Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Henri Hubert, one of the founding figures in the anthropology of time, wrote, “The division of time entails the maximum of convention and the minimum of experience” (1999, 70). Barbara Adam, a leading current figure in the social scientific study of time, writes, “Time forms such an integral part of our lives that is rarely thought about” (1995, 5). The lack of thought about time can lead to unexamined assumptions, and these assumptions can mislead us when we study the ideas of time from other cultures and eras. Along these lines, A.J. Gurevich observed, “The present perception of time bears very little resemblance to that of other epochs” (1976, 230); Robert Levine notes, “Life on clock time is clearly out of line with virtually all of recorded history” (1997, 81–82); and Sacha Stern argues that assumptions about temporal regularity common today are unfounded in the study of ancient calendars and consequently lead to misunderstandings (2012). These observations suggest a problem for the study of cultural differences, namely, that a dimension of thought and experience about which we are unreflective might be shaped in ways that are culturally unusual. As I wrote in Objects of Time, “In thinking about the human understanding of time through the human past and across cultural differences, we have adopted a unique and artifactually mediated set of ideas as the ideal type against which all other ideas are understood and evaluated” (2012, 169). Could attempts at studying cultural differences be refracted through the unusual, even eccentric, assumptions about time derived from relatively recent developments in the European time-keeping tradition?

This is not a question of how different disciplines think about time. Andrew Abbott began his book Time Matters with the question “Historians cared about sequence and order. Sociologists didn’t. Why?” (2001, 4). He eventually arrived at a conclusion that emphasized disciplinary differences—historians emphasize change; sociologists emphasize fixed causes (2001, 295). In effect, different disciplines have different temporalities. What are the temporalities of anthropology, however? If one accepts Malinowski’s dictum that anthropology studies the “native’s point of view” (1961, 25), then one might conclude that anthropology merely relates the temporalities of the people it studies, but the crisis of representation in the 1980s (see Clifford 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Cushman 1982) revealed that claim to be dubious. Whereas Abbott is interested in what the dominant temporality should be for theory and method, the question raised here is a bit different: What temporalities get in the way of describing and understanding the diversity of human thought and behavior?

Anthropology is among those disciplines one might think are equipped to address cultural diversity and time, and to become aware of its own temporal assumptions. Yet, anthropology has struggled with this issue. In Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian raised the issue of “anthropology’s problem with Time” (2002, 60). Unfortunately, while he pointed out the problem, anthropology has not really addressed it. Rather than wrestling with the time problem, much of anthropology instead offers a greater “historical perspective” than it did previous to Fabian’s book. While this addresses the temporal warping caused by the rhetorical construction of the ethnographic present, it does not address the underlying cultural logics that shape Western scholarship’s conceptualization of history. Indeed, history is as subject to these temporal logics as anthropology, so a substitution of history for the ethnographic present is simply a substitution of one manifestation of these logics for another. Indeed, the problem with time is not just within anthropology, but is a problem of all European-derived post-Enlightenment scholarship. Fabian was too modest in his project.

Carol Greenhouse’s book A Moment’s Notice is bolder than Fabian’s in its trenchant criticism of anthropological temporal biases, because rather than limiting herself to the temporal framing of ethnographic representation, she tackles the biases that seep into all ethnographic practice. She notes numerous ways in which anthropology’s naive approach to the topic of time distorts ethnographic representation: she points out the tendency of anthropologists to assume that without time-keeping technology, ideas of time emerge from cultural interpretations of nature (1996, 40); she describes how anthropologists assume that a lack of cultural emphasis on duration indicates a lack of concern about time (1996, 41); and, finally, that “the indifference to time mentioned by some ethnographers is generally taken to indicate an absence of temporal constructions altogether” (1996, 46). According to Greenhouse, all of these are examples of how anthropology has deviated from Durkheim’s emphasis on time as social in favor of an assumption about a “real” time against which different cultural notions can be evaluated (1996, 46–47). She then notes that anthropological discussions of social time “proceed from analogies to the mechanical clock, as if the clock were itself a materialization of some universal time sense” (1996, 47). The clock is a European cultural creation. As I have argued elsewhere, it is the clock and Gregorian calendar that are exotic and unusual ways of representing time—“the exceptions of human history that have become the rule” (2012, 170). Postill has chastised anthropologists for not studying the spread of calendar and clock time throughout the world (2002), but to his critique can be added the semiconscious absorption of clock and calendar time by anthropologists when describing temporalities. Anthropology has even been an agent in spreading clock and calendar time by means of its representational strategies.

