tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post472373704652478991..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: What Time Is It, Anyway?Cord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-61230444569530338482006-12-18T19:43:00.000-05:002006-12-18T19:43:00.000-05:00JJC--that course on time looks really cool, even *...JJC--that course on time looks really cool, even *if* the bibliography would need some updating. But do you realize how many courses I've stolen from you already? It's almost embarrassing. Then again, I'm inclined to keep doing it.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-40309432399145768982006-12-18T19:41:00.000-05:002006-12-18T19:41:00.000-05:00Good lord, that course looks fantastic. Looks like...Good lord, that course looks fantastic. Looks like I might have some of my summer reading mapped out, right there.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-59003102436422321342006-12-18T18:58:00.000-05:002006-12-18T18:58:00.000-05:00Eileen, I meant to offer this a while ago: here is...Eileen, I meant to offer this a while ago: <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~humsci/courses/205.htm">here</a> is a course I taught quite a long time ago on the cultural construction of time. It was great fun, but I see the bibliography is badly out of date.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-31676919331674682092006-12-18T15:50:00.000-05:002006-12-18T15:50:00.000-05:00Karl--thanks for referencing the book by LeGoff; I...Karl--thanks for referencing the book by LeGoff; I have always meant to read that book, and am reminded to do so again. Your comments, as always, provide much to think about. One brief thought [inbetween wrapping and mailing Christmas gifts and trying to finish that damned "Seven Sleepers" article]: I think in modernity, as much so as in the Middle Ages, that access to timekeeping is a form of power, economic and otherwise, so that, as you point out, time has always belonged [and continues to belong] to . . . workers? [Or is that employers?]<br /><br />As JJC points out, and Karl also concurs ultimately, time can never be really inhuman--at least not if we are talking about the ways in which we measure it or take account of it--although I wonder if the universe, at the same time, is always "keeping its own time" in ways that have nothing to do with how *we* keep, record, remember, and experience time? But then, as soon as we start thinking about that, we place the idea od time--no matter how inhumanly abstract--into some kind of framework of human consciousness. After all, until we noticed it, that oscillating atom didn't "know" it was keeping time; it was simply oscillating. The world does indeed "keep its own time"--it simply doesn't "narrate" the fact [i.e., it doesn't "know" or "tell" it--in this sense, the keeping of time is always a human concern, even a human tragedy].Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-31471022784469695612006-12-18T08:06:00.000-05:002006-12-18T08:06:00.000-05:00But is that true?
Now that you point it out: nop...<i>But is that true? </i><br /><br />Now that you point it out: nope.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-84013244432016192052006-12-18T06:22:00.000-05:002006-12-18T06:22:00.000-05:00It is perhaps only in the modern era--whatever tha...<em>It is perhaps only in the modern era--whatever that is--that time can make a valid claim to be utterly transcendent, utterly inhuman</em><br /><br />But is that true? In Eileen's example, time is still harnessed to time-on-earth (at least in order to gain its numerical designation), is anchored to the human (sustained by human measurements and the keeping of atomic clocks, attached to mundane tasks and interests), and is still subject to relativity (I know very little about physics, but assume that the degradation of atoms proceeds in a temporally relative way as the earth wanders the cosmos compared to such degradation in bodies moving faster or slower -- is there anything that escapes time's relativity?)Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-86509029384677171202006-12-17T21:17:00.000-05:002006-12-17T21:17:00.000-05:00Nice work, EJ.
First, one thing did leap out: "T...Nice work, EJ. <br /><br />First, one thing did leap out: "Timekeeping...[is] more fundamental than most other quotidian concerns." <br />No kidding.<br />==<br />If the calendar riots did happen, and if we wonder at them, we should remember that rioting over calendars seems odd to us only because we take calendars for granted. But imagine the chaos for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck if they lost 10 days. Presumably, they'd lose 10 days of work in a month while having the next month's rent leap up on them. If there were deaths <i>only</i> in Bristol, I'd be astonished.<br /><br />You may wish to look at Jacques Le Goff's "Labor Time in the 'Crisis' [<i>ed</i>: there's that word again] of the Fourteenth Century: From Medieval Time to Modern Time," in <i>Time, Work, and Culture,</i> an essay in which Le Goff sketches the way that humans laid claim to possession of time, how "the time which used to belong to God alone was thereafter the property of men" (51). <br /><br />Per my suggestions about the calendar riots, I'm interested in the draconian punishments meted out to cloth-workers who seized (temporary!) mastery of <i>werkglocken,</i> the bells that marked the breaks in the work day. In 14th-century Commines, "if the workers seized the bell in order to use it as a signal of revolt, they incurred the heaviest fines: sixty Parisian pounds for anyone who should ring the bell for a popular assembly and for anyone who should come armed...; and the death penalty for anyone who should ring the bell to call for revolt against the king, the alderman, or the officer in charge of the bell." (47). Again, we're faced with the pressing issue of time's ownership. The struggle between the physicists and astronomers may be less severe on its face than that of the 14th-century Commines (or 8th-century Northumbria for that matter, where Bede and the Irish struggled over Easter's date), but I suspect that all of these examples are equally illustrative. Of what, I'm not sure yet. <br /><br />I do know that time belongs only to a few of us, and most people "get their own time" only when they retire, when the promise life makes to death is close to coming due.