Temporalities

Russell West-Pavlov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136259937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines.

The author explores temporality's relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including:

• historiography
• psychology
• gender
• economics
• postmodernism
• postcolonialism

Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.

1
Time-Keeping

As a modern reader, one may be a little perplexed to find Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales praising a rooster by the name of Chauntecleer for being a better timekeeper than the clocks he competed with: ‘Wel sikerer [more accurate] was his crowyng in his logge | Than is a clokke or an abbey orlogge [clock tower]’ (Chaucer 1974: 199). Chaucer assigned separate lines to the natural and mechanical timekeepers, thereby coupling and contrasting, hyperbolically, the chicken run and the abbey belfry: the competing temporal regimes dovetail and overlap in a late medieval Europe world where clocks, already beginning to preside over the market places and civic spaces, were none the less far from reliable. Chaucer, as a civil servant in the incipient system of proto-capitalist trade and exchange, was attuned to the time-keeping needs of early accounting and nascent logistics. Clearly his praise of Chauntecleer is parodic, but natural rhythms (night and day, work and rest, harvesting, sowing) are still hegemonic enough to make the comparison viable.

But what Chaucer’s successive lines perform, and perhaps even drive, is the beginning of a slow but ineluctable separation of two linearities: that of calibrated chronometrical time, and that of a mode of temporality given by nature itself and part and parcel of natural processes and events. This chapter traces the increasing sophistication of the former modes of temporality (from time-keeping devices to the development of universal time), but also points up the attendant aporia which allow the latter to remain partially visible even today.

Time-Keepers

The earliest time-keeping devices remained close to natural processes. They measured the passage of time using the dynamic movements of certain elements or heavenly bodies: water, sand, the sun. The water clock (the ‘clepsydra’) was the simplest time-keeping mechanism. It was merely a receptacle to gather water, with a small hole to regulate the flow of liquid trickling in, and calibrations to measure the rising water level. It was sensitive to low temperatures though: a water clock was not much use when it froze. Nor could the flow of water be easily connected to other devices so as to trigger time-signals, except when the force of gravity and, for instance, the weight of buckets were employed to drive a calibrated measuring device, as in Chinese water clocks. Similar natural limitations hampered the utility of the sun dial, which was dependent upon good weather. In the northern latitudes, where cloud or haze could obscure the sun for weeks at a time, its utility was severely attenuated. Devices using sand, such as the hour glass, could measure the duration of a period of time, but could not integrate that to a calibrated scale of measured time.

These early time-keeping devices, which attained considerable sophistication in China or in the Islamic world, were supplanted in Europe by the emergence of the mechanical clock, driven first by a weight on a cable, then, in the 1400s, by a coiled spring whose progressive energy loss was compensated by a cable taken up by a conical fusée wheel (Cipolla 1978: 47–50). The invention of the spring, which enabled clocks to be made smaller, was accompanied by the invention of escapement mechanisms, which regulated the time-keeper. The weight on the cable was a solution to the question of how to drive the clock. But that solution in turn generated a further problem: the cable unwound faster and faster and faster until the weight hit the ground. Thus the initial problem of how to drive the clock was replaced by the problem of how to slow it down. This dilemma was resolved by a mechanism which came to be known as the ‘escapement’. The escapement was a blocking-releasing mechanism that worked to brake the downward rush of the cable and weight. A stop-go-stop-go function interrupted the continuous unwinding of the cable and translated it into pulses of movement which could calibrate the passage of time; these pulses could be relayed to auditory or visual indicators (bells, the movements of hands on the dial) so as to give a measurement of time; in addition, the stop-go mechanism conserved and rationed the energy of the weight or spring (Landes 2000: 9–10). Escapement devices underwent numerous technical transformations from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, including the invention of the pendulum and the anchor escapement. As clocks became more sophisticated and more accurate, single hour hands were supplemented by minute and second hands.

