The Politics of "Time" at the Cusp of the "Millennium"

[First published in a slightly different versio as "Relocating Time: The Politics of Time at the Cusp of the ‘Millennium’", Humanscape 6, no. 12 (December 1999), pp. 6-13; longer and revised version published as Chapter I of Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002).]

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I: Prolegomenon to the Study of the Cultural Politics of Time:

The "twenty-first century", indeed a new "millennium", is nearly upon us. As it is conventionally understood, time moves ahead with inexorable force, indifferent to the fate and fortune of individuals and nations alike. Few commentators have paused to consider the cultural politics of time. Though not everyone is gripped by "millennium fever", and by far the greater number of people have not been lacerated by the fear of the "Y2K" bug, except perhaps in the United States, the haven of millennium mongers and fanatics maddened by millenarian visions, the mere ubiquitousness of the categories of "century" and "millennium" is presumed to render them self-evident. Like a great many other things, the categories by which time is calculated — hour, week, month, year, decade, century, and millennium — have been naturalized, but there is nothing self-evident about how a week of seven days became the unit by means of which time flows into our lives, or about the calendar that dominates much of the modern world system. Almost nothing is as cliched as the observation that "we are all the slaves of time", though that "we" is at times thought to exclude those obdurate and indolent natives of the non-Western world whose management skills at time still fall far short of minimally desirable standards; moreover, this enslavement not only does not evoke much resistance, it is welcomed as the most decisive marker of progress in human affairs and the orderliness of a world always on the verge of slipping into chaos and the chasm of discontent.

The schedule and calendar rule most lives, but there is nothing inevitable about this course of history. It is only in the mid-eighteenth century, with the emergence of industrialization and the factory clock, that the tyrannical discipline of time became a reality for the working classes. Another hundred years were to elapse before the standardization of time was achieved in the West itself, while in much of the rest of the world the Gregorian calendar was becoming paramount, though the ‘natives’ were still to learn the lessons of the clock. If by some accounts the denizens of the southern countries still do not make good use of their time, they are nonetheless largely captive to the norms of the Western calendar. "Happy Birthday" celebrations, for instance, are one of the most iconic measures of how far modernity and secularism have crept into the sensibility of all cultures, though doubtless the birthday party has been molded and transformed by the idioms of local cultural practices. Doubtless, too, some cultures have retained their own calendars, but from the point of view of the moderns, that is no more than the churlish resistance of tradition-bound nativists and primordialists, or an attempt to retain a religious space within the secular domain of modernity.

As we are poised to enter into a new millennium, should we not stop to ask for whom it is that the millennium strikes, and by what sleight of hand it is that the Christian millennium becomes the benchmark for all peoples? What meaning can the "millennium" possibly have for (say) Muslims, if not to remind them that the entire world now lives in the thralldom of the West, and that the life and limb of no one is safe from the ambitions, to use that phrase fraught with ominous consequences, of the world’s "sole superpower"? Is it the imminence of the new millennium that, in part, helps to explain why a certain melancholia now appears to have left a shadow over Islam, and which forms the substratum of unease and anxiety among the Muslim people, whether in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, or elsewhere? We have long understood how European powers effected spatial colonization, but are we sufficiently cognizant of the dimensions of temporal colonization? The railroad timetable, the Gregorian calendar, the weekly schedule, the factory clock, and the office timecard inserted themselves with only somewhat less virulence and bloodthirstiness into the culture of colonized peoples, and yet the imperialism of time may well have more deleterious consequences in the years to come. The homogenization of time has not only facilitated the emergence of globalization and a worldwide culture of corporate business and management distinguished only by its extraordinary mediocrity and greed, it has also greatly assisted in narrowing the visions of the future. To speak of the resistance to clock and corporate time, which betoken a mentality nowhere better expressed than in the predictably American formulation that ‘time is money’, is to point not merely to what some may deride as Utopian thoughts, but to a cultural politics of time that would enable us to reterritorialize temporality.

