kill the clock in ur head
all clocks are bastards
no clocks no masters
“Walter Benjamin quotes reports that during the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city of Paris there were people shooting at the clocks on the towers of the churches, palaces and so on, thereby consciously or half-consciously expressing the need that somehow time has to be arrested; that at least the prevailing, the established time continuum has to be arrested, and that a new time has to begin – a very strong emphasis on the qualitative difference and on the totality of the rupture between the new society and the old.”
Liberation from the Affluent Society, Herbert Marcuse (1967)“This is SATAN’S HANDCUFF.” - Rev. Ivan Stang, immediately before smashing a wristwatch with a sledgehammer at an early SubGenius Devival.
“The clock – not money – emerged as the key technology for measuring the value of work. This distinction is crucial because it’s easy to think that working for wages is capitalism’s signature. It’s not: in thirteenth-century England a third of the economically active population depended on wages for survival. That wages became a decisive way of structuring life, space, and nature owes everything to a new model of time.
By the early fourteenth century, the new temporal model was shaping industrial activity. In textile-manufacturing towns like Ypres, in what is now Belgium, workers found themselves regulated not by the flow of activity or the seasons but by a new kind of time – abstract, linear, repetitive. In Ypres, that work time was measured by the town’s bells, which rang at the beginning and end of each work shift. By the sixteenth century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds. This abstract time came to shape everything – work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the sixteenth century, most of England’s parishes had mechanical clocks. In the twentieth century, as assembly lines in Detroit churned out Henry Ford’s Model T, ‘scientific managers’ were measuring units of work called therbligs (an anagram of their developers’ last name, Gilbreth): each one a mere one-thousandth of a second.
Policing time was [and is] central to capitalism’s ecology.”
Raj Patel and Jason W Moore
“The ultimate and perhaps most significant conversion of reality into numbers is the measurement of time. Clocks do to time what name and number do to the material world: they reduce it, make it finite. And what is time, but life itself? Time is experience, process, the flow of being. By measuring time, by converting it into numbers, we rob it of its infinitude and uniqueness in precisely the same way that nouns and numbers reduce the physical world. Time measurement turns a succession of unique moments into just so many seconds, minutes, and hours, and denies the particularity of each person’s subjective experience of them.
…In effect, clocks turn time into another standardized, interchangeable part of the World Machine, facilitating the engineering of the world. Only time thus devalued is a conceivable object of commerce. Otherwise, who would sell their moments, each infinitely precious, for a wage? Who would reduce time, i.e. life, to mere money? Leibnitz’ merciless phrase, ‘Time is money,’ encapsulates a profound reduction of the world and enslavement of the spirit.
It is not surprising that the revolutionaries of Paris’s 1830 July Revolution went around the city smashing its clocks. The fundamental purpose of clocks is not to measure time, it is to coordinate human activity. Aside from that it is a fiction, a pretense: as Thoreau said, ‘Time measures nothing but itself.’ Smashing the clocks represents a refusal to sell one’s time, a refusal to schedule one’s life or to bring it into conformity with the needs of specialized mass society. Further, it represents a declaration that ‘I will live my own life,’ establishing the ascendancy of now.”
Charles Eisenstein
“The clock, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, represents the key machine of the machine age, both for its influence on technology and its influence on the habits of men. Technically, the clock was the first really automatic machine that attained any importance in the life of men.”
George Woodcock, The Tyranny of the Clock
(I highly recommend reading that one.)
“Even as it silently structures our everyday lives, time is not given or natural; rather, its meanings and forms shift historically and are culturally specific. The concept of time that undergirds the Western academy derives from a Judaeo–Christian notion of time as linear, constant, and irreversible (Lee & Liebenau, 2000). As such the ideas of linear history, progress, and including Darwin’s evolutionary theory originate from this linear concept of time. As this linear and unfolding trajectory of time gained prominence, it became possible to quantify time in standardized units. In HE, linear concepts of time underpin our theories of student development, faculty development, etc. For instance, consider how the language of ‘stages in development’ are all tied to progress, which are in turn connected to linear notions of time and history.
Yet, before the invention of the pendulum clock by Christiann Huygens in 1657, time was measured in relation to physical and biotic phenomenon such as the cycles of the sun, moon, seasons, and harvest (Lee & Liebenau, 2000). Consequently, with the introduction of the clock, time was delinked from human bodies, and human bodies from nature. The clock produced our consciousness of minutes or seconds, and engendered the notions of accuracy and punctuality so familiar to us now. Weber (1958) has noted, as well, the ways in which the intersections of capitalism, religion, and morality, have given time a particular value: it is something that can be ‘wasted’. To this end, the idea that if we do not use time properly, then we would remiss salvation in heaven—hence the ideas we have today such as ‘waste of time’. More recently, Castells has pointed out that instantaneous communication technologies have shifted our relationship with time. He suggests a ‘timeless time’ concept (Castells, 2000).
Alongside the technological innovations mentioned above, time became a new commodity of modernity that necessarily enfolded an ‘Other’ notion of time. According to Mignolo (2011) and Anderson (2011), time is an epistemic tool through which a chronology of difference was created by colonial logic. Time became a trajectory against which to measure indigenous and other subaltern individuals and groups in terms of the degree to which they are out of sync, behind in development, anachronistic, and resistant to progress (Anderson, 2011). Linear Eurocentric notions of time were used to sort individuals into opposing categories such as intelligent/slow, lazy/ industrious, saved/unsaved, believer/heathen, developed/undeveloped, and civilized/ primitive; in the process, most of the world’s people and their knowledge came to stand outside of history (Fabian, 2002).”
—Riyad A. Shahjahan, “Being ‘Lazy’ and Slowing Down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy”
(via fuckyeahexistentialism)
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