Time Tribes: Time and the Other in the Railway Age

Abstract

Drawing on a variety of sources detailing the experience of British railway passengers, I argue that mass railway commuting amplified time discipline and turned it into a common sense. Yet time discipline was not the product of an external force, in the shape of either mature industrial capitalism (E. P. Thompson), the early-modern disciplinary state and its military apparatus (Michel Foucault), or the invisible hand of liberal governmentality. Railway capitalism did not require strict time discipline as a precondition for its reproduction. What railway capitalism necessitated was a world in which time was increasingly detached from place (what I call decontextualized time). Time discipline may therefore be best understood as a response to railway capitalism’s perceived failings: a situational rationality that gained force when the materiality of railway time mixed with an existing culture of punctuality. Its central impetus was the disappointed promise of regularity and predictability; its locus and fermenting agent was the embattled self and its related ethics of independence. Those who promoted time discipline in the railway age were passengers struggling for time ownership within a universe increasingly structured by decontextualized time. What they resented was not time harmonization as such, but rather the confusion it produced through its practical manifestations. It was not railway capitalism, but the railway-commuting public, that elevated time discipline to a moral imperative.