Technical improvements to the clock were given impetus by the search for longitude, essential to accurate ocean navigation and thus a crucial element in Europe’s global trading and colonizing expansion. Latitude could be ascertained fairly easily by measuring the angle of the north star relative to the horizon. Longitude, however, was more difficult to establish. The solution was to treat the Earth itself as a large clock, and to measure the difference between the time at the place at which the voyage had started and the time at the ship’s current position. This technique necessitated time-keeping devices that were extremely accurate, but also small and robust enough to be used on a ship. The search for a reliable, accurate marine chronometer drove forward the technical advancement of clock-making for several centuries. Thus two important aspects of modern time consciousness (accuracy of calibration and the global reach of a single time scheme), though merely incipient, were from the outset intimately bound up with expanding imperial capitalism.

Improvements to the accuracy of clocks, concentrating on the elimination of friction and changes caused by temperature, continued into the nineteenth century with the invention of vacuum cases and the use of electricity as a drive source. Mechanical clocks, spring driven and escapement regulated, were superseded in the twentieth century by quartz and atomic clocks. By the 1970s, timers at the Olympic Games could be calibrated to a hundredth of a second. In the world of subatomic particles, the calibrations of time attained hundredths and thousandths of a second, with new subdivisions being invented, from the microsecond (104⁻⁶) via the nanoseconds (104⁻⁹) to the picosecond (104⁻¹²). These clocks converted the phenomena being timed into vibrations (analogous to the oscillations of an escapement), the most stable and highest frequencies providing the most precise measuring devices ever made. In 1999 the US national Institute of Standards and Technology announced a new atomic clock that would serve as America’s primary frequency standard, with error of no more than a second in twenty million years (Landes 2000: 5–6, 202).

The Western history of the clock as a mechanism for regulating social life begins in the medieval monasteries, where the cycle of offices punctuating work with prayer was marked by bells. The earliest clocks did not run continuously, but served as alarms, set to ring bells to wake the monks for the night prayer (Biarne 1984). Such bell-timers give us the word for ‘clock’ (from German ‘Glocke’ or Flemish ‘clokke’). The monasteries, however, were not merely places of prayer (ora), they were also places of work (labora). They were highly complex economic units, where organization and discipline, regulated by clocks, guaranteed productivity (Mumford 1963: 12–18). Likewise, clocks and bells were widespread in medieval towns (Thrift 1988), as a large number of commercial and technical processes needed to be coordinated there, necessitating timekeepers and time signals audible to the entire community. The textile industry, Europe’s first major large-scale industry, depended upon the coordination of a large number of production processes, and various sorts of manufacturing: paid labour in the factories (heating the vats, etc.) remunerated by the day, and small workshop workers producing by the piece (Le Goff 1980: 35–36). Such tendencies increased exponentially as the industrial revolution gained in momentum and scope, driving the development of time technologies in conjunction with the quadruple processes of commerce, navigation, colonization and warfare.

The development of time-keeping devices had wide-reaching implications for European perceptions of reality. The new mechanical clock was a radical innovation, not so much because of its accuracy, but for two linked reasons: its potential for miniaturization, and the impetus it lent to the abstraction of time.

First, clocks, initially located in centrally visible public places such as a cathedrals or bell-towers, became increasingly smaller, portable and cheaper. They were replicated and dispersed among more intimate domains of life: in workshops, in private homes, in bedrooms, and finally in pockets or on the wrist. Accompanying this increasingly complete saturation of the spaces of everyday life by timepieces, was an ever more pervasive awareness of time, becoming part of the very structures of consciousness of modern European subjectivity. Time-keepers increasingly became prosthetic extensions of the body and calibrated temporality a ‘second nature’. Mere time obedience, imposed from a central time-giver in a central place, often associated with royalty or civic authority, gave way to time discipline: ‘Punctuality comes from within, not without. It is the mechanical clock which made possible, for better or for worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance’ (Landes 2000: 6). Indicative of this time consciousness, for instance, was the inverted progression from watch dials numbering the minutes at five minute intervals, then at 15, and finally, in the twentieth century, not at all, symptomatic of rising public familiarity with the notion of calibrated time (ibid: 140).

