity has been suppressed. There is benefit in revisiting these past examples of time pluralism to think about the present time system and its future.
Every clock tells a story that concerns a debate about time; every clock materially represents ideas; thus, every clock attempts to shape how people think about temporality in a context of debates about time. The stories here are about the articulation of clockwork and clock displays. A clock is a device that converts transitions (ideally of equal duration) into culturally recognized units of time that are then displayed. The following chapters will show that it is possible for very different cultural units of time to be represented using the same clock mechanisms. Clocks differ from clepsydrae and sundials, which work based on continuous processes, like changing water levels or the movement of a shadow. Such continuous movement then crosses marked thresholds, such as hour lines. It is the crossing of those thresholds that marks time. Consequently, there are two very different logics embedded in these devices. Clocks work on the principle of an addition of discrete units that are converted into culturally recognized categories. Clepsydrae and sundials work on the principle of a continuous process crossing thresholds labelled as culturally recognized categories.
The sequence of culturally recognized units is a timescale. What links a clock to the idea of uniformity and continuity is the concept of a timescale. A timescale consists of the assumptions, logic, and units for measuring time. Timescales determine representations of time, and how those representations are achieved. A clock is not a timescale, and a timescale is not a clock. A timescale is a set of ideas to which a clock’s performance is compared. UTC is the current globally distributed standard timescale, and there are no clocks that authoritatively display UTC, only local close approximations of UTC. That said, an ideal clock would display UTC.
Louis Essen, one of the inventors of the atomic clock, wrote that timescales serve three functions: “of giving the time of day, the season of the year, and also a measure of time interval or duration.”19 For a timescale to serve these purposes, it must have the following features: 1) a starting point that defines the epoch to which the timescale applies, 2) units of time, and 3) a sequence of the units that extends from the beginning point into the future or to a point where the timescale repeats. These ideas are essential for the definition of the time of ideal clocks.
It is not clear when the term timescale first emerged, although its importance as a concept seems to coincide with the diminishing public knowledge of how clock time was determined. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first usage as occurring in 1828. Another indication that it is a relatively recent term in English is the fact that there is not yet a standard spelling—it can be spelled as time scale or timescale. While the term timescale seems to be relatively recent in origin, it is remarkable that it is used so frequently without definition. It is as if the term is utterly noncontroversial.
On the one hand, the 1828 date the Oxford English Dictionary gives is plausible because the idea of a timescale seems closely tied to ideas of standardization of time across space and the emerging idea of a reliable, uniform, continuous clock associated with modernity. Such ideas emerged among metrologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, timescales preexist 1828. The most obvious examples of timescales come from chronologies where the creation of a single scale of time, in order to represent the sequence of events, is important. Notable examples of this include the Islamic Hijri chronology or Bede’s use of Anno Domini. Bede’s case is particularly instructive. He starts out his book The Ecclesiastical History of England using timescales associated with the reigns of particular monarchs,20 but since Anglo-Saxon England involved several kingdoms, and Bede’s historical vision included the entire Church, such timescales based on single rulers were unwieldy. This is possibly why by chapter three of his book he begins to use the idea of Anno Domini in order to chart events across kingdoms and space. It seems that once one thinks beyond the local, some form of standardization across space becomes desirable.
The existence of the term timescale in English itself raises questions. It is a European term, most likely of either French or English origin. Moreover, in debates about timescales, the languages of choice have been French or English. This is not because the concept to which the term timescale refers does not exist in other languages; it is just that those other languages use words that are compounds of “time” and “scale,” as well, such as in German where it is Zeitskala. Some languages, like Japanese, borrow the term from English, with the Japanese word for timescale written in either katakana as timu sukeru, or written with a combination of katakana and kanji: 時間スケール (Jikan sukeru—literally “interval of time scale” with sukeru being the Japanese spelling of the English word “scale”).
