Rethinking Order (original) (raw)

Every search for an authoritative standard time shows how much time depends on a stable order of social practices and technological conditions. The introduction of a uniform world-time in the 19 th Century was preceded by political, scientific, and economic struggles for an authoritative model of a temporal order. Only if social practices and technological conditions are met, can time limit the different local times around the world in their scope, assign clearly defined boundaries of time zones, lead to a standardized reference system, and thus make time predictable in its difference. That the division of the globe into time zones , with 15° steps each demarcating the interval of one hour, follows the division into longitudes, and that the prime meridian marking the world time runs through British Greenwich, is due to historical conventions of worldwide maritime navigation, which has long used the Royal Observatory as a basis for measurement. There is little astronomical benefit or any other scientifically plausible reason for privileging Greenwich. Any other longitude-designated as such by other practices-could have been the zero meridian and thus have caused conventions of the order of time different from those established at the International Meridian Conference in 1884 under the hegemony of the British Empire (Blaise 2002, 94; Bartky 2007, 4). To conclude from the order and measurement of time a strictly »social nature of time« and to declare it a product of collective experience that distances the human events from natural rhythms (Lee and Liebenau 2000, 45-47), would, however, be far too simple. Without denying the relevance of clock times, calendars, and standard times, the sociologist Barbara Adam demands a »time-sensitive social science« (Adam 1995, 10) that contributes to the complexity of diverse temporalities of the everyday. Personal memories, anticipations, experiences of travel time during the rapid traversing of time zones in airplanes, technological processes, and new media of communication, weather, and environmental conditions shape the everyday experience of time as well as schedules and clocks. Adam suggests that »a multitude of times which interpenetrate and permeate our daily Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-2-p72tjv51qxmf6 This text was published in Falkenhayner, Nicole et al. (eds.), Rethinking order : idioms of stability and destabilization, transcript Bielefeld, 2015.