II: Homogenizing Temporality

It is with remarkable prescience that Lewis Mumford, more than fifty years ago, observed that "the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men. The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the industrial age . . . In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technic; and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire." [1] Our sensibilities in late modernity are marked by an extraordinary but deadened awareness of time: it is commonplace to speak of having no time, of being too "busy", and of being harried by time. Though industrialization and the age of cyberspace are associated with time-saving devices, the overwhelming number of people appear to be extremely short on time, and in countries such as the United States, the work week appears to have become longer for the laboring and corporate class alike. "What kind of rule is this?" asks Sebastian de Grazia: "The more timesaving machinery there is, the more pressed a person is for time." [2] More so than in any previous age, lives appear to be tyrannized by clocks, office and airline schedules, and calendars. The story of temporal colonization has been told inadequately. "The invention of the mechanical clock was one of a number of major advances that turned Europe", David Landes remarks, "from a weak, peripheral, highly vulnerable outpost of Mediterranean civilization into a hegemonic aggressor." [3] European colonial powers colonized, penalized, and traumatized their own dissenters and religious, ethnic, racial, and intellectual Others before proceeding to colonize the non-Western world, and in the matter of how time was reckoned with, the homogenization of the Western world was similarly to precede the entry of a uniform clock-time in the rest of the world.

The Pattern of the Week. Though seconds, minutes, hours, and days constitute the basic units of time, the preeminent centrality of the "week" to the modern organization of time must be underscored. Patterns of life are generally framed around the week: think of the weekly shopping day, the weekly magazine, the work week (and the ensual of Monday blues), the weekend (and the concomitant feeling of elation on Friday or Saturday nights), the weekly change of films, and so on. It is the "weekly schedule" which determines the shape of appointments. A year may equally be thought of as twelve months, or fifty-two weeks; but since recurrent events, such as winter, spring, and summer holidays, or school terms, seldom coincide with an entire calendrical month, one is more likely to think of a one-week vacation or a school term that lasts ten or fifteen weeks. "Imagine for a moment", the sociologist Pritrim A. Sorokin has written, "that the week suddenly disappeared. What a havoc would be created in our time organization, in our behavior, in the co-ordination and synchronization of collective activities and social life, and especially in our time apprehension. . . . We think in week units; we apprehend time in week units; we localize the events and activities in week units; we co-ordinate our behavior according to the ‘week’; we live and feel and plan and wish in ‘week’ terms. It is one of the most important points of our ‘orientation’ in time and social reality." [4]

The precise origin of the seven-day week has never been established with absolute certainty. It is sometimes conjectured that the seven-day week may have been inspired by the lunar cycle, which in fact is not a twenty-eight-day cycle. In the Judaeo-Christian world, the Creation is described as having taken place over six days; "And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done." Thus the seventh day, which God "blessed", was "hallowed" because "on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation" (Genesis 2.1-3). The observance of the holy day, the Sabbath, was to be the "sign" that would differentiate the Jews from the non-Jews (Ezekiel 20.12), and it was to assist them in the preservation of their Jewishness amidst the hostile Gentiles, particularly during the period of Exile. When Christianity arose out of Judaism, the seven-day cycle was not dispensed with, but rather the Christians tried to mark out their own sphere by eventually electing Sunday rather than Saturday as the day of the Sabbath. Initially, as a persecuted minority, Christians sought to establish a day when they could all congregate in common. That the Christian Sabbath was deliberately established on Sunday, to help distinguish the Christians from the Jews, is demonstrated by the history of the conflict over Easter. In the Eastern churches, the celebration of Easter coincided with the Jewish celebration of Passover, and at the meeting of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, it was declared a heresy to celebrate Easter on the same day as Passover. By ruling that Easter be celebrated on the Sunday following the full moon, the two auspicious occasions were severed from each other, since Passover is always celebrated on a full moon. Similarly, though the Nativity, or birth of Christ, was originally celebrated on January 6, it is only in 354 AD that Christmas was first celebrated on December 25, though the choice of that day was scarcely innocuous. Since Epiphany, which marks the appearance of Jesus as the Christ to the gentiles, was also celebrated on January 6, the Church came to the realization that it was very unlikely that both the birth of Christ and Epiphany had occurred on the same day. In choosing December 25 as Christ’s birthday, the Church could not claim to be motivated by biblical evidence or customary practice, since the time of the year when Christ was born is nowhere indicated; but since December 25 marked the celebration of winter solstice, it was a day on which the Church marked its determined opposition to pagan rites. [5] But in the nexus between religion and the politics of temporality, Christianity is not unique. When, in the seventh century, Islam was founded, again the primacy of the seven-day week was not questioned, but Friday, rather than Saturday or Sunday, was chosen as the holy day of the week. [6] In this manner, the Prophet sought to signify the singularity of Islam, and weld the adherents of the faith into a distinct community.