Recently, John Collins (2015) has argued that there is a tendency among social scientists to fix the ontological status of cultural representations without giving due attention to how those representations are fluidly negotiated, created, and deployed. In the process of doing so, social scientists often insert their own cultural biases that then influence how the cultural representations are described. Based on Greenhouse’s observations, this is particularly true with the study of cultural concepts of time where European-derived temporal concepts have filtered ethnographic representations in ways that are subtly distorting—whether it be in the form of time-allocation studies, or representing a daily round of activity as parallel to a clock, or treating how people chart annual cycles as if they used European calendrical logics. In effect, the biases that Gurevich, Levine, and Stern observe can distort ethnographic description and historical scholarship. Moreover, there is growing evidence that the spatial metaphors that European-derived scholarship often uses to discuss time are not pancultural—namely, that there are languages in which spatial metaphors are not used in this way (Sinha 2014a, b; Sinha et al. 2011).

It Can Be Noon at Two O’Clock

Even European timekeeping used to be different from our current naturalized assumptions about time. To demonstrate this, I shall discuss Derrida’s analysis of the story “Counterfeit Money” by Charles Baudelaire. Derrida is regarded as a major figure in unsettling the connection between representations and their meaning. His concept of deconstruction has been applied widely to reveal hidden assumptions and contradictions in texts ranging from the literary to the scientific. Yet, Derrida was not immune to the influence of his cultural milieu. His discussion of “Counterfeit Money” reveals his assumptions about time, and the gulf between him and Baudelaire. In the book Given Time: I (1992), Derrida addresses the relationship of time to giving in this story of Baudelaire’s. To focus on the problem of giving, Derrida cannot allow time to be a self-referential signifier with multiple, relevant meanings. So when discussing Baudelaire’s use of a French idiom—“But into my miserable brain, always concerned with looking for noon at two o’clock (what an exhausting faculty is nature’s gift to me!)” (Baudelaire quoted in Derrida 1992, 32)—Derrida writes:

At no given moment, and no desired moment [moment voulu] can one reasonably hope to find, outside any relativity, noon at two o’clock. This contradiction is the logical and chronological form of the impossible simultaneity of two times, of two events separated in time and which therefore cannot be given at the same time. (1992, 34, emphasis in original)

It seems quite obvious that it cannot be noon at two o’clock, but it is only obvious within a twentieth-century post-Enlightenment understanding of time as a uniform commodified duration. Derrida does not recognize clock time for what it is: a self-referential representation (see Birth 2012). It cannot be noon at two o’clock only because that is what we were taught in grade school when we learned much of what we know about time. Then again, as Elias observes, “One of the difficulties in investigating time is that people are as yet little aware of the nature and functioning of the symbols they have themselves developed and constantly use. They are therefore always in danger of losing themselves in the undergrowth of their own symbols” (1992, 29).

I know from my French friends that the meaning of the colloquial phrase “looking for noon at two o’clock” is to create a problem where there is none, but I shall purposefully complicate that colloquial meaning in order to demonstrate something Derrida ignores in his discussion: that Baudelaire wrote his story in a context with different attitudes and ideas about time than when Derrida generated his analysis. In a sense, by problematizing “looking for noon at two o’clock,” I am “looking for noon at two o’clock” by looking for noon at two o’clock.