Timescale representations are cultural creations out of social processes, which means clocks are results of those processes. One such story can be read on any current clock or watch—the story of the multicultural origins of our current way of displaying hours. We inherited dividing the day into twenty-four hours from the ancient Egyptians. The sexagesimal system for minutes and seconds originated in the Near East and diffused with the help of Alexander the Great. The division of seconds into tenths, hundredths, thousandths, and so on, is a legacy of the decimal time system of the French Revolution. The representation of time seen on clocks is not an invention of the West, then, but from its Renaissance origins, it was an early example of what the philosopher of science and technology, Don Ihde, called “postmodern pluriculture”21—a combination of borrowings from several cultural traditions. The combination is Western; its components are not. This cobbled-together collection of ideas about time makes up the timescale represented on clocks. In a way, it is a reconciliation of different ways of counting time units—a resolution posed by previous problems of time pluralism.
That simple display mediates a relationship between the clock user and millennia of people thinking about and debating time. It implies a story of how these different time systems came together and the choices that brought them together. Clocks mediate between expert knowledge and users,22 and any clock one looks at includes multiple generations of experts.
These experts are hidden from view. Most people cannot name the person in charge of the Time Service of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), or the heads of time laboratories spread across the globe. While the day is a fundamental unit of time for many people, few know that its current recognized length was determined by Simon Newcomb.23 Indeed, more people know the fictional character based on Newcomb, Sherlock Holmes’s arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty, than Newcomb himself.24
The lack of knowledge is because most users of clocks end their education about timekeeping early in primary school. The educational goal is not a comprehensive knowledge of timekeeping, but merely how to “read” a clock. This education muddles an imagined ideal clock that keeps uniform and continuous time with what material clocks actually display. The relationship between the imagined ideal clock and actual clocks is taken for granted. From this perspective, such basic education in timekeeping promotes an unquestioned association of the ideas of time associated with the ideal clock and how actual clocks represent (or misrepresent) that ideal. Many people treat clocks that synchronize automatically as faithful simulacra of the ideal clock.
The globalization of time standardization embedded in information and communications technology has a logic different from material clocks—those individual devices that people use to tell the time.25 The ideal clock keeps time perfectly; clocks get set. The ideal clock is uniform in its timekeeping; clocks break and malfunction. Bruno Latour observed in Aramis, his study of the demise of plans for a rapid transit system in Paris, that the malfunctioning of technology influences the politics of technoscientific decisions.26 It is often these malfunctions that drive changes in the efforts to get time-keeping technology close in function and representation to the ideal clock.
The material clock mediates cognitive relationships between users who do not question working clocks, designers/builders of clocks, and time policy makers who worry about the variability of clocks.27 When one shifts perspective from the homogeneity of the ideal clock to the diversity of actual clocks the picture becomes far more complicated. As Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift point out, “clock time comprises a number of concepts, devices, and practices which have meant different things at different times and places, and even in any one place have not had a unitary meaning.”28 Such differences are what almost got Mr. March convicted in 1858 and allowed my friend to go home early without a reprimand from his supervisor. Instead of viewing clocks as reflecting the ideal clock in a simple, straightforward manner, we should view clocks as material objects positioned in a contentious and complicated chain of ideas about time and its measurement. The current relationship between the ideal clock and clocks works against public knowledge about the variation of clocks.
When looked at in terms of scientists thinking about time and encoding their ideas into clocks, it is not surprising that different clocks can indicate many different ways of thinking about time. Actual clocks are devices designed and imagined to pursue the chimera of abstract, ideal timekeeping. The ideal clock is uniform and consistent; clocks are a means, often flawed, of conveying that idea to users. Despite being an abstraction, the ideal clock depends on the material limitations of technology. But in this relationship of the abstract and material, most clock users overlook the flaws and the diversity of the materiality of clocks even as such flaws and diversity are a source of concern to those who oversee the definition and distribution of UTC.
Humans’ use of clocks diverges from the time on the ideal clock, however. The time of the ideal clock is uniform and continuous; the human consultation of clocks is momentary and discontinuous. Added to this constellation is the use of clocks in information technology, such as computers timestamping changes to files. This is a documentary function of clocks that is expected to run outside of the intervention of users but to be available to users for consultation. To know the exact time at any given moment depends on a device that measures out increments in a continuous timescale—something that humans are incapable of doing without the aid of technology.
