Time and the first debt

… cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.[1]

—Genesis 3:17–19

Nations are not powerful because they possess wide lands, safe ports, large navies, huge armies, fortifications, stores, money, and credit. They acquire those advantages because they are powerful, having devised on correct principles the political structure which allows the flow of energy to take its proper course. The question is how; for the generator and the possible transmission lines and available outlets to either benefit or destruction are always the same. The only difference between past and present in respect of energy is quantitative, a higher potential available at a higher flow, which makes a wrong hook-up more appalling in its effect by the given ratio, becoming apparent literally in a world explosion. The principles of the conversion of energy and of its appropriate mechanism for human use cannot change; these are universals.[2]

—Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine

 

 

Introduction: life as thermodynamic inversion, scarcity

There are many places one might take as the proper point of departure in discussing time. We may, for instance, look to the human infant, as Piaget did, and there study the ontogenesis of temporality; or we might start with some set of fixed priors, as McTaggart did with his Hegelian commitments. But we may also turn back much further, albeit less so than Hawking:

The active non-biological systems, like a star, active planet, magmatic or hydrothermal system, simply dissipate free energy into surroundings. Unlike them, the biological systems actively extract free energy from the environment and concentrate it. … the principal transition from non-living to living systems in the thermodynamic context comes to the inversion of the balances—from negative to positive.[3]

Of course, taken from the perspective not of quantity but quality, we may see this somewhat differently. We, like the non-biological systems, still lose energy to our surroundings—and we also use it in our activity. This is the origin of scarcity, wherein we are first oriented towards the future. At this point the past is unreal, we have no sense for it. All we know is hunger, for this is what keeps us alive. We need constantly to eat or we will starve. The paradox is that to acquire energy also itself requires energy. There seem two basic strategies, with their prototypical forms as animal and plant: we may either wait or go to it. Plants rely primarily on the sun, some even eat insects that wander their way; they also need water and nutrients from the soil. Here we will focus on one aspect in particular, that of energy; leaving aside others which operate on more or less the same paradigm. Scarcity propels us into the future; that is, it compels desire. All this because we have borrowed our life, only thus has our balance gone from negative to positive. This is the primordial debt:

A man, being born, is a debt; by his own self he is born to Death, and only when he sacrifices does he redeem himself from Death.[4]

With this owed, we exist in a state of cyclical scarcity. This is the basic rhythm of life, the temporal structure of desire. Most simply, but for reasons other than energy, our sleep is entrained by the solar cycle; hence we too are cyclical, desiring sleep when night falls. But we cannot sleep anywhere, often we must be careful.

This is the second aspect: while we have thus acquired a debt by our coming into life, we nevertheless treasure it. We must ensure ourselves against the death that lies without as much as that within. This means avoiding harm—predators, poisons, hazards, etc. The root of ‘avoid’ is to empty, which entails change and motion. For the living being, this means movement. Even plants move, as when by phototaxis they seek light or when their roots grow towards water. There are two aspects here: growth and activity. Each of these requires energy and resources, plainly the plants have invested most of their evolutionary surpluses into the former. Animals, in contrast, have developed down a different line which emphasises physical movement and activity. While we are initially rooted in the world as they, this is only temporary during initial gestation and development. Man is then thrown into the world when his umbilical cord is cut; with this, he must move. Of course at first, food is brought to him. But man is an unusual animal in this regard, many enter the world already able to survive for themselves. For us, in contrast, we are still rooted in our mother—albeit now symbolically and functionally, as in terms of the flow of energy and resources. And once we are grown, then we must move. We learn from those that came before us; first by observation and imitation, later also instruction. From this and our experience of movement, hence our experience of the environment, we come to know this world—how to avoid threats, find resources, etc. This knowledge entails a temporality, as that of mere object persistence.

But even before this we may come to associate qualities with things: desire, fear, etc. This is also an aspect of temporality, yet here it is the past which reaches into the present; whereas with scarcity, it was the present reaching into the future. Taken together, the past thus aids the present in its movement towards desire—in other words, it entails an unconscious corpus of practical knowledge. None of this, of course, is absolute or perfect. Our activity here is similar to that of the reproducing cell, in that this activity is also creative; albeit for a different reason. We simply cannot record everything, nor would this be particularly useful. Instead we order our relations somehow, thereby providing a form associated with certain cues and contexts. This is then creatively reproduced in our activity. As with sexual reproduction, some aspect of identity is here adumbrated by possibility; yet there is the creative component in which chance and circumstance shape the outcome. We may react automatically, as if prompted by some surprise; other times our response may be more considered—anchoring in a similar scenario and then adjusting to the circumstances. This seems possible by virtue of the finitude of knowledge, that always the world supplies half of the equation. Of course, we may well be mistaken or even simply ignore the world and seek to impose ourselves upon it. Sometimes this may be successful, other times it may fail. Suppose, for instance, that we see a berry we think is familiar and desirable. We eat it and fall sick, having mistaken an altogether different berry for one we knew; then we may come to distinguish the two, to determine the cause and rectify our categories. Or perhaps by chance we are not sick, was it truly a different berry then or was it the same? To us it may as well be the same, but suppose an expert was watching us; they might perceive a different berry. That we can be mistaken shows that there are always two aspects: ideality and actuality. Ideality entails understanding or knowledge of the quality of an aspect in actuality—in other words, it is always an educated guess—whereas actuality is the objective truth of the matter, insofar as we can determine that.

Yet turning back to the primitive biological cell, we see a third temporality: by its reproduction the cell obtains a continuity characterised by identity in difference. The cell contains the code necessary to replicate itself, yet each replication is liable to variation. Always there are two aspects to this: the identity of continuity and the difference of change—somehow the child is not their mother, somehow they are, somehow it is inexpressible. There is no way to ascertain which of these aspects is the ultimate reality, here we must be accepting of many-sidedness. What matters is that this is a dialectical process of creative reproduction. There is a revolution here, or an apparent one, when cells synchronise. While sexual reproduction required the more complex synchronisation of separate cells, something similar is present for those with asexual reproduction, as where bacterial strains exhibit mutualistic behaviour. Some strains exhibit functional mutualism, as when one produces necessary nutrients for the other, which might be thought of as symbiosis rather than coordination proper; and yet cooperation in terms of spatial distributions—in other words, mutualistic behaviour—has also been observed.[5] This coordination of behaviour we will call synchronisation, whereas functional mutualism is symbiosis. These two categories are crucial in the development of complex biological organisms. The same two aspects can be seen elsewhere also, as in the symbiotic relation of organs or branches of government and the synchronisation of their functions. Synchronisation is here a fundamental concept: it is the dynamic capacity to coordinate activity in time and space so as to assemble functional units towards some end.[6] Spatial proximity is the simplest means of easing communication, for there must be some signal to evoke synchronisation. This depends on the quality and quantity of available communications infrastructure—including speed, difficulty, distance, etc.

