Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the New America by Richard Harvey Brown

Author:Richard Harvey Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2005-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

TEMPORALITY AND THE EXPANSION OF CORPORATE CAPITALISM

Modern time, as Louis Mumford observed, is produced by “The clock, a piece of power-machinery whose product is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences" (1963, 15). The introduction of clock time responded to and encouraged the abstract coordination of diverse habits, practices, and ideas into coinciding abstract spaces. Such coordination began in the medieval European monasteries and spread from the fourteenth century across Europe and later the world, enabling far-flung persons and objects to move and be moved in synchronic organization. Man and machine became more integrated through clock time and then through time scheduling and accounting. Increasingly, the clock and not nature served to order one’s daily routine. With the predictability of timekeeping, punctuality and efficiency became paramount social values. Timekeeping synchronized individuals with machines and whole communities with industries. It became imperative to be on time and on schedule as modern society adapted to the quickstep of the clock (Luke 2003; see also Kern 1983; Bartky 2000; Lan-des 2000).

The clock released time accounting from nature (the sundial) and enabled the multiplication of ever-finer distinctions of sequence. Now the runner would always be second, even though he had lost the race by only 3/100ths of a second. In the emerging positivist habitus, time could be both measured and embodied in persons, and because measurements and persons were embedded in social organizations, the new temporality was real and meaningful (Young 1988). Thus Benjamin Franklin’s expression, “Time is money,” was more than metaphoric since in the emerging capitalist world to save time or to work faster was to save money or make more of it. The factory system took work out of the home and placed it in a space especially organized for profit-efficient production. The time flows of industry were regulated by bells and whistles, timekeepers, and punch clocks. A secular discipline of labor replaced the religiously governed rhythms of an earlier agrarian life, despite resistance by both religious authorities and an emerging working class. The time discipline of Catholic monasteries was extended to the Protestant world of work.

Competition compels capitalists to accelerate processes of accumulation, whether these be in production, marketing, or consumption. The top speed of travel or transport in George Washington’s day was that of a horse at gallop. But open space was already rapidly collapsing into regulated time in 1875, when America’s transcontinental railroads instituted regulations to synchronize their hauling services. “Human pregnancies still lasted nine months, but the tempo of almost everything else in life was speeded, [and] the span was contracted" (Mumford 1963, 197). Plantations of the American South also became industrialized with the imposition of time consciousness and the regulation of slave labor by the clock, which increased productivity substantially after 1830 until 1865 (Smith 1997; Eltis 1987). The adoption of clock time not only increased profits for slave owners, but also facilitated greater discipline and control over slaves.

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