Elsewhere, for instance among the Hindus, the seven-day week may have arisen out of the seven planets of ancient astrology — Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars — and it is altogether possible that even in the Western world, the astrological influence was predominant. As one scholar has noted, "the Indian days of the week (varas) had already matched their European counterparts many centuries before regular contact between India and the West was established", [7] and today only a place which is outside the orbit of any of the world’s major religions is likely to have a conception of social organization of life in which the notion of the seven-day week does not play a critical role. However, speaking historically, the week has not always comprised seven days. In antiquity, the week revolved around the market day, and in societies as varied as those of Peru, Colombia, Indochina, southern China, and Mesoamerica, the week could extend anywhere from three to twelve days. In the modern period, there have been two notable, but strikingly unsuccessful, attempts to alter the seven-day week, both inspired by the desire to escape what was deemed to be the nefarious influence of bourgeois Christianity. The revolutionary calendar introduced by the French Republic, which marked the year 1792 as Year One, was composed of twelve months, and each month was made up of three ten-day periods of time called decades. This calendar eliminated the traditional Sabbath day, and the weekly rest day, Sunday, was replaced by one rest day every ten days. Much later, the Bolshevik regime, in September 1929, instituted the five-day — and then the six-day -- week, in the hope that this would greatly bolster production by. Both calendar reforms failed, and in France and the Soviet Union alike the seven-day week was restored. It is a mark of the resilience of the seven-day week that the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe, fearful that he would lose his "Reckoning of Time for want to Books and Pen and Ink", and "even forget the Sabbath Day from the working Days", used his knife to etch onto wood the date of his arrival upon the island of which he imagined himself to be the sole inhabitant, and then for every day made a notch with his knife, "every Seventh Notch" being "as long again as the rest". When, at long last, Crusoe encountered a native, he named the man "Friday" after the day of the week when he chanced upon him. [8]

The Christian Era and the Gregorian Calendar. The present primacy of the Gregorian calendar has obscured the recognition that different calendrical systems have vied with each other over the greater part of history, and that the Gregorian calendar, a product of the Christian West, has only recently established a nearly worldwide hegemony. As with most other things which the West has succeeded in implanting onto the modern consciousness, largely through the force of colonization, the Gregorian calendar had the advantage of simplicity. Pope Gregory XIII, who reformed the Julian [after Julius Caesar] calendar in 1582, stipulated January 1 as the official beginning of the calendar year, and at first the reform met with acceptance only in Catholic Europe, not extending to non-Catholic Europe until after 1700. One scholar, who has made a lifetime study of the sociology of time, remarks that the first two non-Christian countries which accepted the Gregorian calendar were Japan and Egypt in 1873 and 1875, respectively, and both were then engaged upon a radical course of "modernization and Westernization"; and ever since then the adoption of the "Gregorian" or "European" calendar has been seen as a sign of a society’s willingness to embrace Western modernity. [9] However, the Gregorian calendar had been introduced into the non-Western world earlier: in India, for instance, it was the calendar used by the East India Company, and by the end of the eighteenth century, a considerable portion of India was under the Company’s rule.