The synchronisation of functional units may take two forms, either continuous or intermittent.[7] The former is less common, though we may well see its basic form in the fact that the possibility of synchronisation must be continuous. This might be compared to the difference between a fibre-optic cable (continuous) and the signal which it carries (intermittent). The same is true of our brain and heart, the intermittent synchronisation is dependent on the continuous connectivity by which the possibility of synchronisation is established. We are here concerned with intermittent synchronisation more than the mechanism of its bare possibility. This can be thought of as the actual coordination in which activity is synchronised, whatever the means by which that is accomplished. Of course, the means of connectivity—and particularly, its extent—are important; we will thus touch on this topic more than once. This will become particularly important following the development of clock time, not to mention its spatial propagation by electrical signalling. The form of a means, such as a clock, determines the mode of the signal by which it tends to initiate synchronisation. But we will return to this later. For now, we must note that intermittent synchronisation entails the temporary coherence of a functional unit towards some end. This may involve cells, organs, and in particular for humans, coordination between individuals acting as groups and societies; it is the latter category with which we are foremost concerned. Our interest is the ways in which synchronisation functions towards the ends implied by the image outlined here: life as scarcity, survival, activity, reproduction, etc. Our focus will be on the synchronisation of human activity in social groups and societies for the purpose of acquiring energy; or more broadly, the relationship between energy and work. For man not only expends energy himself that he might acquire more from the environment, he has also come to harness alternative forms—other men, horses, engines, etc.

But for any of this to be possible, society must somehow enlist the private interests of its population. The bare minimum coherence required to avoid collapse operates akin to herd immunity, so long as failure is contained then it is usually manageable. What needs to be avoided is social contagion resulting in total desynchronisation. Suppose a small band of troops enter combat; and from an objective perspective, it doesn’t look good—one of the men notices this, he turns and flees. So long as nobody else sees this, they may fight on; but there is a risk that this loss of morale may spread through the unit, at which point they may be routed by panic. This is different, of course, to their suffering a bloody defeat; they may still win if they’re lucky. The idea here is that morale—or for an individual, confidence—entails the maintenance of synchronisation under stress. Beyond that there is also basic functional coordination; that is, synchronisation under ordinary conditions—more practical knowledge of what ought to be done than confidence. And below this, biological life: the obvious prerequisite for any component of a social unity. That this is the basis, the bare minimum, is emphasised by Kropotkin’s exhortation: “Bread, it is bread that the Revolution needs!”[8]  This is a telling point, at the centre of the state we find the first scarcity—the primordial debt. People are dragged along by their stomachs; and beyond that, by their minds. The latter may disregard the former, as in hunger strikes, but at some point the body will fail, collapse, and ultimately die. Whether collapse occurs before death depends primarily on morale; those that die in hunger strikes are carried to the edge by their beliefs in spite of everything else.

Societies thus use mind and body alike to tug people in desired directions, primarily to either prevent interference (out-of-phase synchronisation) or assemble functional units (in-phase synchronisation). One way this is done, as the corollary of Kropotkin’s argument suggests, is by holding their primordial debt against them; or rather, we may speak of the people as always necessarily collaborating in the joint enterprise of society. The only ones that do not collaborate are those who avoid social structures or opt out entirely—suicide is the ultimate negation of the world. To the extent that we wish to continue, we must somehow have food. Some return to primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyles, dumpster diving and urban scavenging; others are lucky enough to have social safety nets, whether family or something more formal like an unemployment benefit. This is the simple demand at the heart of society: all must eat. Here we find the basic temporality of all social structures, the basic rhythm of social life. There are other rhythms also: water, sleep, menstruation, etc. Then above this, there are those rhythms which resolve these demands. We must work, for instance, so that we have something to eat, somewhere to sleep, etc. Of course, this is not enough for long-term stability. To ensure people are maximally engaged, they must have something more than the bare nutrition necessary to sustain life. Dietary factors will influence the physical and intellectual productivity of a nation. And yet more than that, confidence and morale will influence the level of commitment. Marx saw religion as serving this role, and it does, among other things; but so does ideology, Marxism and Catholicism equally offer moral and emotional absolution.

Such societal narratives are also important as solid scaffolding for synchronisation within large groups.[9] Indeed, they seem to be necessary: no lasting civilisation has been without some religious or narrative core. Most basically, this entails a shared language; compare here the Tower of Babel, where the curse on their tongues caused the immediate dissolution of their civilisation. The functional synchronisation of a society, in other words, always requires some communication infrastructure. This can be anything from song and the spoken word to newspapers or email. Advances in communications technology increase the rate at which more distal elements can be coordinated. Meanwhile transport infrastructure provides the other half of this aspect, with one primarily entailing a coordination in time and the other in space. While the capacity to actually go somewhere is crucial, communications infrastructure is necessary for stability and certainty in the flow of commerce. A side-effect of advances in this, particularly that of the penny post, was the creation of regular national newspapers like the Spectator.[10] Anderson argues that these allowed the ritualistic synchronisation of isolated individuals at a far larger scaler than was ever before possible:

We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that. … The significance of this mass ceremony—Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers—is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.[11]

Of course, the story has gone on since then. Globalisation and the Digital Revolution have together heralded a new era, that of the ‘global village.’ But all this must be left aside for now. Instead our aim here is to understand something of the nature of that peculiar form of time so characteristic of modernity—that of the “secular, historically clocked, imagined community.”[12] Or Walter Benjamin put it: “modernity, the time of hell.”[13] Broadly, we will sketch the dialectic by which temporality has been reproduced and developed between the Neolithic and Industrial periods. This will begin with the shift from nomadic hunter-gathers to static agriculturalists, from which point we will trace in outline the historical development of these into the Industrial Revolution. Throughout we will follow the thread of temporality through an array of apparently disparate topics: biology and thermodynamics, food and energy, economics and morality, etc. And at end, we will adumbrate the particular temporality which today is obscured by its apparent universality and necessity.

 

Subsistence: from nomadic to static society

Taking scarcity as our point of departure, we might look to that which preceded the Neolithic era. Here man apparently existed in small groups as a nomadic hunter-gatherer. We might characterise the pattern of synchronisation—in other words, the temporal order—as roughly that expressed by the Greek term kairotopos. The first part of this name comes from Kairos, the Greek god of time as timing, of the qualitative moment of opportunity—described as having a shaved head except for a long forelock, the idea being that you had to be agile to catch him by it and thus ‘seize the opportunity.’ The other half of this word is ‘topos,’ the Greek term for place. Taken together, we see that time is defined by the qualitative integration of a spatiotemporal point. When and where, in this case, are equally important. This can be seen reflected in the temporal orders of hunter-gatherer societies. Most of the time, these existed as small groups moving separately. They would leave one area and move to another, setting up camp and “eat their way out”—methodically gathering from their campsite outwards until supplies were exhausted.[14] At around 19km, such subsistence activities would require an overnight trip. This is like the hard limit to the area that they would exhaust in ordinary circumstances. At this point, they move to the next location. This is simpler for them than us, as they value portability above all else and carry little beyond necessity. Indeed, so important is this mobility that they will euthanise any unable to travel. And that makes sense, this is their mode of subsistence—it is life itself, scarcity drives their hunger and carries them ever onwards. They cannot afford to stop, that would mean an entirely different way of life for which they are not equipped. Perhaps they would survive, maybe they could develop agriculture—most seem to have preferred to minimise the risk.

