“Since our Time is reduced to a Standard, and the Bullion of the Day minted out into Hours, the Industrious know how to employ every Piece of Time to a real Advantage in their different Professions.”
In my last post, I discussed how E.P. Thompson observed how the diffusion of timekeeping devices produced a greater sense of time, playing an important role in the efforts to better synchronize labor in early industrial capitalism. But clocks on every corner and watches in every pocket didn’t only increase the awareness of time, it also radically shifted people’s conception of time.
If work in the pre-industrial period is marked by the varied rhythms of different trades, work in an industrialized society is regimented and purpose-driven to a near obsessive degree. This is generally demonstrated by the two primary characteristics of “time” in mature industrial societies.
- A clear distinction between “work” and “life”.
- Time has to be put to use; it is offensive for the labour force to merely “pass the time”.
So how did this transition occur? The same way all change is effected: through strong discourse and the birth of a new cultural apparatus.
Schooling, literature, wage incentives were all working in unison to eradicate the rituals and customs that propped up pre-industrial irregularities in work patterns. Saint Monday, in particular, drew the ire of the nascent capitalist culture. Most skilled trades (shoemakers, tailors, potters, printing works, etc.) practiced the Saint Monday ritual of taking every Monday off, spending that time on “personal business.” The potteries in England, one of the first trades to experience an industrialized division of labor, were also one of the first to see Saint Monday fazed out of their trade.
“Machinery means discipline in industrial operations … machinery seems to lead to habits of calculation.”
Pioneering figures in work discipline like Josiah Wedgwood developed employee manuals, honed the art of factory workplace discipline, and promoted hourly-wages to incentivize routine and long work days. Task-labor, work contracted for one-off gigs, was effectively put to rest with the rise of wages. From the perspective of commercial institutions, this became and remains the modus operandi for professional life.
This shift in the perception of time, on one level is sociological and philosophical, but it is also something that was lived and experienced by generations in the early- to mid-1800’s. I think many of us know what these shifts in the perception of time mean, especially in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic’s interruption in our lives shows how strong the relationship between work, routine, and our perception of time is.
In losing normal work patterns, many of us have lost sense of time. I have friends dialing into daily conference calls on Saturday, completely unaware it’s the weekend. In these times, Friday doesn’t mean as much, and neither does Monday. Many of us have “free time” or “family time” in ways we haven’t since childhood. What do we do when most of our time isn’t rigorously dedicated to work?
E.P Thompson concludes his article by saying modern man might have to relearn what leisure and “free time” means – time that isn’t perpetually put to use. As an academic, he probably meant it theoretically – it’s an aspirational prescription for society like so much other academic writing. But alas, here we are in varying degrees of a lockdown. There’s no better time to think about what time means to us.
Another day with the beast,