To speak of the Gregorian calendar, as does P. W. Wilson, "as international, inter-religious, inter-occupational and inter-racial", [10] is to belie its origins in Christianity, colonization, and the cant of modernization. One locus of resistance to the Gregorian calendar, as might be expected, is religion: thus, making an eloquent plea for the Jewish calendar as opposed to a Christian calendar, one Jewish commentator has written that the "soul of Israel . . . is anchored in its time. . . . Every people has its own time, which ties it to its land and place, and in which its history and holidays are embedded. . . . Every people that has tried to separate itself from its time has disappeared and is no longer remembered among the living." [11] The Muslim month of fasting still bears no relation to the Gregorian calendar, and Indians of different religious persuasions mark time with a variety of calendars, though the use of the Vikram (Samvat) calendar is not confined exclusively to matters of religious provenance. The Gregorian calendar now also has an inextricable relationship to the Christian Era, a system of dating which was introduced only in 532 AD [anno Domini], and spread to most of Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. The conception of "BC" [Before Christ] or "BCE" [Before the Christian Era] was, in a manner of speaking, an afterthought, as though to suggest that history only began with the coming of Christ, and that such events as the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, which marks the beginning of the Islamic era, were to be restored to their proper insignificance. In the hullabaloo over the coming of the "millennium", it is presumed that the history of Christianity serves as the template for the history of the world.

The Standardization of Time. It is only a little more than 100 years ago that the synchronization of time was achieved. At that time, Britain was the regnant world power, and it is not surprising that in 1884 Greenwich, just outside London, was chosen by the International Meridian Conference as the location for zero longitude and so came to acquire temporal sovereignty. All time-pieces would henceforth have to be set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), from which all other temporal standards — Indian Standard Time (IST), Pacific Standard Time (PST), and so on — are derived. Not surprisingly, considering that France was the other great imperialist power, and that the French were inclined to view Paris as the center of the civilized world, France resisted this attempt at the centralization of time-keeping. Only in 1912, when Paris hosted the International Conference on Time, did Greenwich Mean Time become accepted unequivocally as the universal time-keeper. [12]

This homogenization of time would have seemed anything but inevitable or natural to most people around the world, though in Britain railroad companies had set their clocks to Greenwich in 1848. If one considers the United States alone, by the 1850s, judging from Thoreau’s Walden, trains were an inextricable part of the American landscape: "I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular", wrote Thoreau, adding: "The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country." [13] But the punctuality of trains was not to be confused with the standardization of time. As late as 1870 there were about 70 time zones in the country, and a passenger undertaking a train journey from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco would have had to reset his watch over 200 times if he wished to keep abreast of the local time. [14] The pressure to standardize time came from weather forecasters, and even more so from railroad companies, whose passengers and business clients alike complained of the difficulties in deciphering and interpreting railroad timetables when there was no one uniform standard of time. Finally, in 1883, American railroad companies agreed upon the establishment of the four time zones that are still in use, but not without raising public ire. The Washington Post editorialized on the importance of the standardization of time as "scarcely second to the reformation of the calendar by Julius Caesar, and later by Pope Gregory XIII." [15] True to their name, the railroad companies, then the supreme embodiment of industrialization and entrepreneurial self-aggrandizement, railroaded their way into the temporal precincts of the human spirit, and so paved the way for the elimination of alternative conceptions -- local, mythic, pastoral, theistic, and countless others -- of time.