Some have portrayed the lives of hunter-gatherers as an awful horror, one in which they were “pressed down upon the subsistence level.”[15] Yet there is good reason to think things were not so bad, at least before the industrialised world came on the scene. When European colonists arrived in Africa and Australia, for instance, they quickly took over much of the best land. Aborigines were prevented from camping at water supplies; indeed, efforts were made to curb nomadic activity entirely. To judge them on fair terms, we might find their historical actuality less terrible than the image we have come to know by cultural bias and historical tragedy:

If such peoples are now described as poverty-stricken, their resources “meagre and unreliable,” is this an indication of the aboriginal condition—or of the colonial duress?[16]

If we turn to the culture symbolism of hunter-gatherers, we find that the relation with nature is characterised far differently from the inside than we might suspect. Bird-David, for instance, directs us to the root metaphor of the Nayaka, a South Indian tribe of gatherer-hunters: “nature as parent.”[17] This provides a key symbol which entails an elaborative schema coherent with the structure of Nayaka existence:

… the root metaphor formulates the unity of cultural orientation underlying many aspects of experience, by virtue of the fact that those many aspects of experience can be likened to it.[18]

Our point here is that these symbolic structures act as a narrative scaffolding for intersubjective coherence, and hence facilitate functional synchronisation, within the relevant social group. This says nothing of the origin, and especially not that these ideas explain the behaviour. Indeed, it seems far more likely that equivalent subsistence activities preceded the development of the myths which correspond to them. Either way, it is not our aim to explain this here—at most it can be assumed to have emerged by a dialectic of exaptation from prior structures through creative reproduction over time. Nonetheless, root metaphors can thus be fruitfully used to compare the cultural structure of a people; particularly when read in line with more plainly philosophical and sociological knowledge.

Here we might return to the worldview entailed by the root metaphor of the Nayaka gatherer-hunters, that of nature as a parent:

Nayaka look on the forest as they do a mother or father. For them, it is not something “out there” that responds mechanically or passively but like a parent; it provides food unconditionally to its children. … Similarly, the Mbuti Pygmies refer to the forest as giving “food, shelter and clothing just like their parents.”[19]

And indeed, for them this is true; it is the source of all the necessities of subsistence as much as any luxuries or other materials. This is certainly a different picture to the pity with which European colonists often looked on the nomadic tribes they encountered. Along with this root metaphor goes also a mixture of trust in the generosity of nature-as-parent and confidence in the capacity to overcome difficulties. We might further explain this by the fact that nomadic hunter-gatherers, unlike settled groups, can far more readily move to a new location. The agriculturalist, in relative contrast, has all their eggs in one basket. This threat of general failure has commonly been reduced by distributed cultivation, wherein scattered plots are preferred to a single general field. Similarly, the nomadic mode of subsistence described here can be seen as an intensification of this principle, that the spatial distribution of dependence reduces the risk of catastrophic failure.

Of course, it would not be feasible to simply search at random; and that is not what happens. Instead these groups are well-informed by the wealth of practical knowledge passed down. Livingstone described the Kalahari Bushmen, for instance, as being “so intimately acquainted with the habits of game that they follow them in their migrations, and prey on them from place to place.”[20] This is a temporal order, in other words, that is somehow embedded within nature; roughly what we have here characterised as kairotopos. Of course, the mentions of habits are important also: time can be conceived linearly, as in the progress of a journal, and also cyclically. That this was also an important element in hunter-gatherer culture can be seen in their equivalent of ‘calendrical’ festivals. These are not situated as a measure of time but as the quality of a specific time and place, and it is this which also provides their form:

At Moorunde, when the Murray annually inundates the flats, fresh-water cray-fish make their way to the surface of the ground … in such vast numbers that I have seen four hundred natives live upon them for weeks together, whilst the numbers spoiled or thrown away would have sustained four hundred more …[21]

Again, this draws us back to the question of energy. These festivals are great gatherings because nature-as-parent has thrown a feast which can support population densities far beyond the usual dispersal of small groups. Those that have familiarised themselves with her rhythms gather in great numbers then and there, and in the face of such abundance who among them could doubt the generosity of nature.

We have described this as practical knowledge of a kairotopic order, that the group moves so often and rarely returns to the same place renders time interwoven with space. Another way to put this is to say that the temporal order of hunter-gatherers is entrained to the natural rhythms of the environment. To early European colonists, and indeed many since, this was seen as no temporal order at all: “A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.”[22] There was a sense, in other words, that a natural temporal order was seen as really being no order at all:

The general consensus was that a reliance on nature had made ‘wanderers’ of these intractable nomads, leaving them ‘without any system of order or government.’[23]

Of course, there was an order—it was simply something very different to that which the Europeans had recently encountered, one which they saw as somehow beneath them. And yet, for hunter-gatherers, this order was certainly true; it simply reflected a very different mode of social organisation based on a fundamentally different means of maintaining the energy flow necessary for subsistence. To understand this difference, and see further the interrelation of basic economic activity with temporal orders, we might now turn to the substantial shift in spatiotemporal orders which characterised the Neolithic era. We can see, moreover, that just as the hunter-gatherer order characterised by kairotopos was aligned with their mode of subsistence; so too was the particular spatiotemporal order of Neolithic agriculturalists.

For agriculturalists, in contrast, time is better characterised by the god Chronos. This god is typically represented as an old man, usually carrying a scythe—as representing the harvest. There is also Kronos, a god who is often confused with Chronos but is commonly held to be separate. Kronos is notable in particular for having devoured his children, an idea which was carried through to the Roman equivalent in Saturn. Here we note the twin meaning: Chronos as harvest symbolising the generative aspect of time; and in his description as an old man, the degenerative aspect of time. We might see Kronos, then, as equivalent but with a greater emphasis on the negative side of this bivalent symbol. Indeed, Kronos has also been associated with the harvest. Similarly, Ovid describes time as “devourer of everything, and you, hateful old age, you destroy everything and bit by bit you consume all those things which have been mangled by the teeth of the passing age.”[24] This is precisely the image, albeit as abstraction rather than personification, which is central in the mythological characterisation of Kronos devouring his children. Bongiovanni notes, moreover, that we find in the uncertain etymology of these words the common derivatives of grinding and grain:

These parallel lines of development are reconcilable in the basic meaning of the PIE root *g̑erH- ‘crush, grind, wear down,’ which by extension denotes also the material substance that is crushed or ground, viz. grain, and also, in a corollary sense, the physiological condition obtained as a consequence of the act of wearing down, viz. old age, wherefore it seems only natural to conceive of time here as the causative agent. This begins to explain the symbolism of the rotating sky as a cosmic mill in Scandinavian and other mythologies.[25]

We may begin to see, therefore, how Chronos/Kronos are intimately related to the agricultural developments that followed the Neolithic shift to relatively static agriculture. There is, moreover, the interesting observation that this is associated with the metaphor of a ‘cosmic mill.’

As the hunter-gatherers outlined above took ‘nature as parent’ we might look to the mill as a primary metaphor in agricultural societies. Of course, as with the parental metaphor, we must presume again that activity preceded the narrative which merely scaffolded a coherent understanding of this experiential basis. For this we must turn to the spatiotemporal ordering characteristic of agricultural societies. Once again, during the Neolithic era early agriculturalists were mainly engaged in subsistence activities. The primary demand remained, as before, the effort to outpace scarcity and maintain the continuity of life; what differed was the means by which this was achieved, thereby entailing an entirely different experience of the spatiotemporal rhythms of nature and life. We have noted at the outset that this was better characterised by Chronos than the kairotopos of hunter-gatherers. For one, agriculturalists are relatively static in comparison to hunter-gatherers; hence time begins to come loose from space—or rather, the spatial component of ordering is less dependent on temporality. The difference, in brief, was that where hunter-gatherers had to move to find food, early agriculturalists more often had to wait. We can see the symbolic culmination of this in the mill metaphor gestured at above by Bongiovanni:

Rydberg makes the point that, because the mill was perhaps the first large-scale mechanism invented, its rotating motion aptly served as a metaphor for that of the starry firmament. This motion must have been early recognized regular, predictable, and independent of the capricious interference of gods or other powers. The conception of Kronos as a god of the rotating sky, governing the periodicity of the seasons and the harvesting of grain, merges in the image of the mill with the conception of time as a force that wears down by a metaphorical grinding action.[26]

This we can understand in line with the notion of a ‘key symbol’ or ‘root metaphor’ as outlined above: it acquires its meaning through symbolic correspondence with the experiential basis of a social group. The world was thus organised into seasons, which also provides, as ‘hora,’ the root of the English word, hour. This was a world characterised by reciprocity and regular order: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”[27]

 

Exchange: from generosity to reciprocity

There are two aspects to the morality of exchange in any society, that between man and nature; and that between men. Turning to the Nayaka and their agriculturalist neighbours, the Bette Kerumba, we can see the material–symbolic symmetry of these two relations.[28] For the Nayaka, as we have noted, nature is as parent; for the Bette Kerumba, in contrast, nature is as ancestor. The broad difference here can be described as that between generosity and reciprocity. And more, we see this difference reflected in their energy economies: the Nayaka experience nature as a parent giving freely, whereas the Bette Kerumba by necessity reap only what they sow. This is then paralleled between individuals, with each of these metaphors serving to structure the morality of exchange within these societies. For the Nayaka, if another asks then the right thing to do is simply give it to them—there is here no thought of any expected return, only a tacit trust in harmony of intermingled flows as in a tight-knit family. The Bette Kerumba, and those like them, in contrast, have been described as ‘gift economies,’ though this is somewhat misleading; we might more accurately characterise them as having an economic morality of reciprocal exchange. This differs from generosity in that reciprocity entails some form of calculation, however rough and ready this may be. If you give someone a bow, for instance, and they return a handful of mongongo nuts—then that is hardly a reciprocal exchange. Where before the emphasis was on the relationship as one of generosity, here it is the activity of exchange which is centred—and hence, the relative values involved. Here we may see the beginning of virtual credit–debt relations:

Kinship ties and bargaining are considered to be incompatible, and all goods are handed over as free gifts offered from motives of sentiment. Discussion of value is avoided, and the donor does the best he can to convey the impression that no thought of a counter gift has entered his head…. Most of the visitors … go home with items at least as valuable as those with which they came. Indeed, the closer the kinship bond, the greater the host’s generosity is, and some of them return a good deal richer. A careful count is kept, however, and the score is afterwards made even.[29]

All this plainly requires some way in which value, even if not discussed explicitly, is measured, compared, and remembered. This is particularly important, Sahlins notes, in the dealings between social groups, wherein “the circumstances are radically Hobbesian, not only lacking that ‘common Power to keep them all in awe’ but without even that common kinship that might incline them all to peace.”[30] Here the stability of inter-group relations is maintained not by law but rather by the exchange itself:

The economic ratio is a diplomatic maneuver. “It requires a good deal of tact on the part of everyone concerned,” as Radcliffe- Brown wrote of Andamanese interband exchange, “to avoid the unpleasantness that may arise if a man thinks that he has not received things as valuable as he has given….”[31]

This necessity also motivates what might be called a ‘virtual market’—wherein supply and demand are factored into the equation. The prompting for such calculations, however, is not to maximise material gain but instead to secure intergroup stability. This entails an emphasis, in other words, on the social relation itself rather than objective economic value. And the same is true internally, wherein the appropriate terms of exchange vary significantly according to the hierarchical and relational distances involved. The function of synchronisation here was not material profit but social harmony; hence it was a necessarily complex calculation taking as its basis the social relation rather than fixed values or economic objects.

The metaphoric reciprocity of agricultural activity, of reaping what one sows, is thus found to be reflected in the dominant morality of exchange; yet it echoes also elsewhere, as in ritual and religion. This is particularly obvious in Christianity, which features an abundance of agricultural imagery: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”[32] But here we notice something else also, an effort to resolve the tension we have noted between Chronos/Kronos; that is, time as harvest and reaper alike:

For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.[33]

Here we find in altered form many of the ideas we have already addressed; for instance, of internal reciprocity—now conceived as within ‘the household of faith.’ Moreover, the requisite exchange is now phrased in spiritual terms as a duality of spirit and flesh. The Christian life is here understood in terms of agricultural metaphor: life as season, death as harvest. This aligns well with the imagery of Death as the servant of God, a ‘grim reaper’ with hourglass and scythe. But most importantly, here again we find the principle of reciprocity and, in particular, its relation to eternity. Christianity can thus be understood as entailing a reciprocal relation with God, wherein one ‘soweth to the Spirit’ so as to ‘reap life everlasting.’ Here it can be seen to address the psychological, as opposed to biological, face of our primordial debt:

The price is the knowledge of mortality—each human being anticipates his own demise. Because of this ability to look forward in time, every man and woman is aware that they are subject to the process of decay and, ultimately, death.[34]

We may note also another key Christian metaphor: that of the shepherd. This entails the understanding of God as guiding and protecting mankind as flock, as well as our own duty to emulate this. But moreover, it also suggests some proper orientation or path. Similarly, as with the Nayaka, the Christian conception invokes ‘God the Father.’ This originary role endows the creation narrative with the force of revelation; it is the circumference of a mythic order within which all else resides—past, present, and future alike. And more, what is the case thus also determines what ought to be: that so-and-so is your father, for instance, entails not only a simple fact about a person but also determines what counts as proper conduct in this relation. Christianity entails, in other words, not only an existential debt but also our place in creation and hence the proper mode of sacrifice: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”[35] This echoes the notion of a primordial debt, here imbued with moral and spiritual meaning. Hence perhaps the fundamental role of the religion in structuring time, as with the seven-day week and the Sabbath; church bells signalled the temporal order, Benedictine monasteries were pioneers of time-discipline, etc.

 

Surplus: from organic to industrial

To return to the topic of energy, the history as outlined for the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence resulted, with technological advances, in the possibility and importance of surplus stores. Where the nomadic lifestyle was inimical to surplus property, the static agriculturalist lifestyle made it possible; and more, necessary—there had to be sufficient food to supply a static population until the next harvest. This is to say, in other words, that static agriculturalist societies have higher fixed costs. Yet they can also offer a much higher return on investment in terms of input–output ratios. This is precisely because of their spatial distribution: by mechanically harnessing the photosynthetic capacity of plant-life, man was also able to maximise the density of its energy output. To do so required foremost that he make way for the sun, which deity he was thereafter dependent upon. This was accomplished primarily by the use of fire to clear that which would obstruct planting and obscure photosynthesis, which had the side-effect of providing nutrients for the ground. By the power Prometheus brought we thereby sacrificed the old gods of the forest, making way for an altogether different way of life. With this we exposed ourselves to a new dependence, like Adam and Eve we were thus bound to work the land. Once the forest had intervened between us and the world; so long as we remained in symbiosis, the world tended to be characterised by generosity and often enough even abundance. Now festivals were instead structured according our new dependence upon the sun and soil: reap and sow, reciprocity. For this new patterns of synchronisation were necessary, a new spatiotemporal order. Through intermittent synchronisation of activities, labour and ritual alike, the biological and social orders were thus maintained. Alongside this ran the dialectic of scarcity, yet now the same equation, given new variables, solved to give new values. See, for instance, the prominence of fertility rites—symbolically and demographically, reproduction had become a major value.[36]

