ABSTRACT
When we think about how our conception of time has changed as part of a long narrative of European modernity, we think clocks and calendars; indeed, this is the mode I adopted in Chapter 2 in portraying the singularization of time. Yet there are other technologies that have also affected our time consciousness, devices which have perhaps been marginalized in accounts of time because of their ostensibly indirect connection to time in comparison to the overt time-keeping performed by clocks and calendars. I am talking about new transport and media technologies such as trains, which affected people’s perception of speed and cinema, which seemed to capture the world in real time. Yet an underlying common thread between clocks and these other time-based technologies has always been there; both Poincaré and Einstein saw time as procedural, that time is essentially what a clock does. And let us also recall from Chapter 1, Bergson’s line drawn on the paper, the ‘unfolded’: a material record of movement; unwittingly, perhaps Bergson has offered us a way to re-think time. Clocks, moving hands, lines on paper, images on film, wheels on a track, pixels on a screen, grooves on vinyl … maybe it is in exploring the connections between these materialities and what they do, that we fully come to understand the complexity of time.