Disciplinary Time. International Business Machines, better known to the world through its acronym IBM, may well be credited with inventing "computer time". However, in its earlier incarnation as the International Time Recording Company, IBM may have played a yet more critical role in inaugurating the modern age of what I shall term panopticon industrial efficiency. The "panopticon", to follow its earliest theorist Jeremy Bentham, refers to that modality of surveillance whereby all those under surveillance, such as prisoners, are placed under the watchful eye of the jailer, but cannot in turn watch him. In 1894, the International Time Recording Company introduced the time recording system, and in less than fifteen years all its competitors had been eliminated. Each employee who came to work punched a time card at the time of his arrival and departure, and the company sold its product to businesses with the argument that its clocks would "save money, enforce discipline and add to the productive time." A 1914 brochure commended the company’s product to the attention of businesses with the observation that "the time recorded induces punctuality by impressing the value of time on each individual." Another publicity piece stated boldly: "There is nothing so fatal to the discipline of the plant, nor so disastrous to its smooth and profitable working as to have a body of men irregular in appearance, who come late and go out at odd times"; and the time recorder would assist management "to weed out these undesirables." [16]

It is with a similar ambition of introducing scientific management into the industrial process that Frederick W. Taylor created the most significant upheaval in the modern workplace. "With scientific management, as formulated by Taylor in 1895," Daniel Bell has written, "we pass beyond the old, rough computations of the division of labor and move into the division of time itself." [17] Taylor introduced the stopwatch and calibrated the movements of workers down to fractions of a second, so that inefficient actions could be eliminated and productivity be maximized. Each man’s work was planned out beforehand, and he was given detailed instructions about the manner in which the work was to be accomplished, and the "exact time" that would be allowed for the completion of the assigned task. The worker, stripped of any capacity to influence the outcome of his work, was to be reduced to a mere cog in the machine: "in the new scientifically managed factory," Jeremy Rifkin has observed, "the worker’s mind was severed from his body and handed over to the management." [18] It is these Taylorite principles that informed the compilation of standardized times for clerical tasks by the Systems and Procedures Association of America, to wit: opening and closing of file drawer, .04 minute; opening and closing of folder, .04 minute; opening and closing center drawer of desk, .026 and .027 minute, respectively; getting up from chair, .033 minute; turning in swivel chair, .009 chair; and so on. [19] Even as Taylor was devising his principles of scientific management and enabling the standardization of time, the rigors of clock-time were being introduced to the colonized regions of the world. More than one historian of Bengal has written about chakri, or the clerical job, which embraced the disciplinarity of temporality, and to which Indian men had perforce to gravitate if they wished to find a place for themselves in the newly established administrative and trading offices opened following the consolidation of British rule in India after the rebellion of 1857-58. Whatever the importance of clock-time in regulating factory labor and disciplining the laboring classes in the metropolitan and industrial centers of Europe, in the colonies time was seen as effecting an altogether necessary disciplinary function upon lazy and unruly natives.

III: Democratizing/Pluralizing Temporality

There is no greater cliché, when the West is compared with India, than the observation that time in India is largely ‘cyclical’ while in the West it is ‘linear’. In the most characteristic expositions of this purportedly momentous difference, it is apparently the linearity of time which explains why the West has been committed to ideas of progress, development, and change, just as the presumption of cyclical time in India is said to furnish the most cogent explanatory framework for understanding why Hindus believe in karma or the notion of rebirth, are largely hostile to historical change, and are indifferent, in their daily practices as much as in their metaphysics, to considerations of time. Nothing is said to point more decisively to the "lack of common-sense concepts" of temporality among Indians than the fact that in Hindustani, the adverb "kal" means both yesterday and tomorrow, just as "parson" means the day before yesterday as much as the day after tomorrow. The meaning can only be determined by context. [20] This critical narrative of "Hindu time" -- not unlike the "Hindu rate of growth" which economists constantly bemoaned -- is music to the ears of Indian modernizers, who curse the manner in which their countrymen waste their time, and are ever mindful that more than anything else, Indians must be instructed in the right uses of time. These modernizers welcomed the national emergency that Indira Gandhi proclaimed in 1975, on the grounds that for the first time all government employees arrived to work on time, and even the trains ran on time. The timeliness of Indian trains, which run 24 hours late, is a standing joke among travelers in India, and no Indian who has ever been to a bank could have failed to confront the rejoinder from the clerk that they ought to return the following day for the accomplishment of their errand. Indians appear to take the view that nothing need be done today which can just as well be accomplished on the morrow. This attitude is contrasted, almost always unfavorably, with the opposite tendency to prize efficiency, and at times more philosophically with the observation, attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, that one does step foot into the same river twice. On the latter view, change is always around us, and time is never still; change is itself the only form of constancy.

