A Sideways Look at Time

Ordinary human relationships are suffused with time as power—who doesn’t know that pert, delicious smugness of being first out of bed? To keep someone waiting is, in the West, an act of rudeness: time is used as an index of power. In language, the connection is explicit, waiters are those who wait, whose time is at another’s disposal. Attendants (from the French attendre, also to wait) are those whose time is on pause for someone else. Those who are—or think they are—important will not wait in lines or queues, for they are for the powerless. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, to take control of his stranded situation, makes calendars and, in a famous act of power, finds a servant to dance to the music of his time, whom Crusoe christens with his own calendar: Man Friday.

No one wants to be “the last to know” any news and, by contrast, the frequency of news is indexed to status so VIPs must often be updated. A pedestrian may stop for a hearse, marking his respect for the dead with a special pause. To interrupt your own time, thus, is to offer respect; to interrupt someone else is disrespectful, as children are taught. But there is a power differential in the pecking order of butting-in, which is both age- and sex-related. Children, of course, of low status, can be interrupted. Many studies find that men overwhelmingly interrupt women, though they rarely interrupt each other, illustrating how interruptions are not inherent to men’s speech-patterns but rather signal social power. One such study, from 1975, is reported in Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. A further, related study in 1980 showed that parents were far more likely to interrupt their daughters than their sons.

On a far larger scale, time is aligned with power, so rulers, governments and priesthoods have always used it to create or confirm their authority. From Druids, Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory to the legions of Jesuit missionaries, from Chinese mandarins, British colonialists and Stalin to the authors of the French Revolution, the calendar is an ideological, political and religious weapon. Elias Canetti said that the regulation of time is the primary attribute of all government. Potentates, princes and priests, all hypnotized by hopes of hegemony, have always stood on the borders of space and looked at time—they have come, they have seen, they have conquered—for time is a kingdom, a power and a glory.

A Druid priest, on first miscalculating the Solstice, would have been laughed out of henge. Their power—assuming there actually was such a thing as a Druid priesthood—derived from their predictions of time, for it is but a skip between secretly knowing when something will happen and appearing to have caused it. Druid priests used time to authenticate their power, “making” the sun rise over a certain part of the stone circles and thus seeming to control time and season.

Priests, as far back as history considers, have made the control of time their preserve. Mayan priests of Central America erected famous monuments to the passage of time; G.J. Whitrow writes that “of all ancient peoples, the Mayan priests developed the most elaborate and accurate astronomical calendar, and thereby gained enormous influence over the masses.” In Babylonia, the priest-king performed the same ceremonies on earth as their god performed in the sky: the timing of the priest’s ritual had to chime with the god’s. Worldwide, shamanistic rainmakers, shaking pebbles to whip up a naughty little shower, or hurling boulders for a torrential downpour, would have earned little kudos unless they could control not only the fact of rain, but also the time the rains came. In the Old Testament, when Joshua wanted to demonstrate power, he made the sun and moon stay still, while Isaiah moved the sun back ten “steps” on the dial.

At the 664 Synod of Whitby, the date for Easter was much discussed—a seemingly trivial but actually potent point. The question was whether Easter should be dated according to the Celtic Church of Britain or according to that of Rome. It chose the Roman, thereafter allying itself to the power and authority that was the Roman church.

The calendar has long been used as a source of power. The traditional calendar on Simbo in the Solomon Islands is a tally of moons, called the pepapopu—a tipplish word, a name to conjure with—for, at least magical, at most divine, calendar-knowledge was considered so powerful that when the tally was first revealed to a mythic calendar-keeper, he was killed by jealous rivals. The human calendar-keeper was thought to control the movement of time itself. In many societies, priestly power stemmed from the priests’ timing functions, as in the Nigerian Ibo village described by Chinua Achebe, in Arrow of God. These included identifying the moment of the new moon, deciding when the pumpkin festival should take place and announcing the time for the yam harvest. Achebe describes how, as a result of white colonialism, the traditional god fell silent—as did the priest. With no call to harvest, the people began to starve.

The Romans used the Egyptian “Wandering Calendar” which had 365 days, but which, every four years, had moved a day ahead of the seasons, causing, according to gruff Romans, administrative havoc. Julius Caesar in 46 B.C.E. added an extra day every fourth year to correct it, but carpe diem wasn’t good enough. Seize a day, seize a month. Caesar month. Seizing symbolic power over time, the Roman senate renamed a month in honor of Julius and then one in honor of Augustus, so July and August have ever since blazed their sunny immortality down a trail of summer years.

But it wasn’t quite so easy; with a leap year day, the calendar started losing 0.0078 days a year against the solar year. In March 1582, Pope Gregory XIII sat down and worked out how to rid the calendar of a pesky leap year too many, ensuring no one would need to adjust their set again for 3,000 years. He cancelled ten days forthwith, to redress accumulated errors, so the day after the 4th of October would be the 15th. Ticketyboo. And poked his quill back in the ink. Flanders and some parts of Belgium missed Christmas, as they didn’t make the change until December 21st, which was then followed by January 1st. But altering the calendar is an act of almighty power. Watch one reaction. The English, more gloriously—and disastrously—emotional than they ever admit, threw a complete tantrum. The Pope, of course, was a Catholic and had got his papal paws on the calendar of Reformation England. Protestants protested. The English refused to accept the Gregorian calendar until 1752, when, despite nearly two centuries’ notice, they still seemed to come upon it all unawares. Eleven days were disappeared in September 1752 and there were riots, as Hogarth depicted: people thought that they were losing eleven days of their lives and of their wages. In 1873 and 1875, Japan and Egypt adopted the Gregorian calendar, the first almost-universal calendar the world has known.

