Objective time is produced by the measuring machine, not merely experienced

Evidence

Yet the involvement of the machine in all this allows us now perhaps to escape phenomenology and the rhetoric of consciousness and experience, and to confront this seemingly subjective temporality in a new and materialist way, a way which constitutes a new kind of materialism as well, one not of matter but of machinery. It is as though, rephrasing our initial discussion of the retroactive effect of new genres, the emergence of the machine itself (so central to Marx’s organization of Capital) deconcealed in some unexpected way the produced materiality of human life and time. Indeed, alongside the various phenomenological accounts of temporality, and the philosophies and ideologies of time, we have also come to possess a whole range of historical studies of the social construction of time itself, of which the most influential no doubt remains E. P. Thompson’s classic essay on the effects of the introduction of the chronometer into the workplace. Real time in that sense is objective time; that is to say, the time of objects, a time subject to the measurements to which objects are subject. Measurable time becomes a reality on account of the emergence of measurement itself, that is, rationalization and reification in the closely related senses of Weber and Lukacs; clock time presupposes a peculiar spatial machine — it is the time of a machine, or better still, the time of the machine itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘style is periodizable’ thesis — here industrial machinery, not romantic consciousness, generates the very experience of time.
• DEFINE: Defines objective time as machine-produced, distinguishing it from phenomenological time.