The endless quarrels over the reform of the Gregorian Calendar and over the standardization of local times which differed from town to town were conflicts over the territorial scope of certain social systems each of which had its corresponding system of time. For the people who lived in these systems, however, it was their occupation, their status, and their place of residence that decided which rules of time they had to follow. With the advent of clocks, communally usable, visible reference points were created, which were superior in accuracy and reliability to the means of orientation previously used, the observation of heavenly bodies or the behaviour of animals. It was enough now to glance up at the clock on the church steeple to find out what time it was. One's own sense of time, regulated by the recurring festivals of the ecclesiastical year, by social habits and the necessity of adapting one's work rhythm to the requirements of agriculture, was sufficient to dictate the generally valid, social time. Only with the advent of capitalism, when time could be converted into money, did the attitude towards time characteristic of industrial societies emerge, and the process of detachment of a lifetime which had become measurable in working hours begin. The machine first required to be operated – to the point of total exhaustion. The time that was left was used up in restoring the capacity for work which had been expended in one's working hours. The relation of one's own time to that of others, to social time, had come under the laws of economy – the economy of time. The machine dictated the metronomic rhythm for the machine age. Viewed in this light, the struggle of the organized labour movement in the nineteenth century for shorter working hours was a first step towards the recognition of a minimal proper time, but this was still viewed wholly as collective time and filled with contents which had been collectively mapped out: those of urgently needed recuperation. For the bourgeois individual, however, the emergence of individuality and subjectivity brought a separate sense of time. But the latter remained, as for the female reader of the novel, or for entries in the diary, which became the temporal organ of private feelings, still wholly embedded in the private sphere, withheld from the eyes of others, the secret time of the emergent self.23
The Illusion of Simultaneity
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