<br /><br />Re: Giddins, also from Le Goff, "...men of the Renaissance continued to live with an uncertain time. It was a nonunified time, still urban rather than national, and unsynchronized with the state structures then being established: a time of <i>urban monads.</i> An indication of this may be found in the diversity of the zero hours of the new clocks: sometimes noon, sometimes midnight, which is not a very serious difference [<i>ed</i>: I say Le Goff slips here, but he rights himself by the end of the graph], but more frequently sunrise or sunset--such was the difficulty of freeing preindustrial time from natural time [<i>ed</i>: another slip: 'natural time' was still labor time, with a <i>journal</i> being, as Goldhammer, Le Goff's translator, observes (44), the amount of land a worker could plow in a day: rural spaces yoked (natch, so long as we're using overapt tropes) space and time together too]. In his <i>Voyage en Italie,</i> Montaigne, like many other travelers before him in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, noted what confusion and disorder were caused by the changing origin of time from one city to the next" (49). <br /><br />The variable time that so frustrated Montaigne was certainly "local" time, but it was hardly "comforting." <i>Governed</i> as it was, it was not individual; it was, and perhaps always has been for workers, a time belonging to someone else: abbots and God in the countryside, the bourgeoisie in the city, the king everywhere, eventually. It is perhaps only in the modern era--whatever that is--that time can make a valid claim to be utterly transcendent, utterly inhuman, but even now, as EJ rightfully points out, oscillating atoms are hardly less arbitrary, in the end, than measurements of "irregular" celestial bodies.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-84143197225392179572006-12-17T16:38:00.000-05:002006-12-17T16:38:00.000-05:00egAnonymous--thanks so much for clarification on o...egAnonymous--thanks so much for clarification on o.s. and n.s., which I have seen in scholarly books, but never quite understood what they denoted. When England finally decided to catch up with everyone else, one of the effects was that everyone automatically aged by a bit over a week, including George Washington, which means that when Americans celebrate his birthday, we don't do it on the right day. Then again, since legislation recently converted various presidents' birthdays into just one "Presidents Day," it may not really matter. Another interesting tidbit from the article was why the English finally decided to join up with Europe on the timekeeping matter: a member of Parliament had a mistress in France and he was tired of all the confusion that was caused between them because of the dating on their separate letters going back and forth across the channel. Isn't that great? England *refused* to go along with the change in 1582 as a defiant act of anti-papism, but they went along with it 1752 for no reason other than the confusion of dating in letters between an MP and his mistress. When it comes to the movement of time, entropic decadence really is the rule, isn't it?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-55421276009595710522006-12-16T17:45:00.000-05:002006-12-16T17:45:00.000-05:00Very interesting. Working in a slightly later era,...Very interesting. Working in a slightly later era, I can vouch for England's being out-of-synch with Gregorian time shift. Letters in the period are even sometimes dated thus, "16/26 May 1635." Historians writing about that period routinely have to say in their preface that they are using old style (o.s.) or new style (n.s.) dating (also an issue on when treaties went into effect). Not to mention the fact that the year didn't start until 26 March.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-75881612946930223372006-12-16T15:46:00.000-05:002006-12-16T15:46:00.000-05:00I take it back: we were with the astronomers, clea...I take it back: we were with the astronomers, clearly -- but the point I was trying to make is that it was the moment of sunset that mattered, not the numerical value assigned to that moment. And it mattered for reasons that were far from cosmic.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6218855139858361662006-12-16T15:16:00.000-05:002006-12-16T15:16:00.000-05:00Great post, and much to think about.
To start: wh...Great post, and much to think about.<br /><br />To start: when the Cohen family lit their menorah at 4.47 PM EST, they weren't following the physicists or the astronomers, but the sun itself: that's the precise minute it dips beneath the horizon and signals the start of the new day on the Jewish calendar. The numerical time didn't matter, really: it was the vanishing of the sun alone. So that must be what you called local time, Eileen.<br /><br />Very local, really: as any good Jew knows, the Cohens were doing it all wrong. We should have lit our menorah before sundown, since shabbat begins when the sun vanishes ... so at 4.47 we should have ignited a sabbath candle, not the menorah.<br /><br />Oh well. I'd say we'll burn in hell, but Jews don't have a well developed notion of the afterlife.<br /><br />(Really, we were trying to get our kids excited about Hanukkah beginning, having them count it down to the minute. We are not all that observant, prefering an intensely local family time over a grand and universal ritual time)Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com