The Universal Clock

So far computing technologies have been identified as technologies that map the world through abstracted representational structures. Computers are technologies that encode the physical into abstraction and that manipulate the world through algorithmic and computational logic. However, in our expanded definition of computation we have seen how human and machine processing can also be considered as computational. Taken in isolation these observations may initially seem mundane, that computers relate to the world through a computational logic seems almost self-explanatory. What this section will identify is that the representational logic of computation acts outwardly to restructure the understanding of the world in which it exists and that this restructuring produces a convergence of representation and of being, of the phenomena and the abstract. As such ‘being’ – the phenomenon in the real domain increasingly becomes constituted through the optical strategy of “being represented” within an abstract structure of computation, and so the representation increasingly comes to be conflated with phenomena itself. The first technology that we will discuss – time – is one that predates any modern sense of computation. However, time is a computational structure within the expanded definition through which we have examined it. People have measured time, it can safely be assumed, in some shape or form relative to varying needs since the beginning of humanity28_{. The rise of the sun, its zenith and its fall has marked the diurnal cycle of the}

earth around its axis. The change in this pattern from winter solstice through equinox to summer solstice and back to equinox has marked the annual trip of the earth around its closest star. For much of humanity’s history, and even today for many people and in

28 _{It is debated, in particular in primatology amongst other zoological sciences, that animals in}

many situations, this system of measurement has been a sufficient tool for marking time – as a framework for the organisation of activities and as a method for marking the change in or duration of various processes. Beyond the external clock of the sun remote and local techniques were used to divide these cycles further, water clocks, hour glasses, candles and other techniques allowed duration to be marked and activities coordinated in shorter intervals or in the absence of the sun’s light.

As people moved in great numbers to cities during Britain’s industrial revolution, and as trains ferried them between and amongst these cities, from their homes and to their workplaces, an agreed system of time was required such that large groups of people could participate in, coordinate and measure a wide range or disparate activities. It would seem obvious then, that “knowing the time” would become a central requirement for modern living. However, on closer inspection we see that knowing the time, i.e. the position of a person on the surface of the earth relative to the earth’s rotation about its axis itself is unimportant, instead it is knowing and conforming to a point within an agreed system of time that matters. “Time” comes to be represented by the clock standard time a universal abstraction that approximates the earth’s rotation to a resolution of twenty- four hours divided by wavering boundaries of political borders. The earliest standardisation of time was just such a practical application and was implemented across Great Britain by British Railways in 1847. From this point on, local time across Great Britain, as in time of day, was no longer connected to the astrological time of day, i.e. midday being the point of the sun’s zenith, but rather controlled by the time stated at Greenwich Observatory. With the advent of the 1884 Meridian Conference in Washington D.C, the time at Greenwich Observatory became the universal standard around the globe giving rise to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and later Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary standard by which time and timekeeping are regulated globally today.

This standardisation of time, thus far, gives little indication that its importance extends beyond the organisation of transport systems and coordination of activities. However, it is possible to suggest that time has become one of the dominant structuring architectures of contemporary society. Mumford, in his wide-ranging discussion of technics suggests this point, stating, ‘The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous’ (1934, 14). Mumford’s proposition resonates with the later work of Totaro and Ninno, which we saw in Section 3.4, in suggesting that the logic of computation is structured around thinking through abstract representations and their structure rather than related to the existence of strictly computing machines. As such the existence of computational logic and the existence of computing machines act together to increasingly create the possibilities for each other, a point which will be explored in more detail in Section 4.3. Mumford continues that, ‘In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technics: and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire’ (1934, 15). Mumford’s suggestion, made in the early twentieth century, it can be argued still holds true today. At the forefront of advanced computation and networking technologies the clock, and the ability to perform operations in limited clock time is the key criterion of performance. Meanwhile at the forefront of the development of the practices and process of measurement, which we explored earlier, the measurement of

time sits as the fundamental unit from which the definition of all other physical units of the SI systems are defined29 _{(Consultative Committees of the CIPM 2017).}

More important in the context of this research than the clock’s ubiquity, is the extent to which it is representative of the computational mode of organisation structured around the abstract representation of time. A universal standardised time is in fact a form of network architecture. It is an invisible linkage that structures the action of disparate nodes across real and abstract space. “Knowing the time” is not important – but rather it is coordinating a shared understanding of the time that becomes critical. This reorganisation of understanding towards the universal is central to functioning of representation (as we will see throughout this chapter and as will be explored in greater detail in, Section 4.3). At the same time, it links back to the mercantile need for coordination of phenomena across distance that was discussed in Chapter 2. In this way the coordination required for a functional abstract representation of time is inseparable from the requirement that individual perception of time becomes reconceived through the shared representation. At a practical level this structuring is easy to see across almost all levels of society, in the work place the company clock requires employee’s presence between certain hours, and certain tasks must be achieved before particular deadlines, whilst the universal clock determines whether a hotel booking or financial transaction was carried out before or after a competing transaction. This structuring extends out of the work place too, where an allotted time is granted for eating, bookings are made for evening meals and the bars close to allow a designated number of hours before the working day restarts at the same time one day later in the calendar’s progression.

