Boo to Captain Clock: Jay Griffiths sides with the agitators and celebrants who subvert the regulation of time by potentates and pencil-pushers - Taking Back Our Time

New Internationalist, March, 2002 by Jay Griffiths

'We do not recognize history, patriarchy, matriarchy... or lollipop men/ladies... Our currency is to be based on the quag barter system. We do not recognize the Gregorian calendar: this day shall be known as One...' Thus spake British road protesters in a 1995 manifesto.

The clock and calendar have long been a locus for power struggles. Potentates, princes and priests, hypnotized by hopes of hegemony, have always stood on the borders of space and looked at time -- for time is a kingdom, a power and a glory. When the ancient Chinese empire colonized some new territory, the people of that region were sinisterly said to have 'received the calendar'. Pol Pot declared 1975 Year Zero in Cambodia. Mayan priests in Central America gained their power over people through accurate knowledge of time. In 1370, Charles V of France gave an order that all clocks were to be set by the magnificent clock in his palace; he was the ruler of the land and now would be ruler of time. But wherever there are clock rulers, there are clock rebels, and in the French Revolution, Charles V's clock was severely damaged in an act of articulate vandalism. A new time-measurement was announced: 1792 became Year One.

The Benedictine monasteries began scheduling time and ringing bells through the night in the sixth century, controlling and ordering time according to Christian dictat. The Industrial Revolution created time-owners; the capitalist factory bosses, erecting clock-bound fences of work-time and the sense that employers owned the time of their employees, enslaving their time, enclosing it. Stealthily, nastily, one type of time has grown horribly dominant: Western, Christian, linear, abstract, clock-dominated, work-oriented, coercive, capitalist, masculine and anti-natural: Hegemonic Time. This time, and all the time-values which go with it, have been imposed on numerous cultures across the world. (When missionaries arrived the Algonquin people of North America called clock-time 'Captain Clock' because it seemed to command every act for the Christians.)

There is revolt. The challenge to He gemonic Time has come from the radiant variety of times understood by indigenous peoples; from self-conscious political protest; from children's dogged insistence on living in a stretchy eternity; from women's blood and from carnival.

Subversive and mischievous, carnival reverses the norms, overturns the usual hierarchies. Unlike Hegemonic Time, carnival is usually tied to nature's time; it is ahistoric, linked to cyclic, frequently seasonal events. Carnival transforms work-time to playtime, reverses the status quo. It is frequently earthy and sexual. The Puritans hated that, outlawing May Day and other festivals. Carnival also emphasizes commonality; customs of common time celebrated by common people on common land. In Britain, a huge number of these customs disappeared as a result of enclosures: when rights to common land were lost, so were the rites. Carnival is vulgar: of the common people. And it is vulgar in another sense: drunken, licentious, loud and lewd; from May Day's Green Man's Horn, to apple-tree wassailing. Just as land was literally fenced off -- enclosed -- so the spirit of carnival -- broad, unfettered, unbounded exuberance -- was metaphorically enclosed.

But carnival erupts, the deliberate use of carnivalesque costume amongst global-justice protesters of today, for example, in Seattle, Gothenburg, London, Genoa, seriously playing out the politics of carnival -- and indeed the politics of anti-enclosure.

Workers in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s smashed the clocks above the factory gates in protest at the theft of their time. Trade unions took on first the abuse of time, seeking shorter working hours. British workers staunchly persisted in honouring 'Saint Monday' and French workers 'Saint-Lundi' (in effect the patron saint of hangovers). Protest continued, from the 1960s' revolt against work, the refusal to wear watches, the slogan 'Work less, Live more!' to today's 'Downshifters'.

Play, that subversive beastie, anarchic, energetic and creative, is still hated by modern-day Puritans of corporate capitalism. All over the world, colonization included insistence on work time: Columbus, on first meeting the Tainos people of San Salvador, was convinced that they should be 'made to work, sow and do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways...' The Inuit in Canada refer to themselves as 'rich in knowledge, meat and time'. Anthropologists have recently begun referring to hunting and gathering people as 'the original affluent society' in that the pleasures and necessities of life could be secured with minimum work.

One of the most tenacious conceptual threats to work, and to Captain Clock's Hegemonic Time, is childhood itself. Children have a dogged, delicious disrespect for worktime, punctuality, efficiency and for schooled uniform time. Their time is an eternal present. They live (given half a chance) pre-industrially, in tutti-frutti time, roundabout time, playtime; staunch defenders of the ludic revolution, their hours are stretchy, ribboned, enchanted and wild: which is why adults want to tame their time so ferociously, making them clock-trained, teaching them time-measurement as if they were concrete fact. The school clock is pointed to as the ultimate authority which even the Head obeys.