Today we see the senicide and infanticide of hunter-gatherer populations as barbaric, even if we may abstractly understand its necessity. We can explain our disgust on the reversal of values here, also—elders no longer had to be abandoned due to the necessity of movement. At the same time, demographic growth had become much more desirable. The costs were reduced and advantages increased significantly, now parents that needed to work could leave their children with older people that were unable to work. This was perhaps a factor also in the formation of a culture in which elders and ancestors were respected or even venerated. They were able to live much longer and became the living repositories of culture as song and story and tradition—often all woven into one. Primitive populations without written language lacked any alternative for preserving information. Similarly, ancestor worship can be seen to reflect the new importance of tradition in agricultural society. This was a temporality which recognised its debt to the past in terms of cultural inheritance and practical knowledge. What we might think of as mere technical operations involved elaborate ceremonies and symbolic exchanges of reciprocity with an ancestor or some such supernatural entity. For these the proper enactment of a patterned whole was of the utmost importance, not as steps in a mechanism but the totality of ritualistic form. Such instances of intermittent synchronisation must be seen as functional units not only for the purpose of agriculture, for instance, as by ritual and the sowing of seeds, but also as reproducing the intersubjective reality of the social organism. There are thus two layers of entropy in the static agriculturalist society: the biological body and the body politic. For each, it was equally necessary that integrity and continuity be maintained. This required the coordination of internal forces against the death within, scarcity, and that without, enemies and external threats. In this way social reality was reproduced as the society simultaneously produced the means of ensuring its continuity.

Humans are renowned among the species for their over-imitation, as can be seen in the former importance of tradition.[37] Even now this largely remains, as language itself might be thought of as ‘traditional’ in this sense; to constantly question the basic meanings of words or argue they ought to mean something entirely different. This traits adds value in two senses: it aids in the fidelity of transmission between generations; and it thereby provides a sound basis for what has been termed cumulative culture—or the ‘ratchet effect.’[38] Ultimately this concerns the possibility of progress, of more or less ordered changed within continuity. And in the time since man first settled in static societies, this has been a central factor in the evolution of cultures. We can see this, in particular relation to our purposes, in the ways in which energy has been harnessed. At first primitive agriculture depended on fire and human labour; later additions include oxen, horses, watermills, windmills, etc. All of these entail harnessing alternative power sources; the flow of a river, for instance, or the indigestible diet of oxen. These have thus reduced the amount of labour required of humans; or rather, it has increased their power—that is, their capacity for work over time. This has increased the remaining moiety, which can then be invested elsewhere; as with population growth, monument construction, military production, etc.

We can see that since the advent of static agriculture era man has expanded his access to power in the environment, harnessing streams and horses alike. Yet wind and water mills added little, and animals were still dependent on the same source: solar energy. On the other side, that of surplus rather than production, man has also advanced. This can be seen as something as simple as using pigs to store energy or converted indigestible crops into edible meat. Similarly, we have developed all sorts of containers from amphoras to grain siloes. The stability of stored foodstuffs requires they be protected from the environment, animals, spoilage, etc. Yet this also increased the need and desire for military power, that the society might protect itself from looting as well as expanding by force if necessary. Altogether, the agricultural society is in a constant state of scarcity and their success will depend on how well they can maintain growth and stability. Here geographical factors will also enter into the picture; England’s natural insularity, for instance, let it avoid the balance of power politics which characterised continental European states.[39] This meant that it was able to invest more in expansion, infrastructure, technology, etc. European states on the continent, in contrast, ended up with high fixed costs in order to maintain the standing army’s necessary to stave off their belligerent neighbours. All of these factors require specialisation and the division of labour, thus making for a much more complex state. Yet throughout this, the state must maintain coordination of all these parts. Each functional unit must synchronise as necessary to fulfil its part, then these must be coordinated towards ends which serve the interests of the state.

This begets a civilisational dialectic that Toynbee calls “challenge and response.”[40] Societies need not only maintain themselves against entropy but must also successfully coordinate in response to challenges as they arise. We might here turn to the central challenge of Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution: the advent of modern warfare. And here again, as in the turn to static agriculture, this new age was born amidst smoke and fire:

Once better confined and directed, the force of exploding gunpowder begun propelling increasingly heavier projectiles at larger distances. Manufacture of such guns begun in China just before the year 1200, and the true guns were cast in Europe only a few decades later.[41]

The introduction of guns destabilised the balance of power in Europe, with all hands in a frenzy to acquire the necessary capacity to produce advanced weaponry and gain the advantage. As a result, “casting of field guns became one of the first mass-production industries of the modern world.”[42] This required an immense amount of iron, which led to deforestation of almost all England for charcoal by the middle of the eighteenth century. For all their weapons and other advances, European was at that time still as much an organic economy as that of the early Neolithic era; it was thus wholly dependent on land as the source of food and material products—in other words, “the production horizon … was set by the annual cycle of plant growth.”[43] While the amount of solar energy is immense, this is necessarily channelled through the inefficient process of photosynthesis. This also ties these economies to environmental conditions such as rainfall and temperature, thus limiting the supply of arable land. The energy derived from wind and water, moreover, made little difference to this basic dynamic:

Mechanical power was principally provided by human and animal muscle. Thermal energy came from burning wood or charcoal.[44]

While cautious to attribute the cause of the Industrial Revolution to any single fact, Wrigley argues that “one necessary condition for the escape from the constraints of an organic economy was success in gaining access to an energy source which was not subject to the limitations of the annual cycle of insolation and the nature of plant photosynthesis.”[45] It makes sense, therefore, that the 1750s, when iron was first experimentally produced using coal, is “generally considered as the starting point of the Industrial Revolution”—which Chen characterises as “a successful technology response to a resource crisis by vastly increasing the use of coal in iron making and steam engines.”[46] Of course, as seems to be the nature of the beast, successfully meeting this challenge immediately gave rise to another. As with the shift to static agriculture, the Industrial Revolution bent the path of progress and thus required large-scale changes in the orientation and coordination of functional units. Most notably, the new limit was not energy but time.

 

Labour: from idle to industrious

One key shift required by the Industrial Revolution, therefore, was the need to enlist the population’s interest in a new economic order more suited to the world that was emerging. This has been called by De Vries the “industrious revolution”—which he sees as necessarily preceding the Industrial Revolution.[47] We may read this instead, in line with our account thus far, as a challenge inherent in the possibility of industrial society; rather than preceding the Industrial Revolution, therefore, industriousness was instead an aspect key to its realisation. While coal offered a way to escape from the limits of organic economies, to unleash this potential required the optimal use of other resources—and in particular, that of labour. The Industrial Revolution cannot, therefore, be understood simply as imposition or necessity; instead it necessarily entailed also an enlistment of self-interest among the populace. There are two stories to be told here, the first is that of those early capitalists pioneers animated by the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and the second, that of the people who laboured under them.