In the struggle for world domination between Christianity and the Mithraic mysteries, the treatment of Oceanos, the “stream of time,” was interesting. Oceanos once had a proud position in iconography, producing Mithras from his waters of time. After Christianity won the battle, the image changed subtly but eloquently; Oceanos is pictured at the feet of Christ, not giving rise to Christ as he had to Mithras, but subdued by Christ. Time was crushed by Christianity, as it was to be over and over again.

Anno Domini was invented in 525 by Dionysius Exiguous—or Dennis the Small—a small step for Dennis, but a big step for the power-hungry Church, for this, the first slab of global time, was laid in Christian stone. Some five years later came a hugely influential and novel attitude to time, the Rule of Saint Benedict.

Night. Sin-black, sixth-century night was colonized by this Rule, into a white order of time, bells rang through the nights and days proclaiming the hours from Lauds at roughly three-thirty A.M. to Compline at roughly eight P.M. The first “alarm” clocks rang a bell (a cloche, hence the word clock) to get the monks out of bed, and thereafter came centuries of sleep frightened out of sleep’s wits. Churches and monasteries began to divide the day and diminish the night, colonizing “Tempus Nullius.” From keeping watch at night to the watches and clocks so beloved of Christianity: wake, watch and pray were the watchwords of the Church. (In the so-named Apostle clocks, the apostles represented the hours and when twelve o’clock struck, the twelve apostles trooped past the figure of Christ, the “keeper of time.”) Christianity sought power over time itself.

There were daily, weekly and yearly timetables for prayer, work and sleep, for bathing, bloodletting and mattress-filling. This coercive time-discipline exerted a power over human nature to prevent it tripping away its days in play: idleness, that impish, happy spirit, was decreed “the enemy of the soul.” The monasteries represented time moving with the rhythm of a machine. The Christian church continued its taming of time, charting, fencing, bounding its wilderness, into the Offices of hours and from the twelfth century onward, churches erected belfries and campaniles. (Christian spiritualists had clockwork visions: in 1334, Heinrich Süse, a German spiritualist, had a vision of Christ as an elaborate clock.)

Public clocks began to appear, and from around 1345 people gradually began to use hours divided into minutes, and minutes divided into seconds. (The treatment of time parallels the treatment of land and it is fascinating that in this period which began measuring the moment, space became tightly measured with the use of perspective in art. Before the fourteenth century, artists painted things as they were known to be over time, not things as they appeared at one single given moment. With perspective, though, the moment becomes fixed.)

Not content with exerting power over its own believers, from the early Middle Ages, missioneering Christianity attempted to impose its rhythm of feast days and work days worldwide, using clockwork as a sign of spiritual potency. In Spain’s Reconquista, Muslims were forced to celebrate Christian feasts in Castile, resulting in the rebellion of 1264. Matteo Ricci, Jesuit missionary to China in the 1580s, used clocks to gain entrance to the emperor’s court, for his calendar was more accurate than theirs and his clockwork remarkable; his “self-ringing bells” fascinated the Chinese and, in this quasi-universal language of time and power, saying “my timekeeping’s better than yours” means “my god’s more powerful than yours.” For this was the period when God-the-Clockmaker was the apex of spiritual imagery and if his work was clockwork then the workings of clocks represented the workings of the very mind of God.

Pre-colonialism, the Tewa peoples of New Mexico had a calendar of rituals carried out during the year, such as the rites of the solstice, for instance, or of “bringing the buds to life.” After the Spanish invasion, the Catholic church specifically targeted the calendar as a locus of power and suppressed the timing of indigenous religious activities, while promoting the timing of the Christian year, in a pattern which was repeated across the world.

St. Kilda, a hundred-odd miles west of Scotland, has been called “the last and outmaist isle” of Britain. An indigenous culture thrived there for hundreds of years, but it was brought to its knees, literally and figuratively, by the time of the Christian church, most particularly in the grim Sabbatarianism of nineteenth-century missionaries, the Reverend John Mackay above all. Mackay (who owned the only watch on the island) stayed twenty-four years and effectively banned work—the fishing or fowling on which the islanders depended for their very survival—from Saturday to Monday and frequently on Tuesday and Wednesday as well, with devastating results.

When missionaries arrived among the Algonquin peoples of North America, the Algonquin called clock-time “Captain Clock,” because it seemed to command every act for the Christians. (In Gulliver’s Travels, too, the Lilliputians observed that Gulliver’s God was his watch.) Addressing a Peruvian congregation, a contemporary Texan missionary declares that a meeting will take place “At ten o’clock, punto, ten” on the dot of white Christian time. Missionaries, past and present, have insisted on dictating the time-use of those they would convert: the schedulization of time in mission schools, the disciplined timetables and new rules of time. Richard Gott, an expert on Jesuit history, says:

Religious orders were very rigid with respect to time. Jesuits brought time to other peoples, they put belfries in and rang bells which was completely unknown. Jesuits managed to corral people in without trouble—they seemed willing to be dragged in to Western time and the way days were ordered.

Time, a territory once wild, was tamed by Christianity: so people were corralled in, and dragged into a time enclosed and fenced as surely as land in Britain was by the enclosure acts. When the Tikopia people of Polynesia converted to Christianity in 1928, they still lived in their “own” time, celebrating a ritual cycle, a “circulation of sacredness in the course of a round of ceremonies,” as anthropologist Raymond Firth describes it. By 1956, the ritual cycle was abandoned and all the circularity, the “cycles,” “circulations,” “courses,” and “rounds,” were gone, enclosed by the conquering, linear fences of the more powerful Christian time.

This still happens today. When I was in Thailand, a Karen woman at a Catholic mission station was as keen to learn some English as I was to learn some Karen, and she drew two pictures of things for which she lacked words. One was a picture of a cross, the other the dial of a clock face. These were the two powerful symbols of what the mission meant for her: the coming of Christianity and the Clock. Meeting representatives of the Guarani-Kaiowa Indians from Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil, it is clear that their sense of a calendar is significant and sad. As so often the treatment of land reflects the treatment of time, their land is being stolen by cattle ranchers for burger chains and their calendar stolen by Western missionaries, for the burgerization of their time.

