A Necromantic Device, or How Clocks Think

Abstract

Clocks and calendars are necromantic devices—tools by which the dead think for the living, and the dead’s thoughts deflect the living’s attention from the cycles in the present. This is a consequence of the mediation of cognition by artifacts, and it is a feature of how artifacts can distribute cognitive models across time, culture, and space.

Time should be so defined that the equations of inechanics may be as simple as possible. In other words, there is not one way of measuring time more true than another; that which is generally adopted is only more convenient.

—Poincaré, from “Time and Its Measure” (1913 [1905], 227–228; emphasis in original)