Here we will turn first to Weber’s famous ‘spirit of capitalism’—“that attitude which seeks profit rationally and systematically”—which he describes as originating in a worldly ascetic mode of economic rationalism as adopted by early-modern Protestants.[48] We can understand this as a permutation of the ‘primordial debt’ in line with the Christian understanding of reciprocity and sacrifice: “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”[49] This gave rise to a class of men animated by an intense self-confidence in their piety; all the while conducting themselves such as, on most traditional understandings, was “proscribed as the lowest sort of avarice and as an attitude entirely lacking in self-respect.”[50] Most notable for our purposes, these early capitalists were characterised by a pious temporality of sacrifice:

Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It does not yet hold, with Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God.[51]

This is, as we have noted, contrary to most traditional understandings of temporal ethics. Indeed, we more often find precisely the opposite standard:

There is a strong ethic that haste is unseemly, the mark of a person too concerned with material advances who may not be paying sufficient attention to social obligations. People who hurry their activities are often the subject of gossip. They are regarded as less refined…[52]

The result, says Weber, was the imposition of this idiosyncratic work ethic on the population at large by virtue of its economic utility. Those animated by these principles, for instance, need have little regard for traditional notions of virtue. For the Christian, salvation is the highest value; or to paraphrase Pascal, it is the only infinite value. All other values and principles, in contrast, were mundane and ultimately illusory. This explains why Franklin maintains that “those virtues, like all others, are only in so far virtues as they are actually useful to the individual, and the surrogate of mere appearance is always sufficient when it accomplishes the end in view.”[53] One untrammelled by anything other than their own self-interest can, of course, go far in this world. That is not to say that these early capitalists were not disciplined or intelligent, yet they certainly had an early advantage in this regard:

… some young man from one of the putting-out families went out into the country, carefully chose weavers for his employ, greatly increased the rigour of his supervision of their work, and thus turned them from peasants into labourers. On the other hand, he would begin to change his marketing methods by so far as possible going directly to the final consumer, would take the details into his own hands, would person- ally solicit customers, visiting them every year, and above all would adapt the quality of the product directly to their needs and wishes. At the same time he began to introduce the principle of low prices and large turnover. There was repeated what everywhere and always is the result of such a process of rationalisation: those who would not follow suit had to go out of business.[54]

Of course, this would serve only to further assure these early capitalists of their proper and pious conduct. What better proof of righteousness than their being rewarded by God, acting here in his function as the ‘invisible hand of the market.’ Those that fell behind or went under were seen as failing not because of any particular ruthlessness but simply because they were not disciplined enough, hence were undeserving and destined for damnation. As a result, these early capitalists initiated a shift in market dynamics towards the necessity of rationalisation which was in perfect alignment with the requirements of their era. But in doing so, they also crowded out all other alternatives and rewrought the entire economic order:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.[55]

And yet here we must qualify Weber’s argument somewhat, for it was not that the iron cage was entirely an imposition. The process of rationalisation also entailed enlisting, by hook or by crook, the self-interest of the labouring population. This brings us to another key aspect: money—which Graeber convincingly argues is not per se a commodity but is rather downstream of the virtual credit which animates reciprocity. Usually reciprocity was able to be sorted between individuals, but as society expanded and came into contact with culturally distant people, law came to resolve conflicts as a third-party. This was a capacity granted by virtue of law’s place as a social institution of which acceptance was tantamount to membership in a society. Law further functioned by the power of its recourse to the state monopoly on force; that the state provided this support can be seen to follow from the alignment of economic rationalisation and the new demands of industrial economies and balance of power politics. Indeed, the same capacity for force which maintained stability against external threats also maintained order internally, usually by mere appearance—coming into action rarely, as when Cromwell put down uprisings in Scotland and Ireland. This link between law, state, and money can also be traced in the development of laws which established the debt of guilty parties:

Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal), with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal ... In the Russian codes it was silver and furs, graduated from marten down to squirrel. Their detail is remarkable, not only in the personal injuries envisioned—specific compensations for the loss of an arm, a hand, a forefinger, a nail, for a blow on the head so that the brain is visible or bone projects—but in the coverage some of them gave to the possessions of the individual household. Title II of the Salic Law deals with the theft of pigs, Title III with cattle, Title IV with sheep, Title V with goats, Title VI with dogs, each time with an elaborate breakdown differentiating between animals of different age and sex.[56]

We can see these codes of compensation as early price schedules, the first step towards a system in which value was determined objectively. The difference between this and the market, however, is that the market is not regulated centrally by statute but rather by the ‘invisible hand of the market.’ Here the state says nothing of the price of things, instead it guarantees the value of money and thus, on Graeber’s view, creates the market. To support this, he points to instances where European nations put in place monetary systems in territories. These seem counterintuitive in that the state thus produces money to give to people; and then in the form of taxes, to take some of it back. What seems to matter is less the form of the taxes received by government but the effect on the population:

… one of the first things that the French general Gallieni, conqueror of Madagascar, did when the conquest of the island was complete in 1901 was to impose a head tax. Not only was this tax quite high, it was also only payable in newly issued Malagasy francs. In other words, Gallieni did indeed print money and then demand that everyone in the country give some of that money back to him.[57]

This tax was called, moreover, the “impôt moralisateur”—it was an ‘educational’ or ‘moralising’ tax. What this amounted to was a forced reordering of economic value, centring on the dependence of people to biological scarcity and agricultural rhythms, to synchronise local activity with the demands of the international market: 

Since the “educational tax” came due shortly after harvest time, the easiest way for farmers to pay it was to sell a portion of their rice crop to the Chinese or Indian merchants who soon installed themselves in small towns across the country. However, harvest was when the market price of rice was, for obvious reasons, at its lowest; if only sold too much of one’s crop, that meant one would not have enough left to feed one’s family for the entire year, and thus be forced to buy one’s own rice back on credit, from those same merchants later in the year when prices were much higher. As a result, farmers quickly fell hopelessly into debt (the merchants doubling as loan sharks). The easiest way to pay back the debt was either to find some kind of cash crop to sell—to start growing coffee, or pineapples—or else to send one’s children off to work for wages in the city, or on one of the plantations that French colonists were establishing across the island.[58]

The people, in other words, were forced to reorient their values towards the market and mesh with this system if they were to survive; as with all law, the ultimate guarantor of taxes and money alike was the state with its monopoly on force. And yet, as we have noted, this was no mere imposition; it was also an offer of enlistment:

The colonial government were also quite explicit (at least in their own internal policy documents), about the need to make sure that peasants had at least some money of their own left over, and to ensure that they became accustomed to the minor luxuries—parasols, lipsticks, cookies—available at the Chinese shops. It was crucial that they develop new tastes, habits, and expectations; that they lay the foundations of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to France.[59]

The idea here is the same as that of the ‘industrious revolution’—as Hume put it: “Furnish him with the manufactures and commodities and he will do it himself.”[60] Or more callously yet: “Men are forced to labour now because they are slaves to their own wants.”[61] Altogether this seems to have been a success; in 1802, for instance, Cornish men who had taken on further employment between their shifts in the mines were described as having “become careful and thrifty both of their time and money.”[62]

 

 

Time and money

Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.[63]

We have already addressed, in brief, the mode of economic exchange in hunter-gatherer communities—specifically that of the Nayaka. This is characterised by giving freely as between siblings with the understanding, though no explicit expectation, that things will someday even out. This can be compared to the primitive agricultural mode of exchange, or the ‘gift economy,’ wherein there is a tacit expectation of reciprocity.[64] Significantly, for the corresponding gift to be properly reciprocal this implies some calculation of value. We might imagine, in other words, that the giving of a gift under a reciprocal regime of exchange implies the creation of a virtual debt–credit relationship. Graeber suggests, contrary to the standard history of economics, that this ‘virtual money’ actually preceded barter and the use of coinage:

… our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems.[65]

On this view, in other words, “money is not a commodity but an accounting tool.”[66] Take, for instance, the ancient Sumerian economy which was centred around vast temple and palace complexes. By around 3500 B.C., “temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy” in which “the basic monetary unit was the silver shekel.”[67] But this was not yet equivalent to money in our sense, for “while debts were calculated in silver, they did not have be paid in silver—in fact, they could be paid in more or less anything one had around.”[68] We see, therefore, that the point of establishing the correspondence between the weight of a silver shekel and, for instance, a bushel of barley was simply that this allowed for the systematic determination of reciprocal exchange:

Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and as the credit theorists correctly noted, historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exchange.[69]

What is it to say then, as Benjamin Franklin did, that time is money? Some have interpreted it quite simply: time is a commodity. And yet on the view outlined above, this doesn’t make sense. Or we might instead say: units of time ‘are merely abstract units of measurement’—yet that seems to tell us nothing at all. Here we might gain some further perspective on this question by comparing English to Wolof; of particular interest in that the two languages seem to differ on precisely this point.