New religions have invaded our villages. It’s cultural extermination; they say our rituals are of the devil. Because of them we started to follow the white calendar and now we’re sad we changed to the Western calendar because it means we’re living in the modern world. Before then a year was a very long time for us.

A gibbet, a drawbridge, flags and turrets and oil drums. Made of scrap metal, wit and anarchy, place of white cider and Attitude. Welcome to Fort Trollheim, a “Hill Fort” built (and destroyed) in the mid-1990s. Trollheim, on the site of the road protest at Fairmile in Devon, England, was one of the most spectacular creations of the British direct-action movement. And it had its manifesto:

This is the Independent Free State of Trollheim. We declare that as a Free State we have no allegiance to the United Kingdom and its environs, except Essex, Glasgow, Brixton, parts of Hackney and a few small pockets of Devon. We do not recognise the government or monarchy’s authority over us, except giros and legal aid. . . . We do not recognise history, patriarchy, matriarchy, politics, communists, fascists or lollipop men/ladies. . . . We have a hierarchy based on dog worship. Our currency is to be based on the quag barter system. We do not recognise the Gregorian calendar: by doing so this day shall be known as One . . . Be afraid, be afraid all ye that hear. Respect this State.

To choose your calendar is to choose your politics, for politically active Trolls at Trollheim, just as it was for the French Revolutionaries. The relationship of time with political power is so profound that Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine (1967), writes that the first evidence of fascination with time, through astrology, “coincided with the very birth of kingship.”

In C.E. 807, an embassy from Haroun al Rashid to Charlemagne’s court took a waterclock, to the murmuring admiration of the courtiers. Medieval dukes and princes flaunted mechanical clocks, expensive and therefore prestigious, but also hinting at that ancient power; those who measure the hour hold sway over time itself.

In 1370, Charles V of France gave an order that all clocks were to be set by the magnificent clock in his palace; he was the ruler of lands and now he would be ruler of time. (This clock was severely damaged in the French Revolution—articulate vandalism this, to attack such a symbol of aristocratic domination.)

The prestige—and power—of early clocks is illustrated in a story from Prague where there is a famous astronomical clock, built in the early fifteenth century. Mechanical figures, including Christ and the apostles, and Death, Greed, Vanity and a Turk, were added later by a brilliant clock technician, making the clock a wonderful—and unique—creation. So pleased was the Town Council that in appreciation of his work, they ordered that he be blinded so that he could not make a similar clock for anyone else. In retaliation, the blind and furious man broke the clock and it stayed unmended until the mid-sixteenth century.

To teach someone a different clock and calendar is one of the most subtle but most profound aspects of imperialist power—colonialism of the mind. When ancient China had colonized some new region, the phrase they used to describe this act was at once sinister and telling—the people of the new territory had “received the calendar.” For Chinese emperors, the Mandate of Heaven involved a “stewardship” of time; the ruler, identified as a paramount sign of the times, was responsible for time. When a new dynasty came to power it altered the calendar of the previous dynasty and the start of a new reign was dated as the first day of the following new year, thus the new emperor ritually regenerated time itself. In our age, “President” George W. Bush’s regime launched the “Project for the New American Century” and revealed a similarly stealthy and nasty will to power. Insisting that a new time (be it date, year or century) belongs to you is an act of invisible colonialism: the Bush coterie deliberately linked its empire-building foreign policy with the power of time. In Turkemenistan, meanwhile, President Saparmurat Niyazov, who names himself Turkmenbashi, is nothing if not an arrogant despot, and as other power-wielders do, he has welded time to his rule. January is now called “Turkmenbashi,” after himself, and April is called Gurbansoltan, after his mother.

Just as the Romans counted the years ab urbe condita (from the founding of the city), tying calendar-time to their own prestige, so in the French Revolution, 1792 was designated Year One. Power had changed hands so time must change hands and any association with the church, shaper of the calendar for hundreds of years, was thrown out. Time past was to be guillotined from time present.

There were to be ten-day weeks, each day of ten hours divided into a hundred minutes starting on the first day of the Republican Era: September 22, 1792, the new New Year’s Day. “Time,” said the reformers, “is opening a new history book.” Between 1791 and 1794, festivals were instituted by law. The days were renamed, Primidi, Duodi, and so on, and the months were renamed to accord with the seasons; Vendemiaire was September, October was Brumaire, followed by Frimaire, Nivose, Pluviose, Ventose , Germinal, Floreal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. (They were translated into English like a parade of the twelve dwarfs as Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy, Slippy, Drippy, Nippy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Wheaty, Heaty, Sweety.) Walter Benjamin noted that in the July revolution “the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris”: revolt against the clock.

Zion Ward, the nineteenth-century “messiah,” instructed his disciples to count the years from the date of his “illumination”—1826—which he called the “first year, new date.” “In the South,” said one commentator, writing of the American Civil War, “the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it.” When Mussolini came to power in October 1922, a new calendar was introduced in Italy, marked “Era Fascista.” Ezra Pound wrote a calendar in the spring of that same year which supposedly marked the end of the Christian era and the beginning of the “YEAR 1 p.s.U.”—in other words Year One, post scriptum Ulixix, in homage to Joyce.

Britain “ruled the waves” in the days of empire and through the oceans had power over vast parts of the world. How? Through clocks. In 1714, a petition was offered to parliament, proposing a prize for the solution of the longitude problem. “The discovery of longitude is of such consequence to Great Britain for the improvement of Trade . . . the lasting honor of the British nation is at stake.” Through mastering, with chronometers, the mystery of longitude, thus rendering seas navigable, the British paved the pathless oceans and paved them in the pursuit of power, prestige and profit. The chronometer became a tool of political power, a weapon of empire and the handcuffs of slavery.