In the face of Puranic conceptions of time, where ages or yugas extend into tens of thousands of years, and single kings can be said to have reigned for hundreds of years, the time of history holds little brief. What meaning does the time of human history have for eternal philosophy, or to the student of geology? Yet such notions of time have often been bracketed as special instances of cyclical or at least eternal time. If one could democratize and pluralize time in no more complex fashion than by positing cyclical term against linear time, that would be to surrender the terrain to linear time. The notion of cyclical time is linear time’s reinvention of itself, and we have in cyclical and linear time a false opposition which permits linear time to widen its hegemony in the face of seeming dissent, and obscure the notions of time which formerly competed for our attention, and which have not altogether disappeared from the lives of people around the world. Vacation time, incidentally, is another mode in which linear and clock time recast themselves: as studies of vacations suggest, vacation time is often rushed, and people emerge from vacations more bruised than rested. Most common among alternative conceptions of time are those associated with the taking of siestas and the art of idling. Yet there are numerous other conceptions of time, such as mythic time, pastoral time, and the time of mindfulness — the time when everything is attempted with mindfulness, with a full awareness not of the clock and the importance of productivity, but of the necessity of an awareness that every moment constitutes a fullness in itself. [21]But time can be pluralized much further, as brief and merely suggestive considerations of BodyTime and FoodTime show.

BodyTime. In the most affluent countries of the world, the regimen of time has extended to the body in curious and even novel ways. The temporal rhythms of the body are increasingly ignored, but the body has become the site of worship: penis enlargement substitutes for lingam worship, and breast augmentation or modeling takes the place of the worship of fertility goddesses. If one could invert the travel narratives of the last few centuries, where Europeans commented on what they took to be the peculiar and often gruesome customs prevailing in Africa, the Orient, and other exotic places, nothing would strike reasonable people in these places as being so peculiar as the practice in the post-industrial nations of walking on treadmills, often in unison and to the tune of music, while the streets themselves are bereft of pedestrians. Though time is routinely and sometimes obsessively set aside for body-building, weight-lifting, or "working out" in other myriad fashions, the fetishization of the body by this apparent valorization of time set aside for it must not be confused with BodyTime. Unlike adults or older children, who have been socialized into the disciplinary modalities of modern temporality, infants and very young children only eat when they receive cues from their body. They have not necessarily learned to listen to the temporal rhythms of their body, but adults have undoubtedly unlearned these temporal rhythms. The body must have its time for rest, play, idling, and conviviality, just as much as for work, eating, and excavation: all this makes up what might be called BodyTime. As "scientific research", or what passes for it, has indubitably established, there is much wisdom in the idea that the body is far more attuned to the siesta common in Mediterranean and Asian countries than it is to the mechanical work habits of North America and north-western Europe. [22]

