Friday, November 20 at 4:00 PM in Pugh 160,the third MEMS Graduate Student Talk of the semester
Tim Blanton (History)
“Whose Time? Which Past?: Some Reflections on Medieval and Modern Historiographies of Time”
We are constantly under the surveillance of clocks. We wake up in the morning to the sound of an alarm; we anxiously glance at the clock, waiting to leave work; we go to sleep setting the same alarm. How and why do clocks regulate our lives? A popular but nevertheless fraught answer is capitalism. Time discipline and economic success go hand in hand. It is hardly possible to live and celebrate the virtues of work, productivity, efficiency, and profit without a pocket calendar. Consequently, so the argument goes, we have traded a natural consciousness of time – one regulated by the natural cycles of the rising and setting sun – with a more abstract, mechanized time embodied by clocks. In this presentation, I will analyze some of the historiography concerned with the relationship between time and capitalism from the high middle ages to the modern world. In particular, I will compare and contrast the work of Jacques Le Goff, E.P. Thompson, Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Vanessa Ogle on this and other related questions including the problem of usury, technologies of time measurement, the role of transportation and mass communication, and globalization.
Thanks to Matt Koval for scheduling these talks.
Featured image: Astronomical clock, Prague, photo by Thomas Peck, https://thomaspeck.wordpress.com/category/czech-republic/