by Ritam Sengupta, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, ZMO
25.08.2023
This piece is an attempt to engage with the category of ‘abstract time’ as a problem of history writing, admittedly with a view towards decoding modalities of power that such histories might help describe. My thoughts follow in some way from Samuel Wright’s last published reflection on this blog that argues for exploring the category of time beyond a kind of a priori positioning, whereby its existence as an epistemic object sustains itself independently of any particular experience. Instead, Sam suggests we study time as an object of historical analysis by locating it as a phenomenological problem – one whose objectivity can be fragmented to approach the pre-givenness of time as an assembly of past, present, and future perceptions of temporalities.
The category of abstract time I believe is another route to understand time’s objectivity that confounds historians as something too fundamental to be subject to change or evolution and thus to be rendered historical, a form or flow within which human beings are suspended indefinitely. The phenomenological method allows us to go against this almost irreducibly physical character of time – it is after all considered a ‘dimension’ – and carve out temporality as a contingent, subjective experience amenable to historical making/tracing. In a fundamental sense this makes time the object of a history of temporalities. For historian Matthew Champion, such a history blurs subject-object divisions to cast time as an object entangled with human action, configurations, perceptions, and measurements.[i] Does this however lead to a conclusive stance as that of the historian of time measurement in Japan, Yulia Frumer, that the concept of time need never be approached as abstract?[ii]
Admittedly, the historian encounters time in the archive more often than not as a concrete object of experience and practice. Yet to cast time entirely as an object of experience might be courting a kind of chronological relativism. Through this emphasis on the concrete, we manage to break away from the iron hold of time as a dimension. Yet, to purely stress on time’s entanglement with the particularity of circumstances might blur our vision to the possibility of the realisation of time as an objective form. Conversely, we ought to keep an eye out for the making of time as a structure of experience that is not separate from specific regimes of practice but materialise through them, yet standing apart and affording a common form of intelligibility and power for the conduct of life. The dissolution of subject-object distinctions with respect to the pursuit of temporalities in the archive need not preclude an analytical interest in this objectivity and the formation of abstract time. In fact, the critical escape from being trapped within the problem of encountering time as a transhistorical dimension of sorts need not be a simple negation of all that seems abstract and objective about time. Instead, we could cultivate a more direct interest in pursuing the formation of abstract time as an object of the history of temporalities. Abstract time could really be one kind of temporality rather than the other of the temporality concept.
The purpose of enrolling time’s objectivity as a suitable object of the history of temporalities of course also gathers significance from a hypothesis about a kind of temporal convergence of the world within a modern conjuncture, still ongoing, where a common modality of relating to time is shared across humanity. I will next discuss how this hypothesis is fleshed out in a particular kind of Marxist reading of this conjuncture in tune with the global evolution of capitalism as a socio-economic re-ordering of the world. Following this, my goal will be to think through a possible history of modern temporalities with a view of this derivation of abstract time. However, I am interested less in posing abstract time in dialectical opposition to its obvious other, concrete time. Rather, I hope to speculate more broadly about how abstract time can be enlisted to understand the reconfiguration of social power in the capitalist conjuncture. In other words, I hope to raise the possibility that a history of modern temporalities needs to attend to the possibility of the novel inducement of temporal compulsions within the reproduction of existing modes of social power.
As presented by Moishe Postone,[iii] the capitalist re-ordering of the world stems from the historically unique emergence of a kind of collective existence where labour becomes the fundamental form of social mediation while continuing to be a productive activity. The necessity of labouring to acquire the products of others’ labour (that is commodities) marks the essence of this social formation, at the heart of which is the exchange of value as a mode of mediating the relationship between people, over and above extant modes of hierarchy, reciprocity and the like (that otherwise more immediately command the descriptor, social). This mode of value-oriented mediation is abstract to the extent that it requires a common denominator separate from the actual kinds of labour and the nature of the objects they produce. This common denominator is what Marx referred to as ‘Socially Necessary Labour Time’ – again this is not a form of temporal coordination specific to individual producers and productive activity, but rather a form of social necessity determining the amount of time to be expended by producers to achieve the full value of their labour (always in surplus of the time required to accomplish the basic conditions of social reproduction). What is critical to understand here is that this realisation of time as an objective necessity of social existence does not pre-suppose an already existing abstract or absolute time. Rather the capitalist condition is properly defined by a process of alienation whereby individual, subjective modes of practice, action and labour realize an order of value that then seems to stand over and above them to command a universal, objective law-like time dimension, determining in turn the same kinds of action, morals, modes of existence, etc.