The most accurate clocks were kept at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, the center of this maritime nation and the center of empire. Reeking with the language of imperialism and smug with the knowledge that time is power, the chief clock at Greenwich in 1852 was called the “master” clock; it sent out signals to “slave” clocks in Greenwich which sent further signals to other “slave” clocks at London Bridge. Today, at Greenwich, there is a plaque (in a dismally unprominent position on a run-down housing estate) which quietly commemorates the slave trade in African people which “was to enrich England for centuries and correspondingly destabilise and impoverish Africa.” The same language of clock-power is still used today—there are “Master Clocks” at the Rugby Radio Station for the MSF service of broadcast standard frequency and time. In keeping with both maritime history and the slaving past, in the U.S., the Navy serves as the country’s official timekeeper, with the Master Clock facility at the Washington Naval Observatory, while the website of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, advertises workshops featuring the design of Slave Clocks.

If time at sea represented Britain’s power over other nations, within the country, time for railways represented London’s dominance over the provinces. Although time varied between the west and the east of the country, train timetables needed a uniform time; so London Time was decreed in 1840 to be that standard. The Great Western Railway printed its timetables accordingly, introducing London Time at its stations. Plymouth and Exeter, in the West, hated this expression of the capital’s political dominance and refused to accept it for years. London Time finally became law in 1880. The clock at the Bristol corn exchange has three hands; an hour hand and two minute hands because they register both Bristol and London time, Bristol eleven minutes behind GMT. (Today, in the former Soviet Union, Ukrainian time is slightly different from Moscow time, and trains on at least one line set off at unpredictable times, depending on the nationality of the driver.)

1883 saw time zones introduced in America. By international agreement in 1884 in Washington, the world was divided into twenty-four time zones, beginning with Greenwich Mean Time. Suitably for a nation of shopkeepers, who had long linked commerce and clocks, the first global export was time itself, GMT. (The impulse toward globalization began early: the first object printed on Gutenberg’s press in the middle of the fifteenth century was a calendar and not, as is usually thought, a Bible.) As this became the universal time measurement, it signaled the destruction of other ways of counting times and marked the hegemony of the one, Western—specifically British—way, dictated by British imperial power, as seventy-five percent of merchant ships already followed GMT. The French, never slow to see a slur on their national pride, were at the barricades before you could say Bob est ton oncle and, until 1978, they continued in law to call GMT “Paris Mean Time retarded by nine minutes and twenty-one seconds.” The concepts of imperialism extend to outer space where astronomers use GMT to make their predictions, though they call it UT—Universal Time. The Britishness of the invention of time-values, punctuality more than any other, is recognized, mockingly, as when in Greece “people are called ‘Englishmen’ when they turn up on the dot at meetings or appointments,” writes Dorothy Lee.

In the early years of BBC radio, the time signals were announced in voices heavy with auctoritas, laden with gravitas, declaring, through their ringingly upper-class accents and superior tones, the age-old equation of time and power—in this case social power. The chimes of Big Ben (built in the 1840s and 50s at the height of empire) ring out the same message, for while its tolls dignify and authorize news time on television and radio, with inherent prestige, its geographical position at the Houses of Parliament tells of political power and its striking the hour of London time out across the world recalls—at a stroke—its imperial past, its trading history, its imports of slaves and its exports of global time itself. The design of the Houses of Parliament was itself a subtle use of time, using the past to authenticate power, for it was built in the Mock Gothic style, designed to look far older than it was, to pretend to a more established and thus more authoritative past than it actually had. As Eric Hobsbawn argues in The Invention of Tradition, this phenomenon has been frequently used to invest political structures with a past they do not possess.

Pol Pot declared 1975 Year Zero. Hitler defined his political ambitions through time: the Third Reich was to last a thousand years. Stalin tried to cancel Sunday: between 1929 and 1940, he introduced the five-day, then the six-day, week. In order to demonstrate its power over the other parts of the Soviet empire, Moscow Time was decreed the standard of communist time, to which everyone must synchronize their time. Synchronization is highly political; totalitarian states adore it, from the vast synchronized gymnastics of fascist countries to the synchronized Heil Hitler salute. Synchronization illustrates the totalitarian desire to subsume the individual into the mass. It also, similarly, represents a wish to blur specific, various times into a global monotime.

From the military command “synchronize your watches,” to the recent Gulf conflicts, time has been enlisted as a weapon of war and tool to power. The second half of the thirteenth century saw technological advances in the making of mechanical clocks together with the first cannon. In the fifteenth century, soldiers going to war took their own roosters with them to wake them early. Command depends on timing; in the Flanders campaign of 1708, Henry Sully, famous old English watchmaker, was engaged to go to war with Prince Eugene of Savoy and the duke of Aremberg. In the first Gulf War, time was used in the split-second bombing of Iraqi targets, and in the instantaneous TV reporting to win the public’s political approval. The deliberate time-brinking in the Iraq conflict teed up a volatile—and therefore highly manipulable—public mind.

Colonialism has always involved the political manipulation of time and memory. In Ireland, Eamon de Valera, leader of Sinn Fein, is said to have remarked after the Easter 1916 uprising against the British that the difference between the countries was that “the British never remember their history. And the Irish never forget.” It underscores all colonialism; the vanquishers can somehow never quite recall the exact path they took to their present dominion, while the vanquished cannot forget their humiliations, deaths and defeats. In Papua New Guinea, the era of colonialism was called taim bilong masta in Pidgin.

