Abstract
Kevin Birth, Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 211 pp
In attempting to analyze the tangled relationship between culture and temporality, there is a tendency to view the history of anthropocentric time as one of distinct, uniform paradigm shifts – a linear narrative in which one form of temporal perception succeeds its predecessor. The risk of such an account is threefold: it masks the multitude of disjunctive temporalities that can co-exist within any era; it presents a distinctly Westernized view of temporality, in which technological progress and temporal change become intertwined; and it posits an idealist perspective whereby our perception of time becomes nothing more than a collective product of our minds, offering no analysis of the cultural artifacts that may contribute to its production. Kevin Birth’s Objects of Time, by contrast, represents an admirable attempt to ground the study of time within the empirical specificity of objects and culture.
Avoiding the tendency to subsume the contingency of temporality into a generalized historical a priori; Birth seeks to describe ‘how mundane objects are used to think about time’ (p. vii). ‘Humans’, he argues (p. 6), ‘do not just think about their world, but think with their world’. Echoing Latour’s (1993, p. 77) contention that the ‘connections among beings alone make time’, he presents our modern-day conceptions of temporality as being inextricably tied to our engagement with a plethora of external objects. Rather than focusing upon the psychological origins of temporality. Birth fixes his gaze upon the question of how specific objects represent and produce time, arguing that ‘time-reckoning tools are not merely creations of the mind, as some describe artifacts … but creations for the shaping of thought’ (p. 9).
Yet whilst he identifies the locus of contemporary temporality within the various objects that surround us – primarily clocks and calendars – Birth’s account of time is thoroughly humanist; dedicated to understanding the potentially deleterious effects of these objects of abstract timekeeping. Clocks and calendars, he argues, emerged out of a desire to more accurately measure the natural cycles of the world, and yet, they ‘begin to constitute cycles that diverge from those originally observed’ (p. 20). This argument forms the core of Birth’s thesis: man-made objects do not simply measure time, but rather, contain within their very production hidden assumptions that diverge from the original rhythms that they were designed to apprehend. Through our reliance upon such artifacts, he suggests, the measurement of time is subtly and gradually separated from our ability to control it, until all other social and biological rhythms are displaced. Timekeeping tools may appear to make our lives easier, he contends, but the ‘simplicity of the representation relieves users of the need to master the technical knowledge’, and as such, we lose sight of the way that these objects fundamentally alter us. This is a study of alienation; of the way that mundane, barely-visible tools can actually amputate our ability to grasp both ourselves, and the world around us.
One of the most impressive aspects of the book is Birth’s ability to combine a coherent theoretical background for the study of time with nuanced, and often pointedly relevant, empirical enquiry both historical and ethnographic. Beginning with a relatively brief outline of the history of timekeeping, the book moves into a theorization of clocks and calendars as ‘necromantic devices’ – that is, ‘tools by which the dead think for the living, and the dead’s thoughts deflect the living’s attention from the cycles in the present’ (p. 35). Disputing the common assumption that medieval Europeans had little interest or ability regarding the measurement of time, he demonstrates the way in which our contemporary logic of the clock has shaped our conception of time reckoning, limiting our ability to even comprehend modes of timekeeping outside of it. Through an examination of his fieldwork in rural Trinidad – a case study returned to frequently – he makes note of the multifarious sources of time available within a social environment.
The focus of Birth’s criticism lies in response to such observations: in developing a ‘mean time’ – in contrast to ‘contingent timing’ – that allows ‘the two cognitive tasks of the measure of duration and the determination of moments in time to be combined in a single tool’ (p. 67), we have created a form of time entirely abstracted from lived polyrhythms. The uniformity of modern time masks the plurality of temporal signals within our everyday lives – environmental cycles ‘do not consistently cooperate with the calendar’ (p. 72). In one of the book’s more intriguing arguments, Birth builds upon Freud's concept of the ‘uncanny’ in order to argue that time's capacity to ‘inspire religious awe’ (p. 83) – for instance, through the disruption caused by coincidental clashes and consonances of the seemingly incommensurable temporal cycles of coexistent religions – has been lost as the result of an increasingly universalized, homogenized global time imposed upon all cultures and societies.