While this description of the capitalist conjuncture allows us to grasp the simultaneous production of the objective dimension of time alongside everyday practice, productive activities, and their concrete temporalities, Postone and later commentators like Jonathan Martineau[iv] have noted that the regime of abstract time does not entirely overlap with any conceivable incidence of the capitalist conjuncture in world history. The more technical dimension of abstract time, as simply described by the horological possibility of measuring time by mechanical clocks in equal hours and thus by commensurable and interchangeable units, existed as far back as the fourteenth century (or even before). Presumably this liberated chronometry from the function of particular events, processes, instrumental quirks and made time into an independent variable, thus achieving its abstraction. This found application in earliest instances of control over work time exercised by medieval merchants in production centres of the western world and in control over the circulation of this produce through shipping networks. This marked the beginnings of the generalisation of the value-form and the capitalist condition through expansion of global markets. However, Martineau is very categorical that the hegemonic ascent of abstract time still had to await the emergence of complete market dependence, without which primary producers still had access to their own means of subsistence outside the commodity order. With the creation of complete market dependence, the order of abstract time becomes operational in the conduct of productive activity in the everyday – as expressed in the working day, punctuality, etc. Simultaneously time stands alienated from the realm of this sensuous activity as an objective necessity of modern life and society.
What more can we narrate in terms of the history of modern temporalities while keeping in view this hypothesis that the capitalist conjuncture is marked by the worldwide convergence of social forms in terms of their mediation by different magnitudes of commensurable units of labouring time – a time-oriented compulsion that in turn spills over to structure also what remains of human life as such?
Let us begin with a fairly conventional and broad summary of how conditions across a range of both industrial and service-oriented workplaces have evolved with the incidence of colonial rule in South Asia. Reflecting on the range of histories produced on the subject as well as with an eye towards the contemporary, it can safely be surmised that if the market for human labour power as a commodity had deepened in the colonial conjuncture, this proceeded alongside the reproduction of hierarchical forms of the social distribution of labouring roles (viz. caste and gender). This deepening of the market for commodified labour also proceeded in tandem with the continuing conditions of conducting work through the ownership of the labourer more than the ownership of their labouring time (bonded labour, slavery, etc.). This in some sense could be expected as the formal juridical freedom of the labourer under capitalism frequently came into relief against the real unfreedom of many a category of workers, like for instance indentured neo-slaves, who bound their lives more than any fixed hours of work to the contractual forms through which they were employed. What did it then mean to possibly insinuate the morphology of abstract time within these possible structures of work and life?
The hypothesis concerning the rise of abstract time does not necessarily align with the founding formalism of capitalism that is the juridical freedom of the worker. This hypothesis instead is narrated as a universal experience of alienation stemming from the new conditions of work to engulf all of social existence. Yet, in recounting histories of modern temporalities we ought to be more careful in specifying how in actual experiential sites of work and life, such temporal alienation compared with the alienation of being, of marginalized selves, to extant structures of social subordination. It is not unusual to find archival references to the enthusiastic adoption of clock time or a conscious critique of relentless, timeless work in accounts of social subalterns.[v] Given this, a history of temporality cannot really stop at describing a teleology of subjugation to the abstract order of time. The task is also to understand how this subjection fared not only against other concrete modes of temporal existence, but also against other ‘timeless’ modes of subjugation. In other words, abstract time as a new mode of social domination, needs to be posited as a point of distinction not only against the continuing presence of other concrete temporalities, but also against other forms of social domination that do not necessarily index time as method. Some of these modes of social domination were reinventions of existing fault lines of society like race, caste, gender and slavery through the machinations and laws of modern work sites. Nonetheless the fact that these work processes possibly followed the mediation of abstract time, raises the significant question of how this mediation was experienced against the familiar experiences of social subordination. Did a domination by time interrupt the lived experience of such social subordination? This enquiry can be pursued without seeing in the possibility of abstract time any semblance of the juridical freedom of the worker.
A related second issue concerns the attribution to abstract time of an objective, impersonal structure of domination. This issue is easier to raise in relation to some historical works that directly deal with the problem of abstract time. Sumit Sarkar and On Barak have respectively shown how the proto-nationalist middle classes in Bengal and Egypt actively contested the punctuality of abstract time regimes through cultural idioms and then domesticated this abstract domination through cultivating some distance from its norms.[vi] In Barak’s felicitous phrasing, this was the development of counter-temporality that was equally yet differentially occupied with the cultivation of standardized forms of duration. For him, this better narrates the globalisation of abstract time than a focus on resistance to aspects of clock-time. Importantly, both the authors emphasize how the concerned middle classes redeployed this domesticated sense of abstract time to conduct their own others – workers, servants, peasants, and women.
