Académique Documents
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Geoffrey C. Bowker
Introduction
TIME & SOCIETY © 1995 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), VOL.
4(1): 47-66.
The regular flow of time, itself inspired by the watch analogy, was the
chiefest discovery of astronomy - and thence of the human spirit:
In effect, we only know completely one single law; that is the law of
constancy and uniformity. It is to this simple idea that we seek to reduce
all others, and it is uniquely in this reduction that science, for us,
consists. . . . Such is, I believe, the natural movement of the human spirit
. . . of which Astronomy offers us the clearest image. (Poinsot, 1837:
386-7)
In this Laplacean era, then, both astronomical and political bodies would
be organized within regular time and hence be fully deterministic.
In sum, a cosmology inspired by factory production developed in
the early nineteenth century in Britain and France. According to this
cosmology, humanity was working on two fronts. First, disordered
human events were being made orderly through the development of the
capitalist mode of production on the one hand and by the coupling of
wayward people with regular machines on the other. Second, the human
spirit was discovering that all apparent disorder and disharmony in the
wider universe (as revealed to astronomers and geologists) could, with
the appropriate representational framework, be dissolved into a regular
ordering of processes in periodic time. In each case there was an appear
ance of disorder and progressive change (the appearance of comets,
booms and slumps); in each case the underlying reality was an eternal
present discovered through the use of a representational framework of
temporal regularity. The convergence of these two fronts meant that
each could find rhetorical and philosophical support in the other.
Railways have figured large in the story that I have told - and often in
unexpected ways. Railways were uniquely important in the nineteenth
century because of the interconnection of two innovations. Railway tech
nology created physically a new landscape - marked by the free flow of
massive physical objects on a straight line. The smells and touch of the
local environment did not exist in the abstract landscape the traveler
sensed (they were replaced by a motley collection of machine odors and
noises); only quantities (time, distance, mass) did. Equally importantly,
the railroads represented their own organization within this abstract
space and time. They imposed a standard, administrative time on the
countries they operated in. They developed organizational flow charts
and command systems that traced out the contours of this abstract space.
The grain elevator, mimicking/adjusting to the railroads also produced
in a single movement the physical abstraction of grain (away from the
local and messy, the farmer putting kinds into a particular bin) and its
representational abstraction (in terms of a receipt given to a farmer - a
receipt to be redeemed at some future date).
Where Yates and Chandler, for example, have concentrated separ
ately and superbly on railroads, organization and representation and
Cronon and Schivelbusch on railroads, commodification and represen
tation, I have attempted to show that we should look at commodification,
representation and organization together. Doing so, we can see that this
space and time came to dominate nineteenth-century thinking for good
organizational reasons, and that they flowed out of a set of particular
technological developments.
I have sketched out the operation of a twin process of making nature
and its representation converge (conflating map and territory). This pro
cess of convergence is a key one in the operation of infrastructural
technologies. Its strongest expression, which we saw in the first section
of this paper, concerns the convergence of ‘man’ and machine. Mumford
pointed to how the same Newtonian quantities that govern the first
convergence are often attached to the second: ‘the new man regulated
his bowels and even his orgasms by clock and calendar, with no respect
to more organic rhythms’. He argued that only measurable attributes of
people were used to build the New World (cf. Hacking, 1990) - leading
to the creation of: ‘a habitat where in the end men were acceptable only
when they took on the attributes of machines’ (Mumford, 1957: 98-9).
Taken separately in terms of either intellectual history or the history of
technology, either side of this convergence appears magical: it appears
that the discovery and implementation of a single universal representa
tional time and space or a single spatio-temporal language for talking
about humans/non-humans are separate. I argue that they are both in
fact consequences of the same underlying processes underwritten by
infrastructural technology and its associated organizational work. I have
collectively labeled such convergences (map/territory; human/non
human) bureaucratic convergence, to underline the organizational work
that was involved in operating them.
