Timing Modernity: Factory, Prison, Narrative
Timing Modernity: Factory, Prison, Narrative

Summary/Abstract: This essay explores how regimes of time-discipline have operated—and metwith forms of resistance—across three critical sites of modernity: the factory,narrative, and the prison. Through a historical discussion of factory labor anddrawing on E. P. Thompson’s analysis of time and work-discipline, the essayexamines the industrial capitalist methods of timing that underwrote workers’exploitation and large-scale theft of life and health. Readings of modernistauthors show how the non-plots of modernist narrative push, within a limitedsphere, against the imposition of progressive, developmental time. Finally, theessay examines the empty time of incarceration—modern time-disciplinethrough a mirror darkly. In their prison writings, Black revolutionaries such asGeorge Jackson wrested with the reality of a stolen futurity, illuminatingempty time with liberatory political philosophy and anger.

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