Women are more sensitized to BodyTime than men, since the female body is bound up with the temporal cycles of pregnancy, reproduction, lactation, menopause, and most eminently menstruation. Hence the reference to the biological clock, and the awareness that all of women’s cycles are relentlessly time-bound. In the prime of her life, for thirty odd years or more, a woman can time events in her life and in the larger world outside by her monthly period. A woman’s monthly period averages 28-29 days, and so largely coincides with phases of the moon. It is said of the Tiv women of Nigeria that they can determine at what point they are in their pregnancies by counting the lunations. Yet modern medical and corporate culture attempts to override the BodyTime of women as far as is possible. Thus, the oral contraceptive or pill is always packaged in weekly cycles extending from three or four weeks, as is most common, to five or six weeks, though the menstrual cycles of women cannot be construed merely as multiples of the week. "What essentially takes place here", in the judgment of Eviatar Zerubavel, "is that the perfectly natural menstrual cycle (which is not always twenty-eight days long for all women) is being replaced by artificial cycles that are all mathematical extensions of an entirely conventional social cycle." [23] Though the pill should have adapted to the temporal rhythms of women, it is women who must forgo their own physiology and temporal rhythms to suit the convenience of gynaecologists, the pharmaceutical industry, and countless others whose temporal sensibility cannot think beyond the prescribed intervals of time. BodyTime is sustained with great difficulty and must face the incessant assault of all the institutions of modernity.

FoodTime. The biographers of Napolean have noted that the emperor, who saw himself as a world conqueror reincarnated, spent no more than an average of eight minutes on lunch, and thirteen minutes on dinner. Doubtless, he thought of even this little time as time wasted, as time necessary only to stoke the engine of ambition and generate the energy that would enable him to grasp the world. Napolean, however, was merely a fast eater, not the inventor of fast food. All such innovations have largely been the handiwork of Americans, who can be relied upon to give the world everything that is bigger, faster, and cruder than everywhere else in the world. It is the Americans who appear to vindicate, on the macro level, the proposition that cultures in which food is consumed rapidly are more likely to dominate others. Of course this proposition is not borne out empirically, since the Spaniards and the Italians, who are noted among the Europeans for their leisurely meals, were not without their colonial empires. The Spaniards, notably, were dominant only as long as the English and the French had not become maritime powers; the Italians came to the acquisition of their empire at a very late date, when the principal European powers had left precious little for Italy.

It is transparent that the Americans have tarnished modern civilization with the curse of fast food, and with fast food have come not only the diminishment of the culinary experience and the vulgarization of taste, but the loss of conviviality, the lack of table manners, and the erosion of conversation and what English essayists such as William Hazlitt described as "table talk". It is around the dinner table that civilizations take on their richest hues, and the Slow Food movement, which originated in Italy about ten years ago, is dedicated to the proposition that human beings can be considered worthy of their name only if they rid themselves of "speed" and "oppose the universal folly of Fast Life." As the manifesto of the movement states, "Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods." [24] Though the movement may have drawn the support of mainly connoisseurs and gourmands, its manifesto offers the vision of a future where FoodTime will be honored. The conception of FoodTime, as of BodyTime, is civilizational: it incorporates far more than the critique of fast food, poor taste, and fast consumption, for it recognizes that the "frenzy" of industrial civilization has transformed the very temporal being of homo sapiens.

IV: Keeping Watch on Time

The watchword of our times is undoubtedly "watch". Over the last few decades, a number of organizations that purport to watch the conduct of nations and organizations have crept into existence, such as "Human Rights Watch", "Asia Watch", and "Helsinki Watch", and there is even the "BJP Watch", a group — where else but in the diaspora — which purports to monitor the activities and policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party. To keep watch is to stand guard, and we might recall one older usage of "watch", namely the contingent of sentries that took their turn at standing guard at the king’s palace or fortifications, being replaced at appointed times by a fresh contingent. These days, the keepers of the watch are self-appointed guardians, which fact behooves us to watch them and clock their activities. The greatest of the watchmakers, namely the Swiss, have in recent years themselves come under the watchful eyes of many human rights groups, foreign nations, and victims’ groups for harboring the ill-begotten wealth of crooks, despots, and genocidal maniacs. One of the principal lines of their defense, namely that Swiss banks work with clock-like precision, may not be enough to rescue these banks from the charge of bad faith.