People, including time metrologists, are incapable of knowing the correct time in the current time system without the aid of a clock. Because of this, the anthropologist Laura Bear describes the clock as a prosthetic for knowing the time.29 Such prosthetics are part of what makes us human—we rely on objects to manage our world and our experiences. Objects that define our humanness not only reflect culture but are essential components of many cultural processes.30 Louis Leakey wanted to make tool making and tool use a defining feature of the genus Homo.31 From Leakey’s perspective, this norm goes back millions of years and defines our humanity. Yet, as Bill Brown argued in his article “Thing Theory,” there has been a tendency to separate objects from ideas,32 and even to neglect objects in favor of the mental, rather than to confront the complicated relationship between objects and ideas. Indeed, one of my mentors derided the term material culture with the glib comment, “Material does not have culture.”
Since the 1980s, there has been resistance at such separation of things from thinking and social relations.33 Within cognitive science, in part because of the idea of cognitive tools in L. S. Vygotsky’s work,34 the idea of using elements of the world or material creations to serve as extensions and augmenters of cognitive processes has gained attention.35 We use clocks to know the time; this makes them what Edwin Hutchins calls cognitive artifacts.
Cognitive artifacts are tools for thinking36—they are things that perform cognitive tasks for us. Humans augment their mental capacities by creating tools that complete cognitive tasks. For instance, a calculator is a means of doing arithmetic that one might be able to do in one’s head or with pencil and paper, but it’s faster and easier to use the calculator. A cognitive artifact can be as simple as taking notes for future use rather than relying on memory alone, or as complex as a computer doing complicated analyses of large data sets.
Because of the knowledge encoded in a cognitive artifact, the use of these objects involves little or no reflection on how their results are produced.37 Much of modernity relies on schedules, and to know the correct time associated with those schedules, we rely on machines—our clocks and watches, the devices involved in transmitting time synchronization protocols, and ultimately atomic clocks. Nobody, not even time metrologists, can know the time by the direct observation of the world around them. So our timekeeping is a fusion of the human judgement of time metrologists and their atomic clocks, systems administrators and their computers and clocks involved in synchronization protocols, and clock users. Clocks are artifacts that link these people and processes. When it comes to knowing the time, we are cyber-linked to a host of time-keeping experts and technicians through the cognitive mediation of an object. It is impossible to know clock time without this complex network of material clocks and the people who manage them.
Such dependence leads to forgetting the choices and ideas that went into the design of the objects.38 The clock becomes not just the source of expert knowledge, but the expert itself. Clocks hide the social relationships between clock users, those who maintain time standards, the designers of the current standards, and, ultimately, the relationship to the ideal clock.
André Leroi-Gourhan saw this exteriorization of thought into objects as a new stage in human evolution,39 adding: “The first means of programming by purely mechanical processes were found in clock-making.”40 Clocks are an example of such exteriorization, and they are a significant example because they pervade so much of everyday life.
To some extent, for the prosthesis to work, there must be blind faith in clocks’ representation of time. A psychology experiment in the 1960s demonstrated the credence given to clocks. The subjects were asked to do a simple reading task and record their time by a clock on the wall, but they did not realize that the experimenters manipulated the clock’s rate to run slower than normal. When the clock was running at 50 percent of its normal speed, the subjects still regarded it as running normally. This was also true at 25 percent of normal speed. It was only when the clock was running at 12.5 percent of its normal speed that the subjects began to suspect that the clock was being manipulated.41 Such unwavering faith in clock performance even when clocks perform poorly allows them to regulate the lives of the faithful. Clocks regulate and structure social relations, labor, and even body functions, thereby crafting what Elizabeth Freeman calls “chrononormativity.”42
It is an idea of great power tied to ubiquitous devices. As an accessory to faith in the ideal clock is the argument that Larissa Pschetz and Michelle Bastian put forth: that material clocks shape the experience and perception of time.43 Additional work on speeding up or slowing down clocks reveals that its effect on time perception has additional effects over the experience of fatigue, hunger, and pain.44 Clocks are prosthetics by means of which we know the time, and clocks determine and define the time we know, occluding other possibilities.
