Commodification of time: Time as a measurement tool or as a tool of success?
"He put this engine into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life."
I think my obsession with time started quite early in my life, and my reliance on the productivity has been a big part of my life until I have lost all the sense of haste and ambition with life as the pandemic started. The pandemic not only made me release my cling in time and productivity, but it also enabled me to reflect on and think about a wider concept, the commodification of the time. I've always been left-leaning, so I've always advocated for shorter work weeks, time for leisure, and holidays. My studies also helped me deconstruct a lot of things to understand the structures above the individual and why everything we do is pretty much already determined. My wonderings started with questioning the invention of the clocks, and reflections on the era before the invention of mechanical tools of telling the time.
Society has only been ruled by the clock for the past two centuries, before that, you worked mostly as long as it was necessary, you ate food when you were hungry and you lay down when you were tired. In modern society, everything we do is controlled by the pace of the clock from the moment we get up. The social manipulation of time and temporality is a fundamental feature of classical capitalism. As soon as the extraction of surplus labour-time becomes fundamental to the replication of class relations, then the question of what time is, who measures it, and how temporality is to be understood moves to the forefront of analysis. Time is not simply given; it is socially constructed and perpetually subject to reconstruction. The notion of time in neoliberalism is a type of current currency that is also equally distributed to every human walking on earth, symbolically known as the great equalizer. Like money, time can be saved, wasted, and even invested.
Babylonians were the first ones to divide the day into 12 hours. An idea that was reused by the Greeks and the Romans, then medieval societies made sure that time coincided with prayers. The life of medieval people was in fact regulated by the church. Time as a regulating force naturally became a key characteristic of Western societies. The clock systems served to establish set working days to develop the transportation sector, to discover the new world, to conquer space, or to make sure that you're exactly five minutes late to your tinder date so that you look like such a busy, independent person. Clocks in general became symbols of modernity, order and therefore power. Researcher, Giordano Nanni said, every town had its clock steeple as a symbol of its status and its modernity and in other words, its power. French businessman and a respected figure in the advertising industry Jacques Seguela claims that if you don’t own a Rolex watch by the age of 50, you have failed in life. This basic framework of inductive reasoning explained by him is a value attribution sustained only by the possesion of a luxury wrist watch. The implication here is that the traditionally the providing, career-driven heterosexual men’s watch is an essential to success, and without it, you simply fail in life. From an historical perspective, dating back to Medieval ages where society is under the regulation of the church, the church bells were a way of telling the time. It's naive to see this practice of bells in such a way, it was also the church saying the society they’re under the eyes of God, so it was a surveillance that kept the peasants from rebelling against. It was truly an exerted control over society to maintain power imbalance. Time as a regulating force became a key characteristic for the Western societies. Greenwich in London became the time zero, the west and the east decided by their positions on the map according to Greenwich and they either became GMT+ or GMT-. In other words, the United Kingdom became the center of the world, even physically on the world map. The clock system of the UK served to establish working days and shifts, to set boundaries and basically to control the world over the labour time. Clocks simply became the sign of modernity, the order and therefore the power. Time therefore became politically powerful.
After the French Revolution, France changed their calendar to republican calendar, and in that aimed to demolish the Catholic Church’s power over governance of France and claimed a secular way of administration of the public. Moreover, during the colonial expansion of the Western powers, the political aspect of the management of the time became evermore relevant. Interrupting the cycles of indigenous and local seasons and calendars, and replacing them with the colonizers' rituals and routines along with a new calendar for counting the days, month and years that heavens were visibly Christianised and that idle hands were put to productive work. Missionaries, settlers and colonial officials adopted different means while also pursuing different ends in their attempt to reform the world and its inhabitants. Those with Calvinist theology promoted the character forming value of time discipline and almost went back to medieval practices where the bells marked out the day. Western time calendars and seasons had impacted their communities rituals and coalition. We can suppose that the exploitation of indigenous colonized people and the destruction of their mode of living was inspired by the exploitation of workers in Western industries. However, Indigenous people had different notions for time, mostly based on the positions of the sun, moon and the stars. Ideas that demarcated days, divisions of the year and seasons largely in different ways than either the modernist or the religion based ways. It was partly by interrupting the cycles of Indigenous' local seasons and calendars, and replacing them by the colonizers’ rituals and routines, along with a new system of counting the days. This heathen was to be described as Christianized in this whole attempt to reform the world, and its habitants. Changing this way of living in the colonized lands from the Aborigines of Victoria to the variety of people in Southern/Central Africa, also aimed to decrease their value in the colonial economy. Protestant missions particularly, promoted the character-forming value of time discipline and almost went back to the medieval practices where the bells marked out which part of the day we are in.
In his 1975 landmark book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault examined how we have transferred from a society where power comes from the sovereign, the emperor, to a society where power is exerted through a form of internalized discipline where we discipline each other without the necessity of written down rules. The concept of time is an essential component in this type of society, but the question arises from here is to really find out who really benefits from that value created by the internalized systems. One could simply claim the time serves to themselves as it enhances the productivity and the value of the time given, however, to better understand the world, one must detach themselves from this individualistic approach towards life, and look at the structures that organize and regulate people. From the traditionalist meritocratic approach, it could be simply suggested that if you spend your time wisely, it would serve you, and basically you’d have more success. However, this approach would not go further than limiting the world that is bigger than you to simply you and your individual life.
Time in that matter, and the way of controlling the time is purely a political act that is served to the ruling class. Haste is a proof of diabolical ambition that is often normalized in the West, so normalized that it is often neglected to question or doubt. Time management self-help books, productivity crash courses that teaches you how to spend your time wisely in an 8 hour online course and all the other capitalist time-obsessed practices arose from the urge to discipline: to rule and commodify.
Giordano Nanni, The colonization of time, 2012
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975.
David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything, 2021.