Right on the border of Texas and Mexico is a city straddling two countries. The Mexican half is Juarez, the Texan El Paso. The Americans of El Paso joke about the other side working “on Mexican time”—faintly pejorative and definitely patronizing. The same terms can be used in a deliberately derogatory way: latter-day colonialists describing people “working on Indian time,” or “on Maori time,” mean a sort of idle and disrespectful unpunctuality. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall writes of the colonizing of the Lakota Indians. They had, he said, no word for “late” or “waiting.” The first thing the superintendent of one reservation did was “to force them to learn time.” Pretending, as the West routinely does, that its time was the time, the one and only monotime, what the superintendent actually meant was learning an ugly, shredded time—measured clocked-time—and bowing to its language of power. Efficiency. Punctuality. Work-discipline. “Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,” as Kipling wrote in “If”—the poem most beloved of British imperialists. “There was nothing noble-minded men could not do when they discovered they could slap time on their wrists just like that,” pointedly remarks Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place, a powerful critique of colonialism.

The story of the Trobriand Islands’ calendar is a nugget of time, power and colonialism. Traditionally, the responsibility for the calendar was divided between four districts. One, Kiriwina, was dominant, milking the calendar to increase its power by choosing when to insert certain intercalary months to ensure that various “harvest exchanges” of yams and other foods would, like pass-the-parcel, just happen to end up in Kiriwina’s lap when the calendar music stopped. Enter Leo Austen, administrator of the Trobriand Islands in the 1930s, brimful of work ethic and steaming with industrial capitalism. He came, he saw and, yes, he altered the calendar for, as he noted, spluttering with Protestant indignation, these extra months happened during non-work times of the year; it was an excuse for laziness. So he put the extra months into the work season instead. (His calendar was in turn overruled by the dominant Gregorian calendar.)

In our age, the leaders of the Zapatista peasant uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, insisted their time was not the time of the westernized, modernizing Mexican government. The Zapatista leaders took their orders from the peasants—a process both very slow and completely unschedulable. In their negotiations with the government in the mid-1990s, the leaders commented: “We use time, not the clock. That is what the government doesn’t understand.” Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, speaking to crowds in Mexico City in March 2001, evoked time in his rich, suggestive way, interweaved with the names of indigenous peoples: “Tenek. We come from very far. Tlahuica. We walk time . . . Zoque. We carry much time in our hands . . . Raramuri. Here the dark light, time and feeling.”

In the Pichis Valley in Peru, “development” workers waded into the territory of the indigenous Ashaninca people in the 1980s. Arriving, full of projects, the workers claimed the Ashaninca didn’t “know how to work.” The Ashaninca invited them to stay and enjoy themselves with a canoe-load of manioc beer. For their hospitality, they were lectured on laziness. Adventist missionaries had also come to the area in the 1970s. One writes scaldingly of “natives . . . who don’t know what work or progress is.” The missionaries corralled the people into mission stations to bring “order” into their lives—meaning in effect that the people should bow to Western, Christian time-use and time-values, the women working full-time in the kitchens and the men working nine-to-five, while life on the stations was tightly scheduled with prayers, schooling, work and meals.

Those who have power chain the time of others: never more so than with slavery. Colonial memoirs are full of “lazy” slaves and “idle” laborers, of commands to work “at the double.” For the enslaved themselves, concrete slavery has always been marked by a profound desire to seek an abstract freedom and dignity through time, so slaves have used time as protest with go-slows, subverting authority by delay and by slowness, stretching time with silence, shortening it with song, finding a time-freedom in unpredictable presences, unforeseeable absences, momentary disappearances and sudden reappearances.

In 1791, Jeremy Bentham wrote Panopticon, about a proposed circular form of prison around a central “well” from which warders could observe every inch of the prison, every hour of the day. Surveillance like this is an insidious imprisonment, for it observes not only where someone does something but when they do it, enslaving their integrity of time (that freedom which of all freedoms is the most metaphysical). The prisoner must not only “do time” but must be seen to do it.

An attitude of time-surveillance spreads insidiously today. Time magazine recently claimed that the average New Yorker is captured on video cameras and closed-circuit TV up to twenty times a day; their time is watched. Big businesses install hidden cameras to spy on workers, and employees of Olivetti, the computer company, wear electronic tags, enabling bosses to track them to check that they are not wasting time. It erodes freedom with a slavery of self-observation, a creeping guilt trying to avoid offenses against the clock, a sense of chronocriminality. Twenty-six million American workers are monitored by management to check their efficiency. One clerical worker found her video screen flashing at her: “You’re not working as fast as the worker next to you!”

The panopticon links surveillance, guilt and “doing time.” This matrix is the opposite of innocence, which is guiltless, innocent of time and of surveillance. Picture, for instance, a child’s unwatched innocent timelessness. Surveillance spoils this innocence. Noticing a child makes it notice itself, makes it aware of the passing of adult time. To be innocent is to be innocent of clock-time and of watch-observance.

Observatory is a horribly accurate word; observing time is a tool to power from Newton’s Observatory to Cook’s Observatory in New Zealand, the U.S. Navy’s Observatory, Bentham’s observation-prison and Gradgrind’s Observatory in Dickens’s Hard Times, a “stern room with a deadly statistical clock in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin lid.” And Observatories are hated—Gradgrind’s children hate their father’s observatory. In 1894, an anarchist tried to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; it was also the site of anti-millennium protests. The Cook Observatory is constantly defaced by Maori political graffiti.

If ever an age forged the chains linking time and power, if ever an age watched time and enslaved it, it was the Industrial Revolution, an era which altered the experience of time more dramatically than any other. Work, work, work was the whip word. The watch-chained Victorians shrilly maintained that all hours were to be spent either building economic power or spiritual power, envisaging a system of “spiritual accountancy” whereby hours spent working or praying would accumulate future rewards, whereas playing, lingering, jelly-making, gambling or giggling were coins of hours badly spent—every trifling, whistling one of which would cost you dearly in the afterlife.

