In addition, while there is not yet a form of ‘community clocking’, as my tumblr shows artists, activists, designers and others have indeed been creating clocks that tell competing stories.
Every clock is an attempt to shape how people think about time” (Birth, 2013). Every clock takes a position in a debate about time. Here I’m thinking particularly of anthropologist Kevin Birth, with his approach being pithily summed up in the following quote: “Every clock tells a story. This is a significant problem because it means that philosophers have willingly absented themselves from debates about the crucial role that clocks, and the time they tell, play in everyday life.Īll is not as dire as this though, with scholars in other disciplines pointing to the contingent and historical nature of what we now call ‘clock-time’, and showing that there are multiple possibilities for measuring time and ‘constructing horologes’ otherwise. As a result, the clocks seems to have become practically irredeemable as a tool of critique, or political transformation. Indeed rather than turning towards the clock to develop more critical approaches, the tendency for phenomenologically inspired philosophers is to use the clock as a referent for the kind of time they don’t want to talk about. Continental philosophers, for example, continue to regularly equate clock time with an ‘objective time’ or ‘universal time’. Secondly, as I argue in my paper, in a range of core areas of social theory, clock time remains under-theorised and fundamentally misunderstood. In many ways, then, clock-making remains in the hands of the experts. This training is by and large undertaken outside of the university, and one wonders what improved conversations with arts, humanities and social science researchers may have in opening up established technical practices (as Crampton and Krygier claimed for cartography see p 12). Firstly, while cartography has expanded to include methods for crowd mapping, participatory GIS and community mapping (for example), descriptions of the role of a horologist and the kind of training they might receive, focus specifically on the technical expertise gained and the ability to make and repair objects that measure time in a relatively neutral way. Looking for this one-two punch in relation to horology, turns up very little however. They therefore conclude that “this one-two punch–a pervasive set of imaginative mapping practices and a critique highlighting the politics of mapping–has undisciplined cartography” (12). Importantly critiques of maps and their roles in these power relations has not weakened map making, but has allowed others to “make competing and equally powerful claims” (12). And secondly “a more social theoretic critique, which we argue is a political one, situates maps within specific relations of power and not as neutral scientific documents” (12). The first is that mapmaking is no longer only in the hands of the experts. They also offer two reasons why cartography has opened up to more experimentation and redesign.
In their overview of critical cartography, Crampton and Krygier argue that it “challenges academic cartography by linking geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political” (11). Unlike its more famous and well established cousin, critical cartography, there seems to have been no move to pull horology – “the art or science of measuring time the construction of horologes” (OED) – into more critical frameworks. Partly to ask why no such area of practice and research has yet been developed. Gform.With the finalisation of a new paper “Liberating Clocks: Developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time”, which will be coming out in a special issue of new formations on the topic of “Timing Transformations”, I wanted to reflect a little on the idea of a ‘critical horology’. First Name(Required) Last Name(Required) Email(Required)
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