When the idea of the clock as prosthetic is applied to the idea of time pluralism, one recognizes the threat to standardization. It is not just the clocks that differ, but the people who use them. Going back to the story told by my Trinidadian friend, his supervisor had to believe my friend because they both chose to believe my friend’s watch. Without the watch (and the trick of resetting it), my friend would not have been able to justify letting his crew go home early. Because clocks are necessary prothestics for reckoning time, the trend toward clock standardization is also a trend toward the standardization of the human experience of time.
The idea that clocks standardize people has a sinister ring to it, but it does not indicate some secretive cabal of mad scientists seeking to control our thoughts. Clocks embody ideologies. Since they are things that people rely upon to think, these things “act.” Nomi Lazar demonstrates that they are also devices that are used to establish and maintain political legitimacy.45 The common description of clocks is that “clocks tell time for people”—in the syntax of that phrase, the clocks are the agents and people are objects of agency.
Going back to the idea that every clock tells a story, most clocks tell stories with long histories and multiple generations of both named and nameless scientists, designers, and policy makers. To put it bluntly, much of the knowledge mediated by clocks was generated by people long dead. As I argued in Objects of Time, this makes clocks necromantic objects—a means by which the knowledge developed by dead people is communicated to the living.46 In this situation, one can no longer assume that clock time is what it is because of its function or some conscious planning of a small group of individuals in the present. Each generation of time metrologists inherits the technology of previous generations, and in so doing, inherits the ideas embedded in that technology. Yet, since clocks reproduce concerns of the past, the politics embedded in clocks are not necessarily those of the present. Time standardization creates products of this inheritance.
For this reason, outside of the conscious manipulation of clocks, the technology dictates behavior, but behavior does not dictate the technology—human beings are “locked into the material and technological world they create.”47 Clocks are the way they are because of an alchemy of the reproduction of past designs through habit and present uses. That combination of ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and French Revolutionary ideas did not occur because those ideas were good to combine. Instead, the combination occurred because it represents a history of accumulated habits.
Cultural knowledge is distributed across individual humans, but is also distributed through objects that transcend generations and cultures, and with current telecommunications technology, transcend space, as well. In fact, often the designers of time-keeping knowledge and technology die long before their technology ceases to be used. The list of such people includes the famous, such as Galileo; the less famous, such as Louis Essen, one of the inventors of the atomic clock; and the unknown, such as those who toiled on factory floors faithfully reproducing clock designs. Davis Baird points out about scientific instruments in general that this leaves their inventions in the hands of technicians: “Expert knowledge systems transcend their makers.”48
The ideas of dead scientists and metrologists embedded in clocks shape our time consciousness.
Because of reliance on these necromantic cognitive artifacts, habit becomes more powerful than science: Lazar notes that “in the absence of renewed conflict, temporal order grows familiar and may pass beyond notice.”49 Such a melding of habit with past and present maintains current information technology infrastructure. Clock users act using cognitive artifacts that function based on preprogrammed algorithms. An example is the time synchronization protocols of computer systems. These protocols are not clocks but facilitate the agreement between clocks. Once set up, something like Network Time Protocol (NTP)50 is designed to robustly synchronize computers through communicating with time servers with little or no human intervention. This allows NTP to frequently and reliably synchronize computer clocks, which traditionally have kept time poorly, to give the appearance of computers displaying an accurate time.
To give an example, several years ago when I proctored an examination, I projected onto the classroom’s screen two clocks: the “official” time of the United States provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a dial showing a second hand representing the desktop computer’s clock. At the beginning of the test, there was a 17-second difference between the two clocks. At some point during the examination, the computer’s clock synchronized with a time server, and it started to show no difference from the NIST’s time. Such events occur many times a day outside of the awareness of most users of electronics.