In looking for trouble, I ask: What if time is duplicitous? What if underneath the seemingly obvious fact that it cannot be noon at two o’clock is a set of multiple meanings that permit noon at two? In fact, duplicity in the measure of time is at the very core of modernity’s timescales. Some might find the explanation of this tedious, but understanding the technical side of how time is produced sheds light on how self-referential, and potentially duplicitous, the representation of time can be.

The International System (SI) second, the global standard unit for measuring time, is defined by periods of cesium atoms. That said, while the second is defined in terms of periods of cesium, the best clocks today are not cesium clocks, so the cycles of cesium equivalent to a second are actually measured by the periods of rubidium or hydrogen. The standard definition of the second is different from most people’s understanding of what a second is: The SI second is not defined as a fraction of a mean solar day, because Earth’s rotation is too irregular to serve as a measurement standard. When the SI second was originally defined, it was in reference to a fraction of a tropical year (CNRS 1950, 129), because the duration of Earth’s orbit around the Sun is far more stable than Earth’s wobbly rotation.

This SI second is not a fraction of the current year as measured by atomic clocks, however. This fraction of a year that defines the second (as represented by cycles of atoms) is roughly equivalent to the average length of 1/86,400 of a solar day as calculated by Simon Newcomb in 1895 for January 1 of the year 1900. Newcomb used astronomical records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to determine the average rotation of Earth and the duration of that rotation. He then projected his calculation forward to 1900. Modern metrologists think that Newcomb’s data set is such that his calculation more accurately refers to a day sometime in 1820, however (Nelson et al. 2001, 509).

In sum, the unit of the second is not a simple matter to define. On the contrary, it is a polysemic sign that a global bureaucracy concerned with measurement attempts to constrain to a single meaning. Such attempts at constraint are undone by their own technological efforts to improve the definition of what a second is. The attempts by scientists to improve the definition result in the proliferation of new and old definitions used by the general public and embedded in previous clocks, watches, and electronics. To date, these differing definitions have not been great enough for most people to notice, but as more and more technologies rely on greater and greater precision, legacy definitions will become a greater problem.

So if a second is precisely defined, then a minute, an hour, and a day are precisely defined, right? This is true of the minute and the hour, but not of the concept of the day. 86,400 SI seconds never vary; rotational days do. Since Earth is a rotating object moving through space, one rotation in relationship to the Sun usually does not equal 360 degrees. This rotational period varies further because Earth is tilted, and the orientation of the tilt to the Sun affects the duration of a day. These variations led to the calculation of the mean solar day—an average length of day throughout the year. Moreover, since Earth’s surface is mostly water, and the water gets pulled by the Moon to form the tides, there is constantly a bulge moving around Earth as it rotates. This bulge of water generates a braking influence on its rotation that results in that rotation gradually slowing over time. Because of this effect, Nelson et al. point out that “the present length of the mean solar day is about 2.5 ms longer than a day of precisely 86,400 SI seconds” (2001, 75).

So is a day an 1820 mean solar day, 86,400 SI seconds, a mean solar day in the present, or an apparent solar day? Actually, the day has not been officially defined as a unit of measure (see Seaman 2014).

The duplicity of time does not end with the relationship between the second, the day, and Earth’s rotation. The definition of the SI second is used to constitute Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is a weighted average of times indicated by over 300 atomic clocks. There is no master clock. Each month, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) calculates UTC and reports the value of UTC for the previous month in the publication Circular T. This periodical not only contains the previous month’s values for UTC but it also records the deviations of the times of all the laboratories that contribute time data for UTC’s calculation. This means that the UTC which the time services of these laboratories distribute is not authentic UTC, but an estimation of UTC (Arias et al. 2011, S148–150; Levine 2001, 54). It is this laboratory-specific estimation of UTC that goes out to most of our electronic devices. Thus, even UTC is duplicitous, although for most practical purposes, the difference between the BIPM calculation and the time that is distributed is too small to matter.

