Abstract: “Reconceiving the Value of Time: Its Commodification and Recovery as Individual Time in the Romantic Period”
As various scholars observe, the rise of modernity around 1800 was defined by profound processes of temporalisation and the development of an enhanced time-consciousness.1 Facilitated by technological innovations in chronometry and a growing diffusion of timepieces, this fundamental shift entailed a standardisation of time as clock time and society’s internalisation of it as the predominant structure of feeling time.2 From an economic viewpoint, E.P. Thompson contends, this process was interdependent with a transformation of working habits from the task-orientation of peasant societies to the timed labour of burgeoning industrial capitalism: while the increasingly complex division of labour demanded greater synchronisation in order to maximise profit, such efforts, in turn, required the universal reference frame of clock time, divisible into homogeneous and thus quantifiable units whose uniform succession could be measured by precise timekeepers. Through this heightened time-discipline, time itself was attributed a monetary value and turned into a commodity whose spending had to be controlled and calculated in the most efficient manner.3 As Barbara Adam states, “labour is exchanged for money in a mediated form and time is the medium through which labour is translated into its abstract exchange value.”4 Drawing on Lukács’s and Weber’s theories, particularly the notion of purposive-rational action viewing the world as composed of merely instrumental means for obtaining arbitrarily posited ends, Espen Hammer comes to a similar conclusion: modern capitalism’s commodification of time deprived it of its intrinsic value by purporting that the temporal distance between present desire and future satisfaction is to be reduced as far as possible through the most efficient means.5 Embedded in these processes and equally subject to a growing time-consciousness, many Romantics reacted to the commodification of time by proposing the idea of a person’s individual time (Eigenzeit). In his Ages of the World (1811), Schelling maintains that no thing” has its time outside of itself, for each thing has an inner indwelling time that was begotten with it and belongs to it,” thus differing from the “illusory image of an abstract time” entailed by “comparison and measuring.”6 Similarly, Coleridge argues in his notebooks that “Time and Self are in a certain sense one and the same thing: since only by meeting with, as so as to be resisted by, another does the Soul become a Self. What is Self-consciousness, but to know myself at the same moment that I know another.”7 Identifying the self’s structure with time and grounding both in its self-enactment in interrelation with other autotelic selves, he not only conceives time as engendered from within and unique to each self but also as inherently social. These philosophical ideas are corroborated by Romantic poems foregrounding the becoming of the speaker’s individual identity in a time of its own, as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion. Far from ascribing a mere exchange value to time as an objectively quantifiable resource that is to be rationalised, the Romantics, as I will expound in my paper, reattribute an intrinsic value to it: the time a person’s action takes is not to be minimised in order that its end be attained most quickly, for it is not its outcome that is deemed to contribute to their individuation but the irreducible time in which their action unfolds.
Notes
1 See Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Neuzeit’. Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe,” in Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, pp. 300-48 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995³), p. 304; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 238; Niklas Luhmann, “Weltzeit und Systemgeschichte. Über Beziehungen zwischen Zeithorizonten und sozialen Strukturen gesellschaftlicher Systeme,” in Soziologische Aufklärung 2. Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft, pp.103-33 (Wiesbaden: Springer, 1991⁴), p. 124.
2 See Marcus Tomalin, Tellingthe Time in British Literature, 1675-1830. Hours of Folly? (New York: Routledge, 2020), p. 8; Rudolf Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur. Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1980), pp. 246-7.
3 See E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” in Past & Present38 (1967): pp. 56-97; herepp. 60-1 and 69-71.
4 Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 111.
5 See Espen Hammer, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 44-57.
6 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Joseph P. Lawrence (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), p. 139.
7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4, 1819-1826: Text, eds. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 4929, f32.
Bio: University of Bonn, Germany
Marvin Reimann received his Master’s degree in English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn in 2018. From 2020 to 2024, he worked as doctoral student and research assistant at the DFG Research Training Group Contemporary/Literature. History, Theory, and Praxeology at the same university and is currently in the process of finishing his doctoral thesis. Following an interdisciplinary approach, his thesis consists in a comparative analysis of selected scientific, philosophical and poetic texts of both German and British Romanticism with the aim of carving out a conception of individual time (Eigenzeit). As the subject of his thesis suggests, his research interests mainly lie in the interrelationship between philosophy, literature and science, with a particular focus on the long eighteenth century, but also include ecocriticism and Modernism.