That the English language (and it is not singular in this respect) allows the metaphors of watch and clock to be extended so far testifies to the extraordinary dimensions of temporality that persist across a wide spectrum of discourses in virtually every culture. The geographer Robert Levine, who has made a comparative study of conceptions of time across cultures, relates that on a recent trip to India he encountered a sign on the narrow-gauge Darjeeling railway that reads: "‘Slow is spelled with four letters; So is ‘life.’ ‘Speed’ is spelled with five letters; So is ‘death.’" [25] This macabre sense of humor seems not at all out of place in a culture where the bus driver plows his vehicle through the streets at breakneck speed, mercilessly casting aside smaller vehicles and pedestrians alike — residents of Delhi are not likely to forget the Red Line, or Killer Line as it was nicknamed -- only to arrive at his destination with nothing on his hands but time. To arrive at a richer conception of time, or rather of life where time is not a commodity, modern culture has perhaps had to make a cult of time, and massacre all those who stood in the path of time’s relentless drive. If modernity’s encounter with time is any gauge, we have become creatures largely of sense rather than sensibility.

As we move into the twenty-first century and the new millennium, it becomes imperative to think about the possible ways in which the reterritorialization of temporality might be achieved. The dominant conceptions of time have been located in the modern bureaucratic, financial, and corporate institutions of the West, as well as in those intellectual practices encapsulated under the disciplines of physics, history, anthropology, and others; and the iconic representations of the mechanical view of temporality remain the Gregorian calendar, the stopwatch, the factory clock, the weekly schedule, the appointment book, the Christian Era, and such units of time as the "century" and the "millennium". Jeremy Rifkin’s sketch of the "Time Wars" which he has predicted will overtake the modern world’s concern with spatiality may perhaps be somewhat overdrawn, but there can be little doubt that the temporal dimensions of human life, which the study of history is vastly ill-equipped to comprehend, will acquire renewed importance in the future. To reterritorialize temporality, and to make it work in the cause of humanity rather than as an affront to the spirit of humankind, is to relocate time in the body, in foodways and lifeways, and in such cultural practices as walking, writing letters, idling, and conversing. The politics of time is yet to open itself to us, but the time when we shall be let onto the secrets is not so far removed.

 

Notes:

[1] Cited by Robert Levine, A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist (New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins, 1997), p. 63. I am grateful to Ashok Hegde for his help with library work.

[2] Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), p. 313.

[3] David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 12.

[4] Pitirim A. Sorokin, Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1943).

[5] Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1987), p. 73.

[6] For further discussion, see Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 70-77.

[7] Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: The Free Press, 1985), p. 25.

[8] Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinsone Crusoe, Mariner (London: Oxford University Press), p. 64.

[9] Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, p. 99.

[10] P. W. Wilson, Romance of the Calendar (New York: Norton, 1937), pp. 29-30, cited in ibid., p. 100.

[11] Cited in ibid., p. 74.

[12] Landes, Revolution in Time, p. 286; Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

[13] Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), pp. 106-7.

[14] Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 12; Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), esp. ch. 2.

[15] Cited by Levine, A Geography of Time, p. 73.

[16] Cited by O’Malley, Keeping Watch, pp. 161-62.

[17] Cited by Rifkin, Time Wars, pp. 106-7.

[18] Rifkin, Time Wars, p. 109.

[19] Ibid., pp. 110-11.

[20] Hajime Nakamura, "Time in Indian and Japanese Thought", in J. T. Fraser, ed., The Voices of Time, 2^nd ed. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), p. 81.

[21] On passing the time in mindfulness, see Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation, trans. into English by Mobi Warren (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

[22] James Beard, "Science supports the three-hour lunch break", Utne Reader (Sept.-Oct. 1997), p. 59.

[23] Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle, p. 98.

[24] See http://www.slowfood.com.

[25] Levine, A Geography of Time, p. 6.