John Wesley, Methodist. The very word is like a fetter on time’s freedom. (At a Methodist Sunday school in York in 1819, teachers were fined for unpunctuality.) Methodist: austerity such that no hour can slip away in glee nor a body snooze away a fuggy morning. Here he is, Mr. Wesley, in a 1786 tract on The Duty and Advantage of Early Rising: “By soaking . . . so long between warm sheets, the flesh is as it were parboiled, and becomes soft and flabby. The nerves, in the mean time, are quite unstrung.” One Rev. J. Clayton wrote in a 1755 pamphlet, Friendly Advice to the Poor, of “that slothful spending the morning in bed: the necessity of early rising would reduce the poor to a necessity of going to Bed betime; and thereby prevent the Danger of Midnight revels . . .”

The rising middle classes, responsible for colonialism and stiff-upper-aspidistras, capitalism and the loss of play, could do one thing well; they could certainly get out of bed. Getting out of bed betimes, ah me, the hardest thing you have to do all day and you have to do it first. But they were not content with their own rising, their own useful productive time. They looked beneath them and saw the poor. What did poor people do all day? They slept in, they slept out, they slept around and they slept around the clock. They idled, they hummed, they chatted, they drank. They honored Saint Monday from Tuesday to Sunday, they had holidays all over the time, they ambled and they gambled. The middle classes purpled with a collective Mock Gothic rumble. John Foster, writing An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance (1820), bemoans the fact that manual workers had, after work “several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please . . .” As they please, if you please, as if their time were actually their own. The presumption!

Though the middle classes pretended that productive time use was about morality, it was actually about class politics and power, in such an age of power, trade power and colonial power. For the middle classes made their money out of other people’s time—it suited the ruling classes very well that those below them should use their time to work to increase the profits and power of middle-class capitalists. As landowners took over the common people’s land in the enclosures, so new capitalist timeowners took over the common people’s hours in the factory-enclosures of time.

In an extraordinary conflation of ideas, time was changed forever. The economics of capitalism combined with the Protestant work ethic, the sour snobbery of class structure, the moral strictures of Puritanism, the stance of colonialism, new urbanization, Christianity’s hell-now, heaven-later accountancy of time, and the rise of synchronized working in factories—making a time of machines. When Lewis Mumford writes in Technics and Civilization that “the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern age,” machine is the word. Most early factory machines were actually made by clockmakers. Machine production in factories required people’s time to be mechanized, to be as clockwork. This era was driven by new types of power: steam-power, water-power, coal-power and now—added to these—there was clock-power.

And all these were underpinned with the theories of science—Newton above all (a misanthropic alchemist from Grantham), who had offered the intellectual justification for mechanical time which so despised human time. Newton who had said that time was absolute and uniform, factory-time in overalls. Time was Granthamized. The Victorians loved him, inaugurating, at Saint Peter’s Hill, Grantham, in 1858, a statue of him, two tons of Granthamite misery for two centuries of hard time.

Just four years before, in 1854, Hard Times was published—a fabulous, blistering portrait of factory-time, describing Coketown (a New-town place for Newton times), where “every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.” “Time went on in Coketown like its own machinery: so much material wrought up, so much fuel consumed, so many powers worn out, so much money made.”

What was lost? Time varied, elastic and colored. Time local, mischievous and ribboned. Time seasonal, haphazard, red-lettered and unpredictable was gone. Time was wearily dreared out of bed. Convenienced and colonized. Mapped. Leveled. Privatized. Enclosed. Counted in and accounted out. Factored in and factoried out. Days of equal width, hours of equal length of watched time replaced the stretchy hours of sun-time and the seasonal days of times gone by.

Factory-discipline and clock-power needed predictable, standard days of work. Gone was the honoring of Saint Monday—which cobblers, colliers, cutlers and cockneys, potters, printers and picnickers worshipped. Here, France and England could agree, as Duveau, the French historian, wrote in 1946, “Le dimanche est le jour de la famille, le lundi celui de l’amitié.” (Sunday is the day for the family, Monday the day for friendship.) Saint Monday, in effect the patron saint of hangovers, was reviled in Victorian temperance tracts.

The time of festivities, too, was a focus for power struggles, for they often dramatized local class politics: the right of the parish poor to collect certain doles, or gather wood, the legitimization of grazing or gleaning rights. Many such festivals were outlawed by the Victorian middle classes, the workers’ holidays overruled. It was of course under Margaret Thatcher (a misanthropic chemist from Grantham), very much heir to Newton’s factory time, and a banger-on about middle-class Victorian values, that May Day, the traditional workers’ holiday, was threatened with abolition.

Hard Times has its Granthamite Gradgrinds and Bounderbys, the factory owners and politicians seizing power over the grim lives of the factory workforce, but there is more; a third class, the “circus people” who represent preindustrial time, the jumbly, curly time which was lost, the people who drink far too much and have far too much fun and refuse to believe the stricture that time is money so Mr. Bounderby of Coketown remarks severely to the circus people: “We are the kind of people who know the value of time, and you are the kind of people who don’t.” Coketown’s time is the “hard” time of the title; the circus people represent “soft” time; humane, funny, whimsical and irregular, a time for children and animals. Time is always a genderizable concept and, in this instance, the differences are stark. “Circus” time, round like the circus tent or a circle is female time, represented in the book by a circus girl, Sissy, sisterly in nature and name. (Her second name is “Jupe,” the French for a woman’s skirt.) “Hard time” is represented only by men, forcing time straight like a ruler; in that world, Gradgrind will not call her Sissy Jupe but insists she is “Girl number twenty”; the sequence of numbers represents the linearity of time and an interchangeable child for interchangeable, mechanical times.