Finally, Birth discusses processes of globalization, and the way in which they are both implicated in and perpetuated by the homogenization of time. He suggests that as a result of a unified, global system of discrete time zones, combined with an increasingly global economy in thrall to no particular local temporality, we have seen a conceptual flattening of the planet, with local solar time left as a casualty. This loss is no mere question of semantics; he remarks that ‘if human biological circadian cycles are cued by the Sun, then making solar time irrelevant also asserts that those biological rhythms are irrelevant’ (p. 128). Birth emphasizes that biologically, humans are diurnal creatures, and as such, we risk both our physical and mental health when we come to rely upon objects that mask this ‘relationship between the solar cycles and biological cycles’ (p. 139). ‘Resistance,’ he suggests (p. 143), in reference to Foucault, ‘can be biologically embedded’ – we may not consciously recognize the effects that abstract time is having upon us, but our bodies do, and they react accordingly.
This is a timely message, and one that Birth presents with a great deal of both clarity and empirical specificity. There are limits to what the body can do; perhaps, instead of attempting to transcend such barriers, we need to place more focus upon the way that the objects with which we interact can affect our lived experience, whether positively or negatively. The legacy of Marshall McLuhan (1964) remains vital here: technologies which extend our body also risk amputating it. The great strength of Birth’s study is his ability to articulate the way in which conceptions of temporality have material consequences upon our quality of life, as well as providing an important intervention into the methodological importance of temporality in ethnographic study. Criticizing an increasingly common emphasis on the ‘instantaneous flow of information’ that has ‘obscured the features of living on a rotating globe’ (p. 130), Birth foregrounds the need to avoid normalizing metanarratives of uniform temporality, and pointedly reminds us of the dangers in homogenizing the diverse phenomenological experiences of human subjects, as constituted within the contingent specificity of their environment.
Even recognizing Birth’s resolve that his study is not ontological in nature, for a book that is explicitly devoted to the study of objects, there is little precise definition of what an object is. For instance, whilst reference is made at several points to people using the celestial bodies as a means for timekeeping, according to Birth’s logic, these would not be considered objects that produce time. The latter designation appears restricted to artifacts produced by humans, the result being more a study of tools, rather than the far more broad and amorphous category of objects. Whilst this does not compromise the value of the text, in light of a number of recent scholarly works on the role of the object in contemporary social theory/philosophy (see for instance Bryant, 2011; Clemens and Pettman, 2004; Harman, 2002; Olsen, 2010; Parikka, 2012; Verbeek, 2005), a greater level of definitional clarity would not be unfounded.
Moreover, whilst Birth’s focus upon the corporeal effects of contemporary temporality is a refreshing antidote to overly subjectivist approaches, I cannot help but wonder whether he overplays his hand slightly in conflating bodily rhythms with environmental rhythms. Whilst I would not dispute that humans are diurnal creatures, there is a questionable, if not necessarily intentional, implication running through Birth’s argument that non-clock/calendar forms of timekeeping are directly connected to environmental factors, rather than abstracted from the tools used, and thus, in turn correspond more accurately to our own biological rhythms. Although this may be accurate for most of the world’s population, one wonders whether inhabitants within the Arctic Circle, for example, could ever follow such diurnal rhythms without a certain level of temporal abstraction. In making a fairly sharp distinction between natural environments and human tools, Birth risks understating how truly heterogeneous time reckoning can be.
Finally, although Birth cogently and ambivalently reflects upon the application of the theoretical perspectives discussed within the context of timekeeping, I cannot help but wonder whether linguistic relativism and speech act theory are – particularly in terms of intentionality – on their own not entirely adequate as a basis for cognizing the unpredictable potentiality of material artefacts. A greater focus upon contemporary theories of technology and mediation would perhaps strengthen his argument in this regard even further. These, however, are minor qualms, and have little tangible effect upon the overall quality and argumentative efficacy of the book. The virtue of Birth’s largely anthropological perspective lies in its ability to explicate, the need for both further scholarly engagement with issues of temporality within the social sciences, and a greater focus upon the connections between an increasingly accelerating timescape and mental/bodily health.