So, was Baudelaire’s sense of noon 43,200 seconds after midnight (probably not, because his clocks and watches were likely not that accurate), or when his clock indicated 12:00 p.m., or when a public clock struck twelve, or the general period around midday, or when a shadow was at its shortest during the day, or when a shadow pointed due north or struck a noon mark on some windowsill? There are multiple noons and multiple twos. Derrida’s comment should be changed from “outside any relativity” to “outside any consciousness of the semiotics of time, it cannot be noon at two.”

Built on this duplicity of time is a duplicity more familiar in social science—the duplicity of time in defining capitalist labor relations. Sometimes the artistry of social relations requires managing different times. In a context such as rural Trinidad where industrial and agricultural labor relations meet and collide, one finds a consciousness of multiple times that Derrida lacks. In Trinidad, when I inquired about the expression “Any time is Trinidad time,” one man said, “You’ll tell the person who comin’ to meet you to go come at one o’clock and their one o’clock might be half past two in the evening, and when they come they will still tell you they on time.” On the surface this seems quite commonplace and different from the sensibility in Baudelaire’s phrase, but the logic behind the saying “Any time is Trinidad time” that allows one to treat eight o’clock as if it were seven extends to other contexts, and most interestingly in relationships between workers and their employers. To frame this point, it is worth quoting an elderly Trinidadian man who recalled how time was indicated in plantation work: “In the instances they blow a conch shell to tell you, well, in ten minutes we all must bear up to enter the field and at dismissal time, at four o’clock, they blow the conch shell again, and you know it is dismissal time.” This centralized control of time is a facet of labor relations. E.P. Thompson offers testimony from witnesses to conditions at Braid’s Mill: “‘...[I]n reality there were no regular hours: masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression’” (quoted in Thompson 1967, 86). The implication of this is that the employer could make four thirty or even five o’clock into the dismissal time of four o’clock.

When workers carry their own watches, it is not merely a matter of keeping the employer honest, but it allows the possibility of the workers themselves creating duplicitous time. Where I did my fieldwork in Trinidad, the conditions were ideal for this. In both plantation and roadwork, workers were distributed over large areas and often supervised by a foreman who was promoted from the ranks of the regular workers, but whose sentiments were still more with the workers than with the employer. This foreman was in charge of the dismissal time from work and obviously could become popular with the workers if he allowed the workers to go home early. If management suspected that a foreman was doing this, they would send a supervisor out to the work crew around dismissal time to check to see if they were working. In this game of cat and mouse, the foreman had to be sure to dismiss workers at the correct dismissal time according to his watch. This led to exchanges between supervisors and workers about the correct time. As I discussed in Any Time Is Trinidad Time (Birth 1999), foremen developed a trick of being able to change the time on their pocket watches while the watches were still in their pockets. This would allow a foreman to set his watch to that of the supervisor at the beginning of the day, end the work day 20–30 minutes early, and adjust the watch to indicate the correct dismissal time when a supervisor showed up at the work site after the work crews had gone home (1999, 103–104).

Returning to Derrida, rather than viewing noon at two o’clock as an “obvious” contradiction, thereby a priori prohibiting any inquiry into other possibilities, one should be open to the ways in which it can be noon at two o’clock. To do this requires attention to the flexibility of noon and the artificiality of the clock. After all, for all the emphasis that has been made on the arbitrariness of signs, little of this discourse has been applied to the arbitrariness of clock time as a sign.

Derrida’s sense that noon at two o’clock is an obvious impossibility is the product of a temporal consciousness that seems to have emerged relatively recently as a result of the acceptance of systems of uniform timekeeping. Elias points out that the current emphasis on uniformity and continuity “runs counter” to both physics and the thinking of our predecessors (1992, 39–40). In fact, Baudelaire’s life span overlapped with the period when the foundation for temporal uniformity was being laid but temporal uniformity was not yet adopted. This was the period after what Macey (1980) dubs the horological revolution—a period in the eighteenth century when the precision of timepieces coupled with the precision of astronomic observation ushered in a new era of accuracy in timekeeping. As a result, mechanical clocks and mean time came to be preferred over direct observation of the Sun. One reason for the preference was that clocks were easier for travelers to use than sundials. To use a sundial properly, one must know one’s latitude as well as be able to orient the dial to a north–south axis. A watch required less knowledge to use as one traveled. One could simply keep it set to local time by adjusting it to local bells that chimed the hours or to noon marks or public sundials that could be found in many towns and cities. There were no time zones at this period, so even a short journey east or west could result in having to adjust one’s watch.