Punctuality and regularity in the workforce became, with watches, first a possibility and then a necessity. It wasn’t that people didn’t work before the Industrial Revolution but, as E.P. Thompson says in his funny and brilliant essay Time and Work Discipline , the work pattern had been “one of alternate bouts of intense labor and idleness whenever men were in control of their own working lives,” but in this period, power over people’s time was taken away from them and put under the control of factory owners.

Josiah Wedgwood introduced the system of clocking-in; and Crowley went one-up, writing The Law Book of the Crowley Iron Works, a penal hundred-thousand-word-thunder-code; timesheets, time-keepers, time-informers and time-fines: his employees’ hours of service were calculated “after all deductions for being at taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, breakfast, dinner, playing, sleeping, smoaking, singing, reading of news history, quarrelling, contention, disputes or anything forreign to my business, any way loytering.”

This power over working people’s time was deeply resented. A Scottish industrialist spoke of “the utmost distaste on the part of the men to any regular hours or regular habits” and workers’ shock that “they could not go in and out as they pleased, and have what holidays they pleased.” One Yorkshireman wrote in 1830 that the factory system was “a state of slavery more horrid than . . . that hellish system ‘Colonial Slavery.’ ” A nineteenth-century Dundee textile worker commented on the abuses of time-power thus:

In reality, there were no regular hours . . . The clocks in the factories were put forwards and backwards, morn and night. Instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression. A workman was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss anyone who presumed to know too much about the science of horology.

We worked as long as we could see in summer time, and I could not say at what hour it was that we stopped. There was nobody but the master and the master’s son who had a watch, and we did not know the time. There was one man who had a watch . . .

It was taken from him and given into the master’s custody because he had told the men the time of day.

In America, the earliest textile factory complex was at Lowell, Massachusetts, which opened in 1823. It had a surveillance system and a highly regulated labor force, its rhythms governed by the clock and machine. Bells in the cupolas rang insistently, tolling out the lie that time is money; bells tolled the workers awake, to their jobs, to and from meals, curfew and bed.

With the industrial revolution and factory-employment, people ceased to own their own time; the workforce had to demarcate time which “belonged” to an employer. Watch-ownership increased, for not only were they prestigious, they were also signs that though you may not own your own time, you could own the measure of it. (Interestingly, today, the refusal to wear a watch is a subtle status-signal: “My time is owned by no one. I am no one’s slave.”) The first joy of watches—and their inherent prestige—has rarely been so deliciously expressed as by a Sussex diarist in 1688 who notes that he “bought . . . a silver-cased watch, which cost me 31 i . . . This watch shewes ye hour of ye day, ye month of ye year, ye age of ye moon, and ye ebbing and flowing of ye water; and will goe thirty hours with one winding up.” What he bought, of course, was ye status and ye pride, ye innocent pomp as ye plump round prose shewes so gleefully after all ye years.

No such power over people’s time could have been usurped without protest. With eloquent violence, workers in Britain, particularly in Lancashire and other textile districts, during the 1820s and 30s, smashed the clocks above the factory gates, the loathed symbol of a new world order which had stolen the power over their time. Trade unions—very quickly made illegal—took on first the abuse of time so, seeking shorter hours, the early unions threatened go-slows until they won the ten-hour act of 1847. The 1848 revolution was partly about time; a desire for the “three eights”—eight hours’ work, eight hours’ sleep and eight hours’ play. Karl Marx highlighted time’s role in capitalism, arguing that the regulation and exploitation of workers’ time was a key aspect of capitalist philosophy and warned of the “overconsumption” of workers’ time (a prescient phrase for today’s “greedy institutions”). In Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon, the workers destroy their machines to stop the machines from destroying them. It includes an incident concerning the carrying of a watch, and there is a museum for bygone evils, considered the right place for watches. In Paris, May 1968, student protesters stopped a clock at the Sorbonne, writing below it Nous y mettrons le temps, meaning both “Let’s take time off” and “We will decide what the time is.”

The order of time runs through much of the history of time and power. To the clock has been ascribed the ability to order life; religious orders, of course, first ordered the disorder of time, their bells “lifted all things unto a sphere of order,” says clock historian Carlo Cipolla. In 1481, a petition to the Town Council of Lyon, asking for the town to have a great clock, says: “If such a clock were to be made, the citizens . . . would live a more orderly life.” Richard Palmer of Wokingham, England, in 1664, giving lands in trust for a sexton to ring bells at 8 P.M. and 4 A.M., did so to “order” the life of the locale. (In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse writes of “the alliance between time and the order of repression.”)

And whose natural state was iridescent disorder? Who were even more unpunctual than the poor? Who were by nature living in a state of such disgraceful enchantment that they thought the hour of now the only possible time? Who—unforgivably—insisted on seeing the purpose of life to be not work but play?

The middle-class adults saw the power and the profit to be squeezed from childhood time, down mines and up chimneys. They also may have seen that childhood was a huge conceptual threat to their hard times; childhood is fundamentally in opposition to the schedulization, punctuality and uniformity of factory-time. Children, unstoppably, adhere to circus-time, they have an affinity with Dickens’s circus people; it is adults—as Bounderby nearly said—who are the kind of people who know the value of time, children are the kind who don’t.

Cometh the hour, cometh the grown-up. Thomas Wedgwood, son of Josiah, designed, as E.P. Thompson writes, “a plan for taking the time and work discipline of Etruria into the very workshops of the child’s formative consciousness.” He intended it to be a rigorous education system to schedule, coerce and control the wispish free spirits, to form them into mini-machines for factory work out of whose time more Wedgwood money might be minted. Wordsworth—of all people—was proposed as superintendent of Wedgwood’s education system. He wrote his furious refusal in the passionate poetry of Book Five of The Prelude (1805), spitting about:

The diction has it: the “watchful men” observing, from all their observatories, “skilful in the usury of time,” are with us still, making machines of children, confining them. Thomas Gradgrind, industrialist of Coketown, a fictional Thomas Wedgwood, has a school, a model of a mini-factory to fill each child with fact, to measure each hour with industry. A school in which bullies and bankers flourish and childhood withers. When his young daughter, “his own metallurgical Louisa,” is found delightedly peeking at the circus which has come to town, he furiously removes her with the sneer, “You are childish.” And when she grows up, Louisa’s most aching reproach to her father is that his theories of upbringing cost her the experience of childhood.

