This short essay is made up of some fragments from the fifth lecture of my course “A General History of Technology.” The full handout has not yet been整理出来, but today there happens to be a filming session that will deal with the relevant topic, so I’m extracting these parts first and jotting down a few lines at will.
What is a clock? It is a kind of, or rather a class of, technical artifact. As a technical object, it of course has a specific function; so what is a clock for?
The answer seems very simple: a clock is for “looking at time.”
But on closer thought, this act of “looking at time” is rather magical. First, this abstract thing called “time” can be “seen” with the eyes. Second, this technology is useful—that is to say, we “need” to look at time.
So the question is: where does our need to “look at time” come from? Or, put another way, when exactly do we need to look at time?
Obviously, we are not staring at clocks every moment of the day, looking at time nonstop. We always look at time at certain “opportune moments.” That is to say, before we see the “time” on a clock, we already have some grasp of “the right moment, the occasion.”
What is the relationship between the two “times” in the phrase “when to look at time”? I want to say that they are both continuous and different. The former “time” is more primordial, or rather more mixed; it is encountered in all kinds of actions and situations in our lives. The latter “time,” by contrast, is presented to us by the particular technical object that is the clock.
Once clocks have become commonplace and have penetrated every corner of our lifeworld, the boundary between these two “times” has become blurred, even reversed: it in turn shapes our understanding of the former kind of “time.” But in the age when clocks were still a novelty, their appearance and spread were in fact a shock to the very idea of “time,” a kind of erosion.
We need to go back to fourteenth-century Europe, where the earliest mechanical clocks appeared in medieval monasteries. Of course, antiquity already had all kinds of timekeeping devices, but the mechanical clock brought entirely new features. In short, it made it possible for us to “look at time.” In antiquity, “clock” referred to bells rung to tell the time, and in the Western monasteries even earlier they relied on bells. Sundials, of course, are things we look at with the eyes, but in essence one is still looking at the sun; a sundial can be said to be a technology that lets us “look at the sun” more precisely. A mechanical clock, by contrast, on the one hand breaks away from the sun, moon, and stars and seems able to run automatically, so the “time” it gives appears to be some independent thing detached from all context; on the other hand, the mechanical clock gives visual time, letting us look, letting us read.
Why did the earliest mechanical clocks become popular in monasteries? The reason is simple enough: because only monks needed to “look at time.” Peasants and townspeople did not need to look at time; they only needed to look at the sun and listen for the night watch. The time they needed was all contextualized. So we find that when Western clocks were introduced into China, they were not regarded as practical tools, but were sought after more as amusing toys or craft objects. The large number of Western clocks preserved in the Palace Museum were all meant for appreciation and play, because Chinese people at the time did not need to “look at time.”
Only monks needed to “look at time,” because they had established a discipline that transcended ordinary life. They needed to follow God’s rhythm, not the rhythm of any worldly thing; they did not pray at “sunrise” or in the “afternoon,” but at “the time for prayer,” so their demands for the strictness and stability of “telling time” exceeded those of other secular ways of life, and mechanical clocks were useful to them.
Many revolutionary new technologies do not solve some preexisting need; rather, they shape or produce new needs. They do not satisfy certain ways of life; rather, they shape new ways of life. The mechanical clock is a classic example: it propelled the need to “look at time” and reshaped the rhythm of people’s lives. It was not until after the Industrial Revolution that “looking at time” ceased to be only the need of monks and a few other groups and began to become a need for everyone. That is why the historian of technology Mumford said that the key machine of the Industrial Age was not so much the steam engine as the clock.
Today, mechanical clocks have gradually receded, and the latest ruler of the rhythm of our lives is the mobile phone, whose screen most prominently displays, more often than not, “time.” With technological progress, it seems we are able to control time more and more precisely and autonomously. We can set the alarm for 7:59 or 8:01, as if our control were quite strong, but going to work at 9 o’clock is beyond our own control. Our technology controls time with ever finer precision, and the rhythm of our lives is also being governed by technology ever more deeply.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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