Baudelaire lived at the end of this shift from sundials to watches. It is likely that he was even aware of French Revolutionary time, which replaced traditional time with decimal hours (Shaw 2011; Zerubavel 1977). In this time, noon was five o’clock. This is readily seen in period watches that were made to allow one to convert decimal time to traditional time.

Baudelaire’s life also unfolded somewhat parallel to that of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer who often wrote about the theme of time and whose work was translated by Baudelaire into French. Baudelaire, in effect, worked during an era in which time reckoning was shifting from the individualistic timepiece to the synchronized watch, and he translated Poe’s texts in which the theme of time reckoning looms large and usually in connection to themes of foreboding (as in “The Raven”), terror (“The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”), suspense (“The Masque of the Red Death”), the emotional range from rapture to melancholy to despair (“Bells”), or the foolishness of those who do not understand the arbitrariness of clocks and calendars (“The Devil in the Belfry”).

This last story is particularly interesting in terms of period consciousness regarding the duplicity of time. “The Devil in the Belfry” portrayed how the people of Vondervotteimittiss (Wonder-what-time-it-is) lived by their impressive town clock. This clock was managed by the belfry-man, who is the most important man in the village, or, as Poe writes, “He is the most perfectly respected of any man in the world. He is the chief dignitary of the borough, and the very pigs look up to him with a sentiment of reverence” (1975, 739). One day, just before noon, a “diminutive, foreign-looking young man” appeared carrying a chapeau-de-bras and a large fiddle. He danced into town to the annoyance of the residents of Vondervotteimittiss—“But what mainly occasioned a righteous indignation was, that the scoundrelly popinjay, while he cut a fandango here, and a whirligig there, did not seem to have the remotest idea in the world of such a thing as keeping time in his steps” (1975, 740). This man “pigeon-winged himself right up into the belfry” (1975, 740), and as the great clock began to strike noon, he began to bludgeon the belfry-man with the fiddle and the chapeau-de-bras. Meanwhile, the townspeople diligently counted the chiming of the clock’s bells. After the clock struck noon, the story concludes:

“Und dvelf it is!” said all the little old gentlemen, putting up their watches. But the big bell had not done with them yet.

“Thirteen!” said he.

“Der Teufel!” gasped the little old gentlemen, turning pale, dropping their pipes, and putting down all their right legs from over their left knees.

“Der Teufel!” groaned they, “Dirteen! Dirteen!!- Mein Gott, it is Dirteen o’clock!!”

Why attempt to describe the terrible scene which ensued? All Vondervotteimittiss flew at once into a lamentable state of uproar.

“Vot is cum’d to mein pelly?” roared all the boys—“I’ve been ongry for dis hour!” (1975, 741)

In this story, among Poe’s targets for his wit and mockery are those who wonder what time it is and who are obsessed with the clock. He portrays these folk as so focused on the clock that they cannot recognize noon. They make the belfry-man the most important man in the world. But a scoundrel who cannot keep time when he dances demonstrates that thirteen o’clock is possible, and that it is possible for it to occur at noon.

It is not surprising, then, that time is a theme that recurs in Baudelaire’s writings as does his ambivalence about clock time. Baudelaire’s life unfolds between the emergence of reasonably accurate watches and the enshrinement of national times and time zones in law. It is a period when each town has its own local time, and even public clocks within the same city can strike the hour differently. The combination and contrast of different times and timescales is a powerful generator of meaning rather than simple contradiction or irony.