Clockmakers and time metrologists did not create NTP. Computer scientists who designed it desired a protocol for using networks to distribute time signals generated by those who manage high quality atomic clocks. So, in addition to clock designers and makers, in this web of transgenerational and translocal relationships, are also those engineers and technicians who maintain clocks as mediators. In effect, the production and exchange of clock time follows the logic of what Ian Hacking observed about laboratory sciences: There is an interconnection of the things themselves, the facilitators and makers who instruct users on how the things are to be used, and the technicians who work with users to keep the things in working order.51
The consequence of this necromancy is that the concerns of the designers and facilitators, some of whom are long dead, sometimes differ from those of the users, and as a result, inherited designs embody cultural logics of bygone eras. The modern clock is a good example. The clockwise movement of the hands mimics the movement of the Sun’s shadow on a sundial in the northern hemisphere—the hemisphere in which clocks originated. In charting the movement of this shadow, analog clocks adopt a geocentric representation of the relationship between the Earth and Sun in the northern hemisphere. We know that the “movement” of the Sun across the sky is a product of the rotation of the Earth, and not of the Sun’s motion. Moreover, the shadow on a sundial moves in a counterclockwise direction in the southern hemisphere. An accurate clock representation of Earth’s rotation that did not privilege one hemisphere over the other would have the hands stay stationary and the dial move in a counterclockwise direction. This sort of display has been tried, such as in the decimal clock made by Abraham Breguet that is now at the Frick Collection,52 but such representations never caught on. The northern hemispheric geocentric display is far too ingrained in clock users’ habits to change. In effect, the cognitive artifact leads the users to imagine cycles incorrectly.
Clocks and calendars are essential equipment for the durability of many institutions.53 The persistence of knowledge after death that gets embedded in the design of common cognitive tools, like clocks, has a conservative quality to it. Normally, technology is viewed as an agent of change, but objects can also be agents of stasis, particularly when humans’ habits are tightly integrated with the object. This gives rise to another source of time pluralism—the differences created between the primary school knowledge of time deeply embedded in habit and the advancements in time-keeping and time-synchronization technology and practices.
Michelle Bastian argues that this undermines the tendency of philosophical discussions of time to see clocks as “self-evident tools” that “are not thought to be worth remarking on.”54
Basically, clocks are in a largely unexplored black box55 with a largely unexplored relationship to the idea of the ideal clock with its ideal uniformity and homogeneity of time units. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour describe black boxes as containing “that which no longer needs to be considered,” and the more that can be placed into a black box, including habits and modes of thought, “the broader the construction one can raise.”56 For a globalized network of information and economic flows that the ideal clock provides through clocks, and all the transgenerational and translocal knowledge clocks encode, the black box needs to be impressive, indeed. Despite all the writing about clock time, in most cases clock time is still, as Michelle Bastian suggests, “an unassailed monolith.”57 What is inside that box?
The history of timekeeping has been one of different ways of counting hours and different clock designs; current clocks obscure time pluralism through such necromancy. The efforts to create and maintain a standard, uniform timescale is a fight against generations of habit and time-keeping technology. This turbulent history must be suppressed and pushed out of consciousness for official clock times to maintain their legitimacy. It is this history and these politics that are in the black box.
I argue that the ideal clock is an accumulation of ideas and stories reproduced by habit and incorporated into experience. Its representation of time could have been otherwise. As the following chapters discuss, contrary to the impression that there is only a single time clocks can represent, the history of these devices reveals that the development of mechanized timekeeping produced a proliferation of different ways to represent hours.58 The neglect of these other systems of representing time in histories of timekeeping cultivates the impression that there is only one “natural” clock time.
Peter Burke points out that “the rise of the mechanical clock …no longer looks as simple a phenomenon as it once did.”59 The simplistic view of the history of clock time emphasizes the standardization of clock hours that has taken place since the Enlightenment. If one reads histories of clock time written before 1900, one does not find a simple story of a single form of clock time emerging out of some inevitable march of horological progress. On the contrary, one encounters different hour systems and differences between mean time (a time that divided the average length of day into twenty-four hours) and apparent solar time (a time based on the angle of the position of the Sun to one’s meridian on a specific day).60 Because of the present delusion of simplicity in the development of the clock, there is little recognition of our living at a unusual moment in concepts of time—a moment of unprecedented standardization with a veneer of global agreement.
