Abstract

This thesis will explore the relationship between a history of science and technology and a genealogy of ethics. It will attempt to establish the singularity of the technological practice of metric time through a cross-cultural comparative study which focuses on the debate surrounding the origins of mechanical timekeeping, and an analysis of the temporal regimes of Christianity and industrial capitalism. The technologies of metric time are thus shown to have both fostered and served the need to reconcile and mediate between the secular temporal regime of emerging capitalism and the primacy of eternal life. The resultant practices constitute a radical spatialization of time, wherein time-measurement increasingly comes to define the very measure of existence. Finally, the thesis will address contemporary practices of time-technology by way of an excursion into the manifestations of atomic and electronic time, and the time of modern physics. The technological re-introduction of recursivity, complexity and chaos into the measurement of time may very well open up possibilities for human development heretofore constrained by the subscription to a linear, progressive metric time