Authoritarianism and the Phenomenology of Time

Part three in a series of indeterminate length

Read part one here and part two here.

You may be wondering, dear reader, when I am going to emerge from this horological obsession and return to my usual programming. I am wondering that as well, though as I begin to resolve the essential philosophical problems behind the obsession, the light on the horizon begins to ascend.

You also may be wondering how I could be thinking about such arcane issues while the world falls apart around us, as an authoritarian takeover is occuring in my country and a dictatorial president mobilizes troops against American citizens. It’s a fair question, though I would suggest that central to the motivations of authoritarian regimes of all stripes is the desire to control time, or our phenomenological experience of time—to suspend it, to accelerate it, to turn it backwards.

And the problem, or rather the question, is this: what is time in a phenomenological sense, and what would it mean to control it? In other words, what does it have to do with the experience of being human, and how does that relate to our measurement of time and its manifestation in timepieces?

First, what is phenomenology, and what does it have to do with all of this? Simply put, phenomenology is the study of subjective experience. It goes beyond mere sensory perception, however. David Woodruff Smith asserts that:

our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world.” (From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

So, how might we consider our choice of timepieces in a phenomenological sense?

Let’s take, for example, the mechanical watch—either hand-winding or automatic—a little miracle of engineering and art: the gradual release of the spring, the rotation of the gears and the balance wheel, and the turning of the hands—all without an electric power source. Keep the spring wound, and the watch will keep going until the mechanism eventually fails, which could be a decade or more before servicing is necessary. All of this inside a device that often measures less than 4 centimeters in diameter. Gazing at a watch movement in action can be mesmerizing—literally. It’s no accident that we associate a swinging pocket watch with hypnosis.

As wonderful as this mechanism is, it has been objectively superceded in many ways. Quartz watches are more accurate, more reliable, more durable, and less expensive to buy and to maintain. The $30 Casio that is on my wrist as I type this is more accurate than a $10,000 mechanical Rolex. Indeed, quartz movements usually lose or gain fewer seconds in a month than the most accurate mechanicals will lose or gain in a day. And then, of course, there is the smartwatch, which is accurate to the millisecond—though it is destined for obsolescence in a couple of years.

Why is it, then, that most horological enthusiasts are interested primarily in mechanical watches and that many turn up their noses entirely to quartz or smartwatches?

Coming from the audiophile world, I often see the same type of preference among the cognoscenti for vinyl records over compact discs (or streaming), despite the objective superiority of the latter in terms of accuracy and durability. The analogy falls apart when it comes to the durability of smartwatches, since Apple is banking on your having to replace their devices sooner rather than later, but we’ll put a pin in that.

In both cases, however, in the respective worlds of watches and recorded music, the specialist’s preference is for the older, more traditional technology, as opposed to the likely superior (in some ways) but mass-produced and widely proliferated alternative.

The preference, therefore, is for a profoundly subjective experience. It suggests the staking of a claim of ownership of consciousness and of independence from outside forces that would dictate conscious experience. Of course, consciousness cannot be entirely independent; we all have obligations, and our perception and understanding of the lives of others (i.e. empathy) should be central to our experience of the world. But authoritarianism seeks to take over our consciousness, our experience of time, despite the illusion of agency or “freedom.” To a greater and greater extent, the same could be said of the tech industry.

Declaring independence takes work, requires conscious effort. Those who would wrest control of your consciousness away from you are counting on your laziness, on your submission to their values. It also requires self-awareness—specifically, of how our interactions with objects and devices may affect our agency, our control of our own time.

In the next installment, I’m going to carry out a little phenomenological experiment by tracking the different subjective experiences of four different types of timepieces: an Apple watch, a Casio digital watch, a quartz dive watch, and a traditional mechanical watch. Will this lead to any insights regarding the state of the world or the nature of subjective experience? I don’t know yet. How is that for a tease?

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet dive watch to yours.