The modern era is fundamentally defined by the standardization of time. As Lewis Mumford argued, “The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the industrial age.” Pre-modern time is essentially qualitative, and only secondarily quantitative: it is the time of the seasons and the stars, holy days and festivals, actions, occasions and events. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz remarked about the Balinese system of time cycles, “They don’t tell you what time it is; they tell you what kind of time it is” (The Interpretation of Cultures). This observation might be generalized.
Traditional timekeeping is not regulated by abstract number but imbued with meaning and pulsing with rhythm. It is only at a relatively late date, with the invention of the precision chronometer, that time is cut into homogenous units and ordered into a linear flow. This development marks a momentous break in human history. To quote Mumford again: “By its essential nature, [the clock] dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and night steadily change, but a slight journey from East to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign: while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood and action, and in the longer span of days, time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it” (Technics and Civilization).

The recovery of an “authentic” understanding of time—grounded in the specific dynamics of human existence—may be considered one of the major projects of twentieth century philosophy and literature. From Husserl’s investigations of internal time consciousness and Heidegger’s elaboration of time as the horizon of Being, to Proust’s researches in memory and Freud’s analysis of the timeless unconscious, the mechanical march of the clock is displaced in favor of a more intricate, discontinuous, and multilayered temporality. Franz Kafka was especially sensitive to the disjunction between what he called the two clocks, the world of inner time—for him, running at an almost unbearable rhythm—and the regular order of seconds, minutes and hours. “Breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life. The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner” (Diaries 16 January 1922). Incidentally, estrangement from clocks is one of the more telltale signs of madness. Schizophrenics often evince a perturbed relation with timepieces, and clock drawing is a standard psychiatric test of mental impairment. In the words of one patient: “Am I a clock myself? […] I tell myself over and over that it is a clock, but it does not quite fit together, the hands, the face, and that it is running. It gives a particular impression. It is as if it had disassembled itself, but it is all together. […] Now it is here, then it jumps away, so to speak, and turns like that. Is it a different hand every time? Maybe there is someone standing behind the wall and always slipping in a new hand, each time into another place. I must say this clock is not running. It jumps and changes place” (quoted in Boss and Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars).

Mathematical time intimately belongs to conditions of capitalism. According to the old saying, “time is money”; we can add that the two are alike in that they are both abstract, fungible quantities, related fundamentally to labor. If philosophy has submitted clock time to a critique based on a renewed understanding of human subjectivity, Marxist criticism has targeted the socioeconomic dimensions of the “tyranny of the clock”: the regimented time of productive labor and programmed leisure. The revolution will not only change the world—it will (and must) also change time. To this effect, Walter Benjamin reports in his Theses on the Philosophy of History that the July revolutionaries shot the dials off the clocks. “The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. […] During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris.”

Mark Formanek’s performance sculpture Standard Time crystallizes the relationship between labor, technology and temporality. A large wooden ‘digital clock’ is assembled and reassembled by a team of workers in order to display the correct time; this involves 1611 changes over a 24-hour period. The piece no doubt offers an entertaining and even suspenseful spectacle—will the workers manage to change the time ‘on time’? More profoundly, Standard Time involves what I consider to be a triple irony. First, it creates an image of time as the product of old-fashioned material labor. This work-intensive process should be juxtaposed to that of the artist himself, who as the creator of the concept, represents the ascendance in Western economies of immaterial (intellectual) labor. Second, in its simulation of the digital through the means of handicraft and carpentry, there is an obvious retrograde movement: to paraphrase Alexandre Koyré, we move from the modern “universe of precision” to the antique “world of more-or-less.” Invoking the digital language of exactitude, Formanek proposes a loosely accurate and technically clumsy time device. Third, the artwork literally transforms clock time into the free leisure (revolutionary utopia) of artistic time. What better way to waste time than through this gratuitous, unproductive, and exaggerated labor of marking its passage? I am reminded here of a song from an old Soviet cartoon, the refrain of which goes: “We are wasting time all the time all the time/ We are wasting time all the time…”