E-book: https://b-ok.cc/book/2491174/39c8be
I also have the tangible book from HOPP library
p. 2
Larkin’s poem links two salient points: the self-evidence of
time, manifest in the blank incomprehension aroused by this
simplest of questions; and an only vaguely articulated threat
which appears to respond to the question.
p. 5
Following Buttler’s example for gender, this book will suggest that time is one of the great ‘natural’ given’s of our culture, ‘performatively constituted by the very “expressions”-increasingly accurate temporal calibrations, universsal time frameworks-‘that are said to its results’ (1990:25).
The very naturalness of time
reposes upon its power to elide, from the outset, its construction
in discourse and via the mediation of technology. It is this elision
which endows it with an extraordinary potency in organizing
social life and managing it in the interests of power relations.
Elizabeth Freeman (2007: 160) has suggested, ‘temporality is a mode of implantation through which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. Schedules, calendars, time zones, even wristwatches are ways to inculcate … forms of temporal experience
that seem natural to those they privilege.’
Time’s attributes of
linearity (‘what is past is past’),
universality,
quantifiability and
commodifiability (‘time is money’),
and finally contemporaneity
and modernity (‘newer is better’)
all work to structure human existence according to the restrictive but profitable mechanisms of late capitalism.
Time in its common-sense meaning is the most everyday but also the most ubiquitous practical codification of contemporary capitalism in its self-presentation as our planetary
destiny.
p. 6
The recent history of time since the Enlightenment has evinced a progressive narrowing of the spectrum of temporal modes.
The gradual streamlining of temporality down to universal linear time as the self-evident calibration of human existence has repressed and elided other possible temporal structurings of individual and global existence.
It is curious that in the era of now-waning American-dominated
finance capital, time has largely disappeared from the agenda of
philosophy and the social sciences.
p. 7
both time and space, regardless of whether they were the focus of study in any respective social sciences discipline, were treated apart from each other. In this way, the crucial Enlightenment separation of time and space remained intact in the polarized
components of a conceptual dualism (May and Thrift 2001: 1–2).
p. 14
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;
p. 15
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.
p. 16
Mechanical clocks, spring driven and escapement regulated, were superseded in the twentieth century by quartz and atomic clocks. 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.
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’)
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.
p. 17-20
A. clocks go from centrally visible public spaces –> intimate domains of life, indoors, on the wrist, prosthetics
from time obedience (central time authority) –> time discipline (part of the very structures of consciousness of modern European subjectivity)
B. clocks detached time-measurement from natural elements and processes/ Time was released from a system of natural analogies
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.
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).
There slowly emerged a split between a perfect, ideal, transcendental, cosmic time-in-itself, and the imperfect, inaccurate clocks of everyday reality.
mechanical analogy of circularity –> mathematical concept of the arrow-like vector
circularity natural rhythms and the movements of the spheres –> linearity.
the idea of time flowing away behind the subject –> imagined as progression along a series of time-coordinates, moving towards the future
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
‘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
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.
p. 33-35
TIME VS ETERNITY
Since the Renaissance and even prior to that, ‘the true terror of Time’s nature [has been] its changeability’ (Quinones 1972: 430)
The shallow flow of progress is revoked for a residual, protosecular notion of eternity.
Such a polarity has a long pedigree. Early Christianity posed a notion of human time in opposition to God’s eternity.
Medieval theories of temporality underwent numerous transformations… they envisaged an
interlocking of time and eternity. For medieval people, time was thus experienced in a fatalistic mode, in which mortality, constantly present from birth onwards, was offset by the hope of salvation.
The spread of Protestantism, the accelerating development of early capitalism which encouraged it, and increasingly sophisticated technological means for taking control of the natural environment
encouraged a less fatalistic view of the individual’s place in time.
carpe diem topos:
‘the sense of time as an urgent pressure was coincidental with the rise of bourgeois society and
the middle class … time figures prominently in the formation of middle-class values. It suggests an external world of real limitations, against which one must make provisions if he is to be spared an
unsatisfactory reckoning’ (Quinones 1972: 14–16, 349).
Marvell’s implementation of the topos of devouring time is a significant marker of a secular moment in which humanity enters into a struggle against time, and, increasingly better equipped
with the technological means to control nature and make its
existence safer and more comfortable, appropriates time for itself.
This modern narrative of the mastery of time has, however, a
sting in the tail.
What this paradoxical development assumes, however, is a form
of time fully emancipated, on the one hand from divine dictates,
and on the other from the restraints of the natural world. This
emancipation of time, no longer subordinated to its other, eternity,
and confirmed in its mastery over human subjects (Zoll, ed., 1988),
signals the advent of our own experience of modernity.
performance practices_divergent temporalities 