These accounts in one way present a useful way of decoding the social devolution of the objective structure of domination by abstract time. If previously we visited the possibility of the interruption by abstract time of extant structures of social subordination, in Sarkar and Barak’s accounts we have a kind of a reverse possibility: the impersonality of this structure of temporal domination actually aids its neat folding/subdivision into the structures of existing social hierarchies, perhaps at times in service of emboldening them. In fact, this emboldening is possible precisely because of the impersonality of the objective structure of domination by abstract time, that can attach to layers of customs, status, morals without disrupting their extant force.
In turn, this leaves us with a useful query as to how to pitch the problem of the temporalization of social relations that is highlighted by the hypothesis about the emergence of capitalist value-mediated socialization. A possible social history of temporality would have to engage with how social constituencies engage each other on temporal terms, along with other relations, those for instance, borne of landed or ritual power. However, with a view to the formation of abstract time as an objective structure of domination, we ought to ask how social constituencies cannot but engage each other on temporal terms. An emphasis on this element of temporal compulsion need not resolve into a revolutionary outcome, where all indices of social differentiation are replaced with temporal markers. Instead, a history with such an emphasis would be an attempt at establishing the impersonal character of temporal domination in question only alongside its very specific manifestations by way of other indices of social differentiation. Thus, if in the first instance a history of (modern temporality) queries how abstract time as a mode of social domination compares against more personalized ‘timeless’ forms of social power, a second move ought to accompany this. In the second instance, the historical question about modern temporality asks if and how the devolution of abstract time aids the rearticulation of extant modes of social power as an (seemingly) objective redistribution of temporal endowments.
I end this piece by indicating a third modality of incorporating the question of abstract time within a history of modern temporalities that is concerned with the unit based on which time is presumed to be abstracted. On what scale can we push the minimum criteria of abstract time as that temporal form that can be parsed as interchangeable, commensurable units? The clock and the hour dominate the framing of this question quite obviously for their universality. But is the clock the only way of regularising the morphology of time within the capitalist conjuncture?
Here it is useful to remember that both Postone and Martineau mark the rise of market dependence as a critical condition for describing the structure of compulsion specific to capitalism. For a region like South Asia, more than a blanket criterion of the dispossession of all primary producers from their means of subsistence (primitive accumulation) and their transformation into wage labourers, expanded degrees of market integration and commercialisation might be a more fruitful way of establishing the emergence of anything resembling a capitalist transformation. However, while we are well aware of expanded spates of the commercialisation of agriculture and craft production since early modern times in the region, we can be less sure of the ingress of clock time to support this market dependent framework of production. Does this mean that South Asian agrarian production remained bereft of the effects of abstract time even though it took shape as a form of economic and social life fundamentally braided into market integration and colonial revenue extraction? Here could we rethink the unit of abstract time by maintaining the minimum definition of such time in terms of commensurable units?
Perhaps one such unit could also be the season – borne by uncertain weather conditions and yet increasingly looming large as a temporal structure of its own that had to repeat, with increasing expectations of predictability across years and decades. In South Asia’s colonial past, irrigation, credit and meteorology served as three of the most crucial instruments that went into making a repeatable unit of the season, across which agrarian produce had to reach standardized parameters to serve the demands of revenue and commercialization. How did these instruments reproduce the season as a compulsory unit of time against which South Asian working lives had to be measured, predicted, lived and staked? The scale of abstract time perhaps expands too suddenly as we zoom out to the season from the working day/hour. Yet there is perhaps some food for thought here if we are thinking through exactly what allowed for a semblance of temporal regularity within South Asia’s otherwise chaotic agrarian production systems.
[i] Champion, Matthew S. “The history of temporalities: an introduction.” Past & Present 243.1 (2019): pg. 247.
[ii] Frumer, Yulia. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan. University of Chicago Press, 2018, pg. 11.
[iii] Postone, Moishe. Time, labor, and social domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
[iv] Martineau, Jonathan. Time, capitalism and alienation: A socio-historical inquiry into the making of modern time. Vol. 96. Brill, 2015.
[v] See Yıldız, Hatice. “The politics of time in colonial Bombay: Labor patterns and protest in cotton mills.” Journal of Social History 54.1 (2020): 206-285 and Sarkar, Tanika. Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography. Zubaan, 2014.
[vi] Sarkar, Sumit. Beyond nationalist frames: Postmodernism, Hindu fundamentalism, history. Indiana University Press, 2002, pp. 10-37. Barak, On. On time: Technology and temporality in modern Egypt. University of California Press, 2013.
Timely Histories 