The difference between passages about clock time from before Baudelaire’s birth and after his death reveals the movement from multiple to uniform times. Baudelaire is a writer during the period of the muddled middle of timekeeping—between diversity of times and clock performance and uniformity and grades for clock performance. For instance, in his 1711 Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope wrote:

’Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own. (1970, 4, emphasis in original)

As an aside, in Samuel Johnson’s collection The Works of English Poets, he lists the date of Pope’s poem as 1709 with an asterisk that leads to the note: “Mr. Pope told me himself that the ‘Essay on Criticism’ was indeed written in 1707 though said 1709 by mistake. J. Richardson” (1779, 87).

This particular phrase of Pope’s has remained popular in English literature and has been deployed in a variety of ways, ranging from a guide for military surgeons (Hamilton 1787, Vol. 2, 179) to an article on circadian rhythms of birds and plants in the New York Times in 1998 (Freeman 1998, 4). While the phrase suggests the great extent to which opinions differ, its survival in an age of a coordinated global time system that is managed to a level of accuracy of one second every 60 million years seems ironic. If opinions varied as much as the clocks and watches of the early twenty-first century, then opinions would vary hardly at all! So while Pope’s turn of phrase poetically indicates varied opinions, it does so solely on the consciousness that different watches can indicate different times. If one accepts Pope’s representation of the extent to which opinions vary as an indication of the extent to which early eighteenth-century watches varied, then watches used to vary quite considerably in the times they indicated. Milham reports that early clocks and watches were only accurate to around two hours per day (1947, 226). Before Baudelaire’s lifetime, for it to be noon at two of the clock one had to use a clock—one could not achieve such confusion with a sundial.

In fact, in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century and later, statements of another time at noon were commonplace—a search using the digital archive Eighteenth-century Collections Online produces many results along these lines: In his memoirs, General Thomas Fairfax wrote of one of his battles, “And here did the first fifth continue from eleven o’clock at noon, till five at night” (1776, 29); and Mrs. Catherine Jemmat wrote in her memoirs, “Yesterday about two o’clock at noon, I came to drink a pint of beer at a public-house” (1765, 139). Such minor examples are numerous, but one also finds the following two cases. The first comes from a letter to The Monthly Magazine and British Register from 1798:

Sir,

I have just been reading in your Magazine for July, an excellent paper on “Progressive lateness of Hours kept in England,” and heartily concur with the sentiments offered there on this growing folly …

I believe that four o’clock is the latest dinner-hour in the memory of the oldest fashionables now living. This was soon altered to five, which, with some, is still nominally the hour: I say nominally, for cards of invitation, like the beauties of Eastern writing, are not to be interpreted literally; and five generally means, and is fully understood to mean, any time between six and seven … One night at the opera, when the last dance was finished, I heard Mr. B— ask Lord D— to go home and take pot-luck with him, which the latter declined, owing to a previous engagement to dine with a select party, as soon as the Duke of Bedford’s motion was got rid of! This Mr. B—, however, is a sort of wag—a plain country gentleman, who eats his mutton chop quietly at two o’clock at noon, and afterwards sups at his lady’s midnight dinners. (1798, 97, emphasis added)

The second case comes from The Spectator, a daily periodical written by Joseph Addison and others in the early eighteenth century:

The hours of the day and night are taken up in the cities of London and Westminster, by people as different from each other as those who are born in different centuries. Men of six o’clock give way to those of nine, they of nine to the generation of twelve, and they of twelve disappear, and make room for the fashionable world, who have made two o’clock the noon of the day. (1744, 226, emphasis added)

Noon is thus sometimes a period around midday, and sometimes the zenith of the Sun, and sometimes twelve o’clock. The “fashionable” seem to be fashionably late with time, commonly making five o’clock into six or seven in the evening, and two o’clock into noon. There is a consciousness of the arbitrariness of time.

