Clock time

When we speak of “clock time” we tend to mean the natural movement of moments. But of course, the clock is a mechanical device, and its measurements of moments is purely conventional. It ignores natural seasonal variations in the length of daylight and night and generally, as Barbara Adam notes, operates “independently of the variations that were the mark of planetary cycles.”

Adam sums the the social, political, and psychological effects. (The psychological effects are especially intriguing: You can feel the clock ticking in your brain if you stop and notice; has any mechanical device in history gotten under our skin the way clocks have?): The clock “shifted the experience and meaning of time towards invariability, quantity and precision motion measured by number. With the mechanical clock, time became dissociated from planetary rhythms and seasons, from change and ageing, from experience and memory. It became independent from time and space, self-sufficient, empty of meaning and thus apparently neutral. This allowed for entirely new associations, linkages and contents to be developed and imposed. As an invariable measure of length, time was amenable to mathematical use, infinite division and precise calculation. As a quantity it became not only an essential parameter in scientific investigation but also an economic resource that could be allocated, spent or saved. As abstract value it could be exchanged with other abstract values such as money. As money it entered economic calculations, became an item in banking and book-keeping, entered as opportunity cost and came to be tied to speed, efficiency and profit creation. As machine time it became naturalized as time per se , it became, in Mumford’s words, ‘the new medium of existence.’ Although the shift to clock-time relations occurred slowly over a period of some four hundred years, the radical nature of the change cannot be overestimated: the machine time seeped deeply into the fabric of social life and spread like a spider’s web across the globe, leaving those who resisted the new time defined as backward and old-fashioned.”

Adam suggests that climate was a large factor in pushing Western Europe toward mechanical time-keeping. In the West (as opposed to the Middle East) weather was too cold for water clocks and sunlight too variable for sundials. But she cites David Landes’s book on the clock to suggest that sociopolitical tradition and religious practice were more important factors. China rejected the mechanical clock because they thought it too inaccurate, because it didn’t work in “a society organized to variable hours,” and because it removed the power of the emperor to set times and seasons. Islam didn’t move toward clock-time because their hours of prayer are not stipulated at certain times of day. Monasteries did have set hours for prayer, and this impelled them to set liturgical hours by mechanical means.