Beyond the ordering of tasks in the sequence of universal clock time, universal time also imbues value on processes and practices. The link between clock time and value production is central to the industrial mode of capitalist production (Thompson 1967). The production of new material and immaterial value is shaped around the hands of the clock. How much time can be provided and how much time can be spent in the production of such values forms the basis of monetary value of many services. Meanwhile disparate value is placed on the time of various activities and those of various workers – time thus acts as a hierarchal structuring network rather than simply a coordinating one. As such new forms of knowledge production and practice become ‘entimed’ (Hörning et al 1999, 294), their value being inherently fixed to the time they take to produce or consume. Time, measured to the second, the millisecond and the nanosecond becomes an accountable and exchangeable quantity.

Time, for most humans, remains linked to the observance of astronomical movements of days and years, and to the duration of human lives, thus there remains a limit on the availability of total time. Time unlike other immaterial commodities of value (discussed further in Section 4.2.3) cannot be generated infinitely and this limit creates a scarcity. The scarcity of the total thus requires smaller and smaller division of time in order to create increasing measures of value in the productive logic of capitalist expansion (Solnit 2003, 15). Whilst more time, in the astronomical sense, cannot be created more abstract units of time can. This decrease in size, the measurement of time at quantum resolution, brings with it an increase in speed that is central to what has been termed capitalism’s “accelerationism” (Noys 2010, 5). As time is measured in ever smaller subdivisions so too increases the potential for creating value within subdivided limits of scarcity that a fixed conception of time, anchored in the world of human biology and perception allows. This acceleration and subdivision move time as abstract further away from the perception

of time in human perceivable and experienced scales towards the prosthetic senses of technical apparatus.

Clock time, represented as a unilinear subdivided series of instances can be suggested as changing the way in which we relate to the world, by universalising experience as a form of representation within an external abstract structure. In this way the clock is a computational technology, an abstract representation of the form we have described. The unilinearity and regularity of the clock’s abstraction places clock time at odds with both our individual perception of time (Allan 1979) and with many traditional conceptions of time that were central to many of the main religious and pagan traditions outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In many such traditions time was viewed with varied topologies and trajectories including circular, spiral and helical. Time, however, throughout other pre-computing historical conceptions had also been viewed as unilinear, St. Augustine, whose early conception is central to western Judaeo-Christian, thought of time as mutable, transitory and irreversible (Hausheer 1937). Indeed, many traditions that use non-linear trajectories of time also allow for an element of linearity, the spiral, for example, includes a linear function describing the decreasing radius towards or away from the centre and the helix along its axis. This linearity is evidenced through the recording of history on a linear scale inside of the non-linear timelines of mythologies, astronomy or natural cycles.

Regardless of the particular conception, time flowed in some form that was used to make meaning and to structure activity as human action. With universal clock time the agreed abstract measure becomes the primary structuring apparatus. Mumford sums up the changed relationship between time and the universal clock:

The clock is 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: 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 day, time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. (1934, 15)

What is different in the technological time of the clock is the introduction of a universal unit of measure, time no longer as perception – or chronoception - but as an explicit framework external to the individual.

The relationship of time to perception is deeply bound up with theories of affect and sensation, memory and identity (and in theoretical physics with theories of space). Whilst Locke (2012) and Kant (1922), amongst others, required transcendence from the self to allow a universal understanding of time, Husserl (1991) and later phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty (2004) position time’s passage as existence only in the immediate sense perception, on the other hand Heidegger’s (1996) Dasein is as part of a world that includes time, neither inside of or without the individual. In each case, time is perceived internally as experience. With universal clock time the locus of this experience is relocated to an external and objective measurement system. This movement alters and speeds up our perception of time itself (McLoughlin 2012) (Solnit 2003). Time perception as secondary to clock time in this way continually anchors our perception to the universal abstract representation and away from the subjective experience. This changed perception challenges the notion of a universal nature that is “discovered” by the clock –

a realist measurement interpretation of an unchanging nature – instead it can be suggested that the clock produces the concept of time as a linear and steady process. This altered hierarchy between representation and perception is one example of the convergence between being and representation the mechanism for which we will examine in Section 4.3, however, before doing so it is necessary to look at other examples of the way that our understanding of experience is being reshaped through the abstract representations of computation.