It is a small conceptual difference between making two o’clock noon and looking for noon at two o’clock as Baudelaire’s protagonist does. The fashionable eighteenth-century English could find noon at two, but what of Baudelaire’s Parisian? For him, this ability was a curse, and led to moral musings on his friend’s behavior. Contrary to Derrida, the tension is not between noon and two, but between the curse of looking for the fashionable noon at two and a moral sensitivity toward beggars that is not fashionable.

This discomfiting nature of time was later suppressed. In contrast to Pope, in Around the World in 80 Days (a tale based on Poe’s story “Three Sundays in a Week”), Jules Verne describes his protagonist, Phileas Fogg, as following a daily schedule according to “chronometrically set times” (1995, 9), and Fogg’s abbreviated interview in which he hires Passepartout as his valet is instructive:

“What time do you make it?”

“Eleven twenty-two,” replied Passepartout, pulling an enormous silver watch from the depths of his waistcoat pocket.

“Your watch is slow.”

“Pardon me, sir, but that’s impossible.”

“You’re four minutes slow. It is of no consequence. What matters is to note the difference.” (1995, 11)

The reader learns from Passepartout that his watch “never loses more than five minutes a year. It’s a genuine Chronometer!” (1995, 35). Yet, instead of setting his chronometer to a known meridian, Passepartout must align his reckoning of time with that of his master.

Whether or not the idea of a “genuine chronometer” is meaningful depends on the audience. Connoisseurs of fine watches might appreciate the statement and the irony that it is the servant who carries the chronometer. Since 1973, makers of fine spring-oscillator watches have sought chronometer certification from the Contrôl Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres (COSC). Such certification demonstrates the accuracy and reliability of the watch. Those, like myself, who are content with (and can only afford) cheap watches tend not to aspire to purchase a watch that is a genuine chronometer. Yet, this certification indicates that two watches that show the same time, an expensive spring-oscillator certified chronometer and a cheap electronic watch, suggest a profound difference in status between their owners.

The contrast between Pope and Verne suggests that innovations in timekeeping that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have made all watches “go alike.”

Since clock time was a signifier in flux, as the global time system evolved and before there were international agreements seeking temporal uniformity, there were many different ways it could find noon at two.

The Duplicity of Noon

In current colloquial English usage, noon is twelve o’clock during the daylight hours. In astronomy, apparent noon is when the Sun is at its zenith at a particular meridian. The term noon has its origins in the canonical hours of the Christian Church.

Originally known as Nones, noon is the ninth hour after sunrise, but in more practical terms, Nones was when the Sun was halfway between its zenith and its setting. In some parts of Europe, Nones began to drift earlier in the day, until reaching midday, thereby creating the conflation between the canonical hour and the time of the Sun’s zenith in the term noon (Dohrn van-Rossum 1996, 31). Since the canonical hour of noon/Nones was in the midafternoon, this gives some irony to the translation of Derrida’s French into the English “impossibility of noon at two o’clock.” In French, this confusion of noon and Nones does not exist: midi is midday, and Nones is the canonical hour.

Until as late as 100 years ago, throughout much of Europe, public bells chimed the canonical hours rather than mechanically determined hours (Corbin 1998, 111). The canonical hours were developed around seven periods of reciting components of the Daily Office. The daily cycle of readings, canticles, and psalms that the religious recited may have begun as early as the first century (Taft 1993, 13). The legitimacy of the seven periods came from Psalm 119:164, as well as from the story of the Passion of Jesus Christ, one of the few stories in the Bible with a detailed representation of diurnal time. These passages from the Bible led to the monastic hours of Matins, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline. Each monastic hour was linked to a place in the cycle of daylight, and consequently varied throughout the year as the balance of daylight and nighttime shifted.

Since church bells were among the earliest and most public of timekeepers, and since these bells chimed monastic hours and not mean hours, once clocks and watches that worked on the basis of mechanical mean time were developed, there was a clear discrepancy between church bells and mechanical timepieces. Slowly, throughout Europe, the chimes were synchronized with mean time, with some of the last conversions occurring in the early twentieth century.