So began a system which reaved the child of its hour, which crushed the dandelion clock underfoot in a march to colonize the wild time of childhood, a march of usurpation which continues all the more furiously today, from toy shops called Early Learning Centers—lest the child be late—to “hothousing” children, greenhouse gassing them with a stress which can kill them.

It is perhaps because children are born with such a powerful sense of the now, of wild time, of eternity, that adults need to tame it so ferociously, to spend so much effort teaching children the time—or grown-ups’ definitions of it. To tell the time, to name the weekdays and the months, to know timetables, to recognize playtime and schooltime and to think up reasons why there should be a difference between them. Children learn a hierarchy of time, who they must wait for and who they cannot interrupt. To obey the clock, pip pip. And as surely as the Bunsen burner evaporates water, the clock causes the evaporation of childhood.

Today, children as young as two in Tokyo attend crammers, as the competitive pace of education demands. Modernity seems to steal time from children; the U.K. press reports that children are becoming more shy because parents spend an average of just eight minutes a day talking with them (quoted in the Coventry Telegraph), while other statistics show that twelve percent of the population spend more time in their cars than with their families (quoted in the Guardian). A national survey in Japan found that fathers in single-earner households spent an average of three minutes per day on “family work” including feeding, bathing and playing with their children. (The figure reached nineteen minutes per day at weekends.) In a Management and Coordination Agency survey, 1986, 37.4 percent of Japanese children “never” interacted with their fathers, for example, eating meals together or talking, on weekdays, compared to 14.7 percent of American children and 19.5 percent of German children. 17.1 percent of Japanese fathers “never” spent time with their children at weekends, and the data seemed similar to U.S. data of the 1960s and 1970s. American fathers spent about two minutes per day with their children in 1965 and about seventeen minutes with them ten years later. Another, conflicting, survey from the University of Maryland, suggested that parents in 1990 spent forty percent less time with their children than they did in 1965.

Children are taught to fit into adult time, though a child’s hour lasts far longer than one of ours. This difference has partly to do with the relative time of one’s lifespan; as a proportion of a four-year-old’s life, an hour is a long time; as a proportion of, say, an eighty-year-old’s life, an hour is but a breath. Part of the difference is in the way the brain processes information about time. Part is physiological; children move quickly, their metabolism faster than adults—the river of time therefore seems to run slower than the child whereas it runs far faster than the eighty-year-old. Apart from a difference of duration, there is a difference of direction: old people live in their memories, facing the past. Young people live in their hopes and they face the future.

One of the most striking protests against modernity’s brutal and coercive accountancy-time comes in Momo, a book for children—though one which is a privilege for adults to read. Written by the German surrealist Michael Ende in 1973, it tells the story of Momo, a small girl. (“How old are you?” she is asked. She thinks a moment, then hesitantly replies “a hundred and two?”—for, crucially, no one has ever taught her to count.) Momo is a waifish pixie who turns up in a town to the delight of everyone she meets; shabby and poor, she has one form of wealth—time. She uses her time to listen to people, and they love her for it; listening, of course, creates time for someone else, while speaking takes it from another.

The town she arrives in is one where people matter, the barber talks to his customers and the local tavern, Nino’s inn, is a social place for old men to while away idle afternoons over one warm glass of wine. But then into this world, stealthily, coldly, come freezing cold men in gray, from the “Timesaving Bank,” who count up time and persuade people to save time in order to make money—these gray men effectively steal people’s time, for “the more time people saved, the less they had.” Nino’s inn becomes a fast-food café, Mc-Nino’s by any other name, and people become obsolete. It is only a child—and one who can’t count—who cannot be cheated by the equation time is money. Momo alone can save her town, with the help of Professor Hora who shows her the “time flowers” and remarks: “Time is life itself and life resides in the human heart.”

Not a lot of schoolkids know this: the Latin word ludus means both “game” and “school”; the word school comes from the Greek skhole which originally meant “leisure.” It was the free time, the playtime, the wild time unaccounted for by demands of state or duties of religion, the time in which a person could “idle well” as Aristotle said, exploring the unmeasurable, the pleasurable, treasures of mind out of time. Ask any playground-philosopher today what school means and you will hear the exact opposite. Measured, unpleasurable, untreasured time marked by school clocks. (And a place where bullies and bankers still flourish.)

In the U.K., early in 1997, the government proposed new ways of scheduling children’s time, including the possibilities of open-all-hours classrooms, teaching for babies and summer schools. In one part of the country, a fifty percent increase in the length of the school day is planned and, in another, weekend schooling proposed. Is no time free? Is there no time for children to be? To guess, to play, to stare, to count clouds, to catch peanuts in their mouths, to see whose knees are knobblier, to hop, to flick things, to see who can get their tongue farthest up one nostril? “There isn’t enough time to wobble,” wailed a distressed five-year-old to me in the park just now.

But the spirit of childhood will always end up thumbing its nose at adults who try to squash it; the circus classes will always be with us, because children are always with us, living, as they do, preindustrially, in tutti-frutti time, roundabout-time, playtime, dandelion-time. Theirs is an idea of time which has no sympathy whatsoever with the Industrial Revolution in all its historic and contemporary manifestations, for children, hardy perennials, are staunch defenders of something far more valuable and much more fun, the time of ludic revolution.