Such histories also tend to neglect the relationship of colonialism and time standardization.61 Global imperialism used standardization to suppress multiple ways of conceptualizing time. This did not eliminate alternatives but established the European ways of reckoning as dominant.62 One should not assume that the movement of Western material culture indicates assimilation to Western ideas, however.63 Western clocks were vectors for communicating Western ideas of timekeeping, but clocks could be adapted to local, non-Western ideas. There is a growing body of literature on how other ways of reckoning time have survived the domination of the “Western” ideal clock. Such cases have been documented for Egypt,64 Turkey,65 and Japan,66 and the literature is bound to expand as this issue becomes more widely explored.
Consequently, I disagree with the position that “other times—non-Western and pre-modern—become silenced through a form of temporal imperialism.”67 Instead, as the well-documented examples from Egypt, Turkey, and Japan demonstrate, globalization only increased competition between time systems.68 Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum argues that the current intertwining of horological technology and social habits should not be viewed as an outcome of Euro-American superiority, but of Euro-American arrogance,69 and I would add that such arrogance gets in the way of seeing the diversity of time systems that continue to be used.
Instead of accepting and exploring a cultural diversity in clocks, the tendency has been to contrast “clock time” and “natural time.” This binary distinction is pervasive and used to divide the world into “traditional societies” with imprecise and local times and “modern societies” with uniform and abstract time.70 This is misleading in two ways. First, it essentializes all the cultural approaches to thinking about time that are not tied to the European science of time measurement, even if the non-European approaches include time-measurement devices. Second, it misconceptualizes modern timekeeping as beyond challenge, when, in fact, it is messy, contested, and plural, as chapters 6 through 8 will show. In this approach that focuses on the logic of the ideal clock, clocks are not sufficiently examined, and the diversity of times behind clocks is not explored.
Time metrology was and is a critical part of the architecture of empire and capitalism—in Latour’s words, it has expanded “locally everywhere.”71 In addition to using clocks to coordinate social relations, clock time is a crucial element of the representation of the movement of capital by means of accounting and bookkeeping. It coordinates electric power grids. It is a necessary component of all computing in which marking actions with timestamps is essential. For all these time-reliant technologies and techniques to work, time must be standardized. As such, the measurement of time from the European metrological perspective became separated from locality,72 even as many people’s daily lives time remained intrinsically tied to their location.73
Guided by the concept of the ideal clock, time metrology created measures of time accepted and understood by all across large distances,74 and thereby it became a global means of regulation and governmentality.75 Pierre Bourdieu points out, “One of the first acts of civil bureaucracies …was the establishment of public time.”76 Clock towers were “structures that helped express the power of the government at a distance; they became architectural proxies for the state itself.”77 Such public time inclines authorities toward standardization, which in the case of European colonialism involved relating technology, mathematics, science, and chronology.78 Time pluralism is not just a threat to standards, but to power.