The notion of ‘wasting time,’ for instance, familiar to us, is entirely foreign to Wolof speakers. The single instance Moore records, the exception which proves this rule, entailed the use of English loan words: “Yaangiy wést suñu taym”—that is, ‘You are wasting our time.’[70] But here, ‘wést’ and ‘taym’ are borrowed from English; waste and time, respectively. There are two Wolof words which we will here inspect to see where this difference lies. The first is jot, which can be used similarly to ‘time’ in the sense of one ‘having’ or ‘lacking’ it.[71] But this is conceived as a subjective and internal resource, as the capacity to do something in the sense of being free from obligations. As one Wolof speaker put it, “Jot is free will; it’s your self-possession.”[72] One important difference between jot and time, for our purposes, is that jot is not measurable in units: “whereas you can ask a person if she has jot, you cannot ask her ‘how much’ jot she has.”[73] More broadly, “jot denotes neither a period of time, an entity that can be measured in units, nor a substance that exists independently of the person who has it.”[74] To compare, we can examine the metaphoric relation between labour and time—which Lakoff and Johnson take as the basis of ‘time as a quantifiable resource’ in English.[75] This points to some further crucial differences in Wolof temporality. Where in English we might speak of owing a quantity of time, for Wolof speakers “what is owed is specifically an amount of work, which is quantified in terms of time”—for example, “I owe her a morning’s work; the afternoon is mine.”[76] Or take the notion of an employer ‘giving’ time to their worker; here Wolof speakers talk more in terms of being freed from obligations, and hence having jot, rather than any sense in which time is a quantifiable resource.

As already noted, one cannot speak of ‘wasting time’ in Wolof. But here we will turn to the next Wolof word: jamano, which is “typically used to talk about a period of time that is associated with someone or something.”[77] This can mean, for instance, a cyclical time period, a generation, or a life stage—and it is the last of these senses that jamano can be wasted. Where time in English is conceived of as an abstract entity which can always be wasted, Wolof limits this to more concrete entities: “if you do not fulfil the responsibilities of the stage of life you are in, you are wasting your jamano.”[78] What is wasted, in other words, “is a temporal attribute of a person rather than an impersonal period of time.”[79] Moore concludes that the basis of this difference seems to be that “Wolof does not have a word for time with an ‘amorphous external substance’ sense that would be appropriate to treat metaphorically as a resource.”[80] This would explain why Wolof speakers nevertheless may use time to quantify labour, for instance, and also talk about wasting specific time-periods. As to the reason for this difference, Moore admits they cannot say—instead gesturing, in line with Lakoff and Johnson, to “complex cultural constructs such as clocks and hourly wages.”[81] To follow this line, therefore, it is to these that we now turn.

While clock and watch are familiar for us, we might again turn to the edges to see them anew. John Campbell, for instance, an early British missionary to Africa, sought to demonstrate his pocket-watch upon first encountering the locals:

… [the Bushmen] evidently concluded it must be a living animal, and my offering to hold it near their ears, to hear its sound, seemed to convince them it was some dangerous creature, by which I intended to injure them, for they almost overturned the hut in order to escape from the watch.[82]

Similarly, when Heinrich Lichtenstein showed his watch to a Xhosa envoy, telling him that “this instrument kept pace with the sun—the man “gave it back again without saying a word, almost as if offended that he should be told anything so utterly incredible.”[83] Despite our familiarity, or perhaps precisely because of it, we might here do well to look more carefully at the nature of clock time. This entails not only a mechanical investigation of clocks—particularly the ‘horological revolution,’ to which we will soon turn—it also requires we also investigate the cultural context in which the clock arose. We must thus begin some way back and give a brief overview before arriving at anything like the clocks we know today.

Early clocks and watches did not tick, and were instead described as a ‘jar’—that is, a “harsh inharmonious sound.”[84] But in 1680, Sherman points out a new representation in the writing of John Aubrey:

One time being at Hom Lacy in Herefordshire, at Mr. John Scudamore’s, he happened to leave his watch in the chamber windowe—(watches are then rarities)—The maydes came in to make the bed, and hearing a thing in a case cry Tick, Tick, Tick, presently concluded that it was his Devill….[85]

However inharmonious the earlier sound was, this new phenomenon seems to have been more jarring yet—at least, to maids and Bushmen. Aubrey was writing at a time when the ticking of a clock was a recent phenomenon indeed, having been around for a few years at most and rare at that. The crucial mechanical advance responsible for this aural shift in the pulse of clockwork was that of Huygensian chronometry. The earlier aural of experience of clockwork is captured by Robert Hooke, a rivel of Huygens: “I never yet heard a clock or watch … whose balance [i.e., regulator] did not very sensibly beat vnequally.”[86] This irregularity was the result of interactions between the regulator and the rest of the clockwork mechanism, which meant that the component intended to regulate the time-piece was also reflexively regulated by the whole. To overcome this, Huygens drew on a design first formulated by Galileo:

… a pendulum of a given length and weight, once set in motion, will complete every successive swing in precisely the same period, even if the arc of the swing should narrow or widen. Huygens, linking this intrinsically isochronous instrument to the clockwork (a project Galileo had envisioned but perhaps never actualised), immediately imparted to the machinery a new accuracy and auditory impact. The first clocks built to his designs lost only fifteen seconds a day, and rendered isochronism audible by a newly steady sound. Even Hooke grudgingly conceded that Huygens’s pendulum “performes very much…. [A]s to sense [i.e., as far as sense can detect] his Pendulum seems to vibrate in equall time.”[87]

The key to this ‘horological revolution,’ Sherman argues, is more than Huygens’ admittedly huge leap forward in terms of mechanical regularity:

Technically, Huygens accomplished simply a change in scale…. From the vantage of the senses, though, the change in scale amounted virtually to a change in kind: the new clocks were the first to make the progress of time available to the senses by way of a running report. As a form of language Tick, Tick, Tick provides an emblem for a new construction of time as series within series, concentric and cumulative, beginning with the small intervals clicked out at the clock’s core, and radiating outward to the markings on the dial, to encompass a whole system of measurement and calibration: ticks, seconds, minutes, hours, and (on calendrical clocks) days and years as well.[88]

We can here understand this as the entrance of a new primary metaphor for time; alongside, for instance, the ‘river of time.’ But there had never before been anything like this, though Huygens’ pendulum clock “imported a regularity underwritten by a law of nature,” the experience of time that it engendered was something which had never beforehand been found in nature—hence perhaps the fearful reactions of maids and Bushmen alike.[89] Galileo had used his own heartbeat, for instance, in the timing of his initial pendulum experiments.[90] He also harnessed the informal irregularity of songs to the same ends; but though Galileo envisaged the pendulum clock, such a thing had never before been experienced. What matters, here, is that this experiential pattern was regular and rapid enough to enter into the perceptual present:

The psychological present is a period of time during which experience is perceived rather than remembered. The psychological present usually lasts 2 or 3 seconds, with an upper limit of about 5 seconds, depending on the events involved.[91]

Moore provides an interactive example which may be helpful in grasping this point:

… beat out a rhythm on a table or hum one; for example, the rhythm of “I wanna hold your hand,” the Beatles tune. Notice that you perceive the rhythm as a gestalt that endures for more than the duration of one of its beats. Hearing/feeling the rhythm as a rhythm is not a matter of remembering the previous beat while you are experiencing the current beat. According to Fraisse, if the succession of sounds in a rhythmic structure is slowed down, the structure will disappear: “The rhythm is found to disappear when the interval between sounds is about 2 seconds.” This means that, in the context of Fraisse’s investigation, if the interval between sounds reaches about two seconds, successive beats are no longer occurring within the psychological present and therefore cannot be perceived as a rhythm.[92]

The perceptual present, therefore, sets the boundaries within which a rhythm can be perceived as a patterned whole. Note, moreover, that the duration of the perceptual present precisely aligns with the temporal metaphor here under consideration. We can see how Huygens’ chronometric advance could then have readily given rise to more than a simple quantitative shift in regularity and precision; it was instead such that the newly regular clockwork rhythm fell within the perceptual present. This meant, in other words, that rather than being perceived a series of events—that is, by memory or intellectual construction—the ticking of a clock was perceptible as a patterned whole: Tick, Tick, Tick.

Might this mysterious ticking noise, so startling then and yet second nature now, be the missing piece between Wolof and English—that which provides the sense of time as an “amorphous external construct”?[93] Of course, this metaphor is not in itself sufficient; it is only the first requirement. To constitute a primary metaphor requires “a direct experiential basis … which motivate[s] highly predictable sets of data.”[94] What is needed, in other words, is some coherence between this patterned whole and the rhythms of ordinary experience. Recall that Moore pointed us to ‘complex constructs including clocks and hourly wages.’ We have thus far investigated the former, finding that Huygensian chronometry provided a new primary metaphor for time, one in which time could be readily understood as a steady series of homogenous units. Now we might turn to the second aspect: that of hourly wages. Here we find a simple—and today, almost universal—realisation of the metaphorical understanding of time as money. Moreover, this key symbol provides a narrative that allows individuals to synchronise their actions with the demands of the economy. This set the stage for a new dynamic temporal order: the economic climate.

 

Conclusion

Clocks, of course, had been around well before Huygens and were already widely used. People were already familiar with church bells and other public clocks. This explains the “otherwise puzzlingly rapid diffusion of clocks and watches between 1660 and 1730.”[95] The difference is that with Huygens’ pendulum clock, a new metaphor for time emerged: Tick, Tick, Tick. This understanding framed time as a steady series of homogenous units; and moreover, as we see even more obviously in the numbers on a digital clock-face ‘ticking over,’ it rendered time as pure quantity. The idea, then, is that this alignment of time and money as ‘abstract units of measurement’ and ‘accounting tools.’ From this it was a simple step to, for instance, conduct a ‘time audit’—which is essentially what industrial pioneers like Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor were doing. People were further expected to turn the same lens upon their own lives, as most obviously in the ‘spirit of capitalism’ but also later as the increasingly rationalised economic environment rendered true by utility what was once held by faith. This entailed, for instance, the narrowing the sphere of reciprocity; and the maximising of economic relations with all that fell outside of it.[96] The idea is that this renders the other a formless ground, placing the emphasis instead on the object as figure: “capitalism amounts to the negation of reciprocity because it attributes value to things, not social relationships.”[97]

But more than that, the Industrial Revolution soon left the people of modernity far less tightly tethered to the seasons and annual photosynthetic cycle. Little surprise, then, that seasonal and religious festivals have since been hollowed out and replaced by sales and celebrations that better reflect the new consumer economy. Similarly, as people were tempted into cities to find work, the natural world and its rhythms were left further and further behind. Meanwhile, clock and schedule became more important for ensuring synchronisation within increasingly dense cities and with commercial activity taking place at ever-greater distances. To provide a stable framework for complex and long-distance synchronisation, however, clock time first had to be standardised and made reliable. But well before this, there an indirect with synchronisation the flow of movement and cues—working hours, inns, churches, markets, etc. Even in the countryside, Thoreau noted the onset of this clockwork-like synchronisation:

The startings and arrivals of the [train] cars are now 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.[98]

Eventually British railways began carrying standardised clock time into the provinces, all synchronised by “electrical impulses transmitted along the major rail networks.”[99] Clock time thus spread outwards as if Greenwich Observatory had become a pacemaker for all England. And indeed, with the successful calculation of longitude, it had in a sense become the centre of the world—ships of all stripes at sea thereafter reckoned their location by reference to Greenwich time. Everywhere people were “continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.”[100] And particularly in the United States, with the advent of the trans-continental railway, “to the degree they thought about it at all, most Americans came to understand standard clock-time as ‘Time’ itself.”[101] Here the Kronos myth is reversed; the child devours its father.

With the Industrial Revolution, and the labour to support it, moreover, the effective energy flow had rapidly increased. Coal processing allowed for the mass-production of iron and steel and steam engines made coal mining more efficient—and then in 1825, the first passenger train. Everywhere there was acceleration: production, transport, communication, etc. Of this new temporality, “the train was an apt symbol: fast, linear, unidirectional, and confident of its destination.”[102] Everywhere the world ran like clockwork, perhaps nowhere more so than the factories wherein men became mere appendages to machines. The rationalisation of labour was not only a matter of enlistment and propaganda but even turned to eye the labourers themselves. This reached a crescendo with Taylor’s principles of scientific management; the embodied movements of workers came under the purview of stopwatches and clipboards, with ideals mathematically determined and enlistment obtained by bonuses for efficiency. Meanwhile, as things continued to pick up pace, progress and efficiency became the new principles of the day, drawing further support from Darwinian notions of linear time and the mechanical world order taking form before their eyes:

Men who were born at the beginning of the [eighteenth] century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway.[103]

The effects of this acceleration on the environment are well known, it is clearer by the day that fossil fuels have been akin to Pandora’s box. Having opened it, we are now dependent on them; and yet if this keeps up then some catastrophe seems certain. Indeed, many catastrophes have already arisen; our focus on climate change is partly its easy symbolism, partly our anthropocentrism. As we noted at the outset, life comes with a primordial debt. And now it appears that our great hope has really entailed yet another mortgage on the future. But these aspects are well known, less obvious is the effect that this derangement has had on humanity. Jacques Ellul has captured in his The Technological Society, better than anywhere else of which I am aware, the existential and metaphysical impact of this fetishisation of the clock and cult of economic rationalism:

The first private clocks appeared in the sixteenth century. Thenceforward, time was an abstract measure separated from the traditional rhythms of life and nature. It became mere quantity. But since life is inseparable from time, life too was forced to submit to the new guiding principle. From then on, life itself was measured by the machine; its organic functions obeyed the mechanical beck and call of machinery. Time, which had been the measure of organic sequences, was broken and dissociated. Human life ceased to be an ensemble, a whole, and became a disconnected set of activities having no other bond than the fact that they were performed by the same individual. Mechanical abstraction and rigidity permeated the whole structure of being.[104]

 

 

 

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