Horological Politics

= how keeping and enforcing time is linked to political power

Discussion

Saffron Huang:

"The visible imposition of time has very often been a deliberate means of exerting control over lives. Sometimes, this display of control is meant to achieve a sense of security through projecting order in chaotic times. The world’s oldest known surviving mechanical clock was installed in medieval Chioggia, soon after a war between Genoa and Venice that left the main piazza blood-stained and the economy devastated. The city council invested what little money it had in a clock tower, as a sign of order for their citizens.

In general,

- public clock towers have always been used to project political power.

By instilling temporal order, public clock towers also aim to instill a sense of civic order.

This civic order can generate a sense of comfort—or not, depending on which people are controlling time for which people’s attention.

Within days of invading, colonists in Africa’s Cape of Good Hope instilled a militarized time signal: the firing of a hilltop cannon everyday at noon. Phenomenologically, a cannon is experienced very differently from a clock tower: associated with war and death, the boom of a cannon carries for miles. Symbolically, it conveys a different message from a local timepiece for a city’s citizens; it asserts control in hopes of unsettling people, rather than reassuring. Every day, the British cannon reverberated clearly in the ears of rival imperial settlers and the indigenous African people and continues to make Cape Town visitors anxious to this day.

Something very similar played out after the bloodshed of India’s First War of Independence, when the British Raj embarked on a construction project that included tall and very loud bell-rung clock towers.

It has been said,

- if the clock was an avatar of Western time, the bell was its amplifier.

The bell-rung clock tower administers a reminder of order, and who can enforce it, to eyes and ears far and wide. The British’s horological supremacy at the height of the empire—London was the center of the clock industry—helped them both to justify (via a sense of technological superiority) and to assert their colonial dominance. More than one hundred clock towers were built in India during the colonial period.

The British imposition of time was oppressive to the people it was imposed on. We have the example of the Australian Indigenous people who had their own timekeeping systems and who resisted and ignored colonial clock faces for a long time, imperially imposed time protocols did finally constrain the unwilling participants with no liberation—telling them to follow protocol and obey their rulers."

(https://summerofprotocols.com/control-and-consciousness-of-time-web)