Second, clocks detached time-measurement from natural elements and processes. Mumford (1963: 15) observes that ‘[b]y its essential nature, [the clock] dissociated time from human events’, to which Landes (2000: 14) adds, ‘and human events from nature’. Time was released from a system of natural analogies. It no longer literally flowed or trickled, but was indexed, not embodied, by the clock, which stood for time itself. Time emerged as an entity dissociated from the natural world (Burkhardt 1997: 43). The development of the escapement system, which translated the force of gravity into a series of stop-go movements, effectively divided time up into mechanical segments: lock, release, lock, release, audibly perceptible in the tick-tock rhythm and visually evident in the staccato movement of the second hand. The flow of continuous time was now controlled by virtue of being broken up into ever smaller segments, which could be translated into abstract arithmetic values. The expression of ‘telling’ the time is related to the German ‘zählen’ [counting] in the sense of our ‘bank-teller’; the digital clock, reduced to pure numbers, is the ultimate embodiment of this process. Time became susceptible of calculation. Rather than being a flow in which all things were caught up, it became manipulable as an abstract, atomized quantity. Co-extensive with the appearance of clocks in cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a rising preoccupation with time as a scarcity, with the shortness of life, counterbalanced by progeny and fame, and the busy-ness of merchant life (whence business) as a mode of proactive combat against time (Quinones 1972: 25).

In the process, the concept of time separated from the machine which generated it, becoming an imaginary and ideal concept, released from the gravity-bound problems of the clockwork mechanism. There slowly emerged a split between a perfect, ideal, transcendental, cosmic time-in-itself, and the imperfect, inaccurate clocks of everyday reality. Clockmaking was motivated, in part at least, by the dream of constantly improving technical skills until real clocks, freed of all friction, resistance, indeed of materiality, would become synchronized with the imaginary ideal clock of the cosmos. In parallel, the forms by which time was imagined underwent a transformation, from the mechanical analogy of circularity, still embodied in the circular clock-face, to the mathematical concept of the arrow-like vector. The circularity of erstwhile natural rhythms and later, of the movements of the spheres, gave way to linearity. Likewise, the idea of time flowing away behind the subject was transformed, coming to be imagined as progression along a series of time-coordinates, moving towards the future (Burkhardt 1997: 60–63).

For most of us, disembodied, abstract time, doubled by deeply internalized time-discipline, is experienced in everyday life down to the minute (‘just a minute’, ‘I’m running five minutes late’). The micro-, nano- and picoseconds of physics remain far beyond our experiential horizon. Paradoxically, however, contemporary physics which explores these foreign lands of time calibration also eschews the very separation of time and the natural world increasingly established by clock-time and legitimized by Newton’s ‘absolute time’. By 1910 Einstein was assuming that ‘anything passing periodically through identical phases’ functioned as a clock Thus, ‘if the clock were nothing but an atom, then time would be marked by its oscillations’ (qtd in Galison 2003: 266). Modern physics has gone a step further, suggesting that time is the oscillations of certain particles. Quantum physics assumes that time is part of a space–time continuum. Time, like other phenomena such as light, is composed of a flow of minute particles known as quanta (Landes 2000: 428n7). These quanta are infinitely minute, estimated by Heisenberg and Levy at 10⁻²⁶ and 10⁻²⁴ of a second respectively (Le Lionnais 1959: 91). Time, according to this quanta-particle-flow theory, is not separate from events and from nature, but constitutes its most minute physical fabric. The infinitely abstract temporal calibrations of modern physics bring us full circle, back to the point where modern time-keeping began, that is, the separation of time from nature, space and place.

At the very opening of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (first published 1925), we are reminded, and this will be the first of many reiterated instances throughout the novel, of time: ‘Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air’ (1984: 6). The very plasticity of the image, hesitating between the deadening connotations of lead (the softest, most malleable of metals) and the implicit wave-form Woolf chooses as a metaphor for time-signal rhythms, recalls a forgotten materiality of time. This materiality links the various narrative strands of the novel’s plot and their embodiment in the respective characters’ consciousness. The materiality of the chimes also narrows the post-Enlightenment gap between time and physical processes. As Elias has pointed out, ‘Clocks themselves are sequences of physical events’ (1993: 1): clocks do not merely calibrate time, they also embody it in their own materiality.

The tangibility of the metaphor eschews the abstraction of modern time, thereby attenuating the apparent antagonism between time measurement (‘Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks … nibbled at the June day’) and the rhythms of existence: ‘Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets’ (Woolf 1984: 91, 50). This quasi-synthesis in turn allows the remarkable flexibility of interior, mnemonic time for which the novel is known: Mrs Dalloway’s thoughts and memories roam over half a century of experience, moving backwards and forwards in utter anachrony.