The phrase “noon at two o’clock” is a pivotal point in Baudelaire’s story—it is the moment when the narrator begins to reflect on the dubious morality of giving a beggar a counterfeit coin. Derrida sees an impossibility, but the dual meanings of midi in French as midday and lunchtime compounded with the multiple associations of noon in English do not create a contradiction, but a dense web of association between being fashionable, eating, fasting, penance, and religiosity. As long as Derrida takes the time as obvious, it is not possible to recognize the alternate possibilities, much less to challenge modernity’s assumptions about time.

Post-Baudelairian Noons at Two

This discussion has raised the ways in which it might be noon at two o’clock in order to reveal the irony of Derrida accepting an artificial, constructed, and arbitrary time so as to allow him to create the obviousness of a contradiction. This is ironic, because rather than engaging in deconstruction, Derrida is affirming a false consciousness of a cultural construct of modernity. This discussion also serves as a means of pointing out the contrivance of modernity’s temporal uniformity. The point is to reveal the extent to which we accept as obvious a sense of time that is historically and culturally contingent. The idea of homogenous empty time criticized by Benjamin (1968), yet widely accepted as a condition of modernity (Anderson 2006; Asad 2003; Taylor 2007), does not have the historical depth and naturalness that is often attributed to it, and as later chapters will show, it should not have a complete grip on consciousness.

This cultural emphasis on temporal uniformity is antagonistic to other temporalities. In his Principia, Newton argued in favor of the use of absolute temporal uniformity over observed motions. For him, true time was this absolute and uniform time, not the colloquial unit of hour, day, month, or year. In effect, Newton argues that science needs to be based on a true time that is distinct from the rhythms and temporalities people experience. In an odd turn of phrase, he writes, “Possibile est, ut nullus sit motus aequabilis quo Tempus accurate mensuretur” [It is possible that there may be no uniform movement by means of which to measure time accurately] (1714, 7). The implication is that it might not be possible to achieve truly uniform units of time because all the processes and cycles in the world are too irregular. Somehow, this unachievable (to Newton) idea of time is the dominant idea of time by means of which everything is studied.

The most significant blindness of Derrida in his Given Time: I is an experience of something even more pronounced than noon at two that he must have had with great frequency. After all, in his later years he taught at the University of California at Irvine. If he had ever had a telephone call between California and France, he would have had to recognize a time difference of nine hours, in effect, noon in California and nine in France. He would have lived nine at noon! The impossibility he proclaims for noon at two, then, is an undue deference to clock time that ignores all the ways in which it can be two times at once.

This time difference is not directly related to Baudelaire’s noon and two, but it does undermine the impossibility and contradiction that Derrida attributes to Baudelaire. Instead of reading Baudelaire as making a comment on impossibility, it is possible, contra Derrida, to read Baudelaire as emphasizing equivocality and duplicity—the duplicity of time and the gift of counterfeit money.

What Is Time?

Marramao points out that “[t]ime places itself at the crux of the relation between daily experience and its representation” (2007, 39). The problem with Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire’s comments about time is that Derrida takes for granted the merger of experience and representation. For Derrida, the definition of time by the motion of the clock is unquestioned and even naturalized. This seems to be part of the modern condition of social science. In physics, on the other hand, the clock does not go unquestioned. Einstein makes the relativity of time and motion a central concern, while Derrida emphasizes that it cannot be noon at two o’clock “outside any relativity.” In other words, outside of what is known about the physical nature of time, it cannot be noon and two o’clock at the same time. In Derrida’s imagination of time, unquestioned and naturalized cultural signifiers trump physics. Yet, if they are cultural signifiers, they could be otherwise. Outside of assumptions of European-derived forms of modernity, it can be noon at two.

Why devote this much attention to Derrida’s Given Time: I? The point is to unsettle naturalized ideas of time so that it is easier to recognize their misapplication. The chapters that follow explore such misapplications in ethnographic representation, chronobiology, discussions of labor-time, chronology, and the imagination of the future. The challenge is to overcome such cultural bias to explore temporalities in all their forms.