In so doing, I find that I have reproduced some key findings from
Alfred Sohn-RethePs work on Galilean space-time. In his classic Intellec
tual and Manual Labour: A Critique o f Epistemology (1978), Sohn-
Rethel focused on the relationship between the commodity form and the
process of intellectual abstraction. His premise was that: T h e form of
commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit’ (1978:
19). Thus, he continued, where use-value was concrete (one could use a
commodity for a certain purpose in the real world), exchange-value was
abstract, quantitative - reckoned in terms of the quintessential^ abstract
quality of money. Sohn-Rethel noted that when a commodity is up for
sale it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of ‘frozen time’
outside of the normal flow of time. It moves in an abstract spatio-
temporal world (which he calls ‘second nature’) unlike the concrete world
of ‘first nature’.
The commodity, then, sketches out (by moving in) a new kind of
representative space. The links in his chain are the arguments that:
1. Commodity exchange is ‘an original source of abstraction’ (1978: 28).
The basic act of representation - separating properties of a thing from
itself and charting those properties in a new medium (with its own
time and space) - is a feature of capitalist organization.
2. This abstraction out there in the economic world (out there in second
nature) ‘contains the formal elements essential for the cognitive fac
ulty of conceptual thinking’ (1978: 28). Thus when people observe
and describe the flow of commodities, they are in fact creating a
representational space and time of much more general import.
3. This is more than a possible link - it actually describes the creation
of: ‘the ideal abstraction basic to Greek philosophy and to modern
science’ (1978: 28).
The concrete creation of a representational space and time comes first;
abstract work by philosophers and scientists in this new space and time
is consequent on that prior creation and an accidental feature of it.
Sohn-Rethel’s commodification process is in the last instance deter
ministic and hegemonic. A number of recent works in science and tech
nology studies have, for a variety of good reasons, attacked any idea of
social determinism (MacKenzie, 1990; Pickering, 1994) or even of society
itself (Latour, 1987). We should not, the chorus goes, attribute any pre
existent reality to society and social process: these are products of our
technological, scientific and organizational work. In this paper, I have
explored a way of embracing these positions while at the same time
looking to the creation of large-scale regularities over extended periods
of time. I have argued that by looking at the intertwining of organiz
ational forms and infrastructural technology we can trace in operation the
development of a convergence between nature (which becomes second
nature) and the bureaucratic representation of second nature in forms,
flow charts and other representational devices (second nature once
removed). The immutable mobiles of the bureaucratic representation
flow in a space and exist in a time which the infrastructural technology
is conjuring nature into. The representation and the technology have
grown up together - notably in the great railroad companies of the
nineteenth century. The convergence of (second) nature and organization
creates the highly contingent world in which Latour’s (1992) hybrids can
proliferate. If we want to truly understand the contingency then we must
also look to its flip side - convergence.
The resultant representational framework was never hegemonic: it
was never universally imposed nor universally true. Postmodern geo
graphies and histories have questioned whether any society or economic
system has created a uniform representational space and time (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987; Appadurai, 1990). Alongside and in direct opposition
to the discourse of featureless time there developed a discourse of time
as progress and change: as a direct causal factor in historical events; and
it is well known that later in the nineteenth century historical and
scientific time was more active. Further, for many social worlds these
representational discourses were irrelevant and false. The reality of the
convergence lies in a particular contingent convergence of political and
scientific discourse mirroring a shift in the political economy, widely
considered. The convergence was an extremely powerful one: it gave
scientists the imprimatur of the state (since scientists produced apparent
social truths) and awarded the state the copyright to the Book of Nature
(by intermediary of the scientists). The motor of the convergence was a
(failed) attempt by a modernist state to make itself more and more real,
by simultaneously projecting nature and society into the same co-ordinate
space and time.
It is easy to assume that the time of the industrial revolution was one
of speed and progress; we have uncovered a representational time that
was static (an eternal present) and featureless. The relationship between
these two times is an intricate one. A consideration of both, however, is
central to an understanding of modern times. It is through the analysis
of organizational work and infrastructural technology that such an under
standing will come. Both the work processes and the technology are a
necessary part of the analysis: the watch was at once a symbol of the
principle of the division of labor (Babbage, 1832: 52) and of the techno
logical ordering of social and natural time; it was also the archetypical
scientific instrument (Comte, 1832). As social and scientific work pro
cesses and technology developed together, so too did their products -
humanity and scientific knowledge - converge. And so co-ordinate space
and time came to mediate social and scientific co-ordination.
References