But one other aspect of time is also foregrounded by Woolf’s use of Big Ben’s chimes as a regular time signal. Not only does it work to unify the disparate characters and their various paths through London, but also it emblematizes, despite Mrs Dalloway’s idiosyncratic mnemonic time-roaming, the world standardization of time. The ‘leaden circles’ evoke global civic time, ‘time ratified by Greenwich’ (ibid: 93) – but the ‘leaden’ quality of the chimes also indexes the residual contextual ‘heaviness’ which always adheres to and encumbers universal time.

Universal Time

Up to this point we have concentrated upon the clock as a mobile entity imposing, via its own mechanical logic, a particular sort of time oddly separated from events and even further from nature. This disembodied time is paradoxical. On the one hand it is made mobile by its abstraction. On the other, the mechanical measuring devices which index this disembodied time allow it to seep into the very smallest nooks and crannies of individual life, saturating little by little global society in the entirety of its localities. Together, the apparently contradictory aspects of abstraction, miniaturization and invasive quotidian ubiquity have contributed to the cementing of universal time in global consciousness.

The nineteenth century saw the intensification of industrialization and of national economies, but within these national systems there was frequently little coherence between regional time areas, let alone along the borders between nations (Giddens 1990: 18). These discrepancies between regional time increasingly posed a problem for rapidly growing global capitalism and its tendency to ‘nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere’ (Marx and Engels 1983: 83). At the local American level, for instance, major railway accidents with numerous fatal casualties were caused from the 1850s on by the discrepant time schemes used by various railway companies (Galison 2003: 104–5). This prompted the American railway companies to take the initiative in 1883 of synchronizing the various local times, and articulating them in five gigantic time zones extending from ‘Pacific time’ on the west coast to ‘Atlantic time’ on the east coast, with all of them taking Greenwich Mean Time as their standard. Greenwich Mean Time had become statute law in Britain in 1880, and was voted four years later at an International Meridian Conference in Washington DC to become the world time standard.

Other nations were following suit and standardizing their multiple local times. Russia set its clocks to unified, if multi-zoned, time in 1888; Sweden did so as well at about the same time, also following Greenwich Mean Time (plus one hour). This increasing articulation of unified regional time zones with one another and with Greenwich Mean Time was made possible by the development of telegraph communication, which allowed the widespread transmission of electronic time signals from the 1860s onwards, initially at local level, with metropolitan centres such as Cambridge, Massachusetts or Bern, Switzerland establishing the starting points for what rapidly became nationally coordinated time systems. Telegraph communication of time signals rapidly superseded short-lived attempts, in Vienna and Paris, to establish networks of coordinated clocks by means of steam-driven compressed air. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, networks of coordinated time signals, transmitted via a capillary system of telegraph wires, from central time-keeping devices to local clocks in railway stations, churches, and numerous civic buildings, imposed a unified and all-pervasive sense of time. Like electric power, gas and sewage systems, unified civic time transformed collective-subjective experience of everyday life. Civic populations were alert to clock synchronization or its failure: when the pneumatic systems in use in Paris and Vienna in the 1870s produced fifteen-second discrepancies, the delays were quickly noticed by astronomers, engineers, and even the public (Galison 2003: 107, 92–98).

Such programmes of time synchronization were not restricted to European or American urban centres or nations, but rapidly took on a global dimension. From the 1850s to the 1890s, the Americans and the French in particular undertook an immense programme of ever-expanding projects to map accurately longitudes around the world: first between Europe and the Americas, both north and south, via undersea telegraph cables, then continuing on to map the entire Americas and large parts of East Asia.

The technology of spacetime communication took a further leap forward with the introduction of radio technology, and the pioneering of long-distance communication of radio signals between Newfoundland and Ireland, and around Europe. The French began sending radio time signals from the Eiffel tower in 1909, finally synchronizing with Greenwich Mean Time in 1911. In 1912 France, under the aegis of Poincaré, ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Time-keeping
• 2 Philosophies of time
• 3 Histories
• 4 Language and discourse
• 5 Gender and subjectivity
• 6 Economics
• 7 Postmodern temporalities
• 8 Postcolonial temporalities
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index