Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management
Exhibition Catalog
Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program
Co-curator (with KJ Abudu, Emily Small, and Johanna Thorell)
Excerpt from "Spending Time: Sociality from Time-Based Currencies to Time-Based Nations":
“Time is money.” Regarded as a maxim of common sense, there are few lessons more pervasive throughout history. Its oldest recorded use is credited to the great Greek orator, Antiphone, who lectured that, “[t]he most costly outlay is time.”2 In its contemporary use, it is attributed to Benjamin Franklin who, in the opening to his essay, “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” compels the young working class to “[r]emember that time is money,” so that they may equate a half day spent idle as having “spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.”3 In many ways, the whole of Western civilization rests on the bedrock that time is but another natural resource to exploit, extract, and leverage in service of capital accumulation.4 By weighing productivity against ones’ limited resource of biological life and valuing it monetarily, strategies to maximize the use of one’s time abound. While some have understood “Time is money” in a more Franklinian sense, others have sought to augment their time through the outsourcing of labor unto others, buying their time on the labor market. The advent and spread of capitalism and industrial production concretized the idea that time is money (and, therefore, a resource) into a system in which time is bought and sold in service by and for those with purchasing power.
The metaphor “time is money” is a cultural hegemony that disincentivizes particular uses of time, while rewarding others—always in service to a capitalist understanding of labor. When expressed as a truism, this metaphor further alienates money from its material value and determines how time—and thus, sociality—should be managed. The linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their book Metaphors we Live By, maintain that because abstract concepts are not experiential, they must be described through linguistic metaphors that, in turn, reveal something to us about our everyday functions and culturally based understandings of society. As they write, “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”5 When one considers “Time is money,” one regards time as a kind of raw material or fuel that powers industry and can be leveraged to increase one’s productivity. That is to say, time on its own is not profitable, nor even useful. Time itself must be employed in a particular way to generate value.