Time standards have become an important component of the transnational informational infrastructure of capitalism, and with this, they have moved beyond the ability of any one nation to control.79 In his work on the development of standardization, Laurent Thévenot notes, “Standards equip entities with a rather public kind of guarantee with the properties of objects,”80 and in quantifying and governing so much of life, standards are also political.81 Despite the importance of metrology in modernity, it is an under-researched topic,82 and one in which metrological practice is often too closely tied to state actors rather than described as defying such actors’ attempts at control.83
The distribution of standardized timekeeping did not result in the homogenization of all timekeeping, however. For instance, in Islam local timing is critical to prayer times and fasting during Ramadan even if the devout use a clock to know when to pray and fast. In such cases, the delocalized global time standard became harnessed to local timing—an example of what Partha Chatterjee noted in stating, “What was necessary was to cultivate the material techniques of modern Western civilization while retaining and strengthening the distinctive spiritual essence of the national culture.”84 For Islamic prayer times, apps now use local solar time derived from ephemerides represented in terms of local clock time. Concepts of time also shaped how administrative functionaries structured and represented their activities.85 The hegemony of time standardization and uniformity that colonialism cultivated was and is incomplete, leaving many unexamined temporal tensions and conflicts that continue to be obscured by the image of the ideal clock.86
These factors cultivated habits that persist after decolonization. Now empires have dissolved, but the legacy of the ideal clock is a remnant of those empires. Because of the tendency to merge how the ideal clock is imagined with material clocks, as a result of postcolonial politics, when time pluralism is discussed, it is posed as an alternative, or even as a threat, to standardized clock time.87 The universalizing aspects of time standards associated with the ideal clock conflicts with nationalist sentiments.88 The course of postcolonial time metrology as a hybrid of European and non-European ideas combined with administrative habits has not fully made itself felt other than in the inability of any former empire to impose its metrological will on the United Nations’ Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-R), the international treaty-based organization that asserts responsibility for defining global time standards. The relationship between the ideal clock and clocks in general is set to become strained, and the relationship of time and experience is potentially complicated (or maybe liberated) because of time pluralism. This leads to a choice: suppress the diversity or be open to new clock designs that represent time pluralism and allow conversion between different ways of imagining time. The argument here is that the representation of time pluralism occurred in the past and is an option for the future.
Time metrology seeks to quantify time, and as an effort at quantification, its logic is to reduce plurality and justify policy.89 I argue that time pluralism is a common element of timekeeping. Starting with chapter 1, the book addresses cases of time pluralism in the past when it was more publicly recognized than in the present. Chapters 2 through 5 present historical cases of time pluralism. Chapters 6 through 8 show that, despite the present uniform appearance of clock time, challenges of time pluralism persist. What these chapters make clear is that the current choices in time metrology see time pluralism as a threat.
A general theme throughout is to acknowledge the possibility of multiple forms of clocks and clock times. If there is no necessary relationship between the time on the clock and any phenomena in the world, there is no reason to assume that clocks must have only one form.
Since every clock tells a story, there are clocks that tell stories of conflict, time pluralism, and conflicts over how the clock time should be imagined and other stories of competing clocks. How can one recover those stories?
To examine time pluralism is to examine different potential times that the ideal clock does not represent. In this approach, the representation of time becomes a site of manipulation and contestation by a few culturally knowledgeable people with implications for many others who take the representation for granted. The historian of medieval science, Lynn White, observed that “technology and science are the essence of power.”90 In the case of representations of time, there is yet another element that magnifies the power at the same time it hides it, namely, the power to manipulate a representation that most people have naturalized. A focus on multiple social rhythms complements the examination of time pluralism. This can be found in the examples of market regulation in medieval York (chapter 2), the relationship of clocks and gender among early modern Habsburg elites (chapter 3), and the emergence of modern astronomy through the time-keeping practices of Regiomontanus, Bernard Walther, and Tycho Brahe (chapter 4).
Finally, there is a political element to the manipulation of the representation of time. This theme runs through all the historical examples and culminates in the cases of the New York State Democratic Convention of 1858, and the enforcement of liquor laws in England discussed in chapter 5. In both cases, there is an agreement on the technology for measuring time and the representation of time, but there is also political manipulation based on the standard to which the technology and representation are set. In effect, there is a debate over which timescale is the timescale of the ideal clock and the timescale to which material clocks should aspire.
These historical examples are to address a concern expressed in current time metrology and highlighted in the debate over the leap second, as discussed in chapters 7 and 8. In this context, the relationship between clocks and the imagined ideal clock is particularly tight, and timescale pluralism is seen as a threat to the stability of this relationship and consequently a threat to the global technological infrastructure building on this relationship. In effect, the motivation to explore historical examples of timescale pluralism in the European horological tradition is to think about the questions of “what if” in debates about current time standards and to loosen the relationship between material clocks and the ideal clock. This is meant to disrupt a narrative of inevitable horological progress that assumes that future clocks will simply be improved versions of present clocks.