Given the multiple times associated with Victorian modernities, how can we trace the mediation of the one we call secular time? As argued in the first chapter, if we want to avoid the confusion currently characterizing the historiography of secular time, we need a working definition of the concept that articulates its exact properties and what they entail. Secondly, we need to operationalize this definition so we can trace how specific networks mediate a distinctly secular time. This is what this chapter sets out to do, thereby establishing the theoretical navigation points for the case studies in the following three chapters.

Secular time is an isochronic, abstract, and infinite time independent of motion. That is not meant to be an absolute and final definition, but it articulates the concept’s characteristic properties in a useful way. In the following, I will try to clarify what precisely these properties entail by attending to the context where the concept was originally developed. What follows here, then, is a kind of origin story of secular time, one conceptual rather than etymological, which will also enable us to operationalize the concept.

The concept of secular time, as defined here, was originally articulated in recognizable form in medieval scholasticism, as a response to a tension between biblical interpretation and a widely held misunderstanding about Aristotle’s statements on the nature of time. I say the concept was articulated, because as I argued in the first chapter and will elaborate in this one, the actual mediation of secular time in specific contexts has never depended on anyone explicitly articulating it. But if we intend to locate secular time in modernity, we need to understand precisely what kind of time we are looking for. And to determine its exact properties, what better place to start than a context where increasingly nuanced answers to precisely that question were debated because something very important was felt to be at stake?

The chapter proceeds in two sections. The first describes the philosophical and theological disputes that spurred the perceived need for conceptualizing a time of this kind. While the tension between the Scriptures and the works of Aristotle took centre stage in most scholastic debates on this topic, another important issue was the existence of angels: created and (crucially) immaterial beings who as such (on the Aristotelian understanding) in contrast to other creatures did not undergo change. In a term borrowed from modern scholars, angels were ‘immutable mobiles’, and from this strange combination of properties the scholastics inferred the existence of a time independent of angelic movement.

The second section of the chapter argues that the theoretical and methodological approach known as Actor-Network Theory offers insights that bear directly on the question of how to locate secular time in modernity: namely by focusing on the construction and maintenance of immutable mobiles in specific networks. As we will learn from the medieval scholastics presented in this chapter, where there are immutable mobiles there is also secular time. Of course, imparting the joint properties of immutability and mobility to specific entities requires constant work, and no socio-technological network succeeds perfectly in this endeavour. Sometimes things get stuck, or their assumed immutability turns out to be only apparent, and so the kind of time mediated will always be only approximating the perfect concept. But drawing on the understanding of the relation between immutable mobiles and secular time developed by the scholastics allows us to nevertheless recognize the time mediated by these networks as distinctly secular.

In the case studies presented in Chaps. 3–5, the immutable mobiles whose flight secular time measures are no longer angels, of course, but railway passengers, news, and banknotes. Yet the concept of time inferred from their function as immutable mobiles remains the same: on this level, networks centred on the construction and maintenance of immutable mobiles also mediate an isochronic, abstract, and infinite time independent of motion.

Origins of the Saeculum

When Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris, published a list of 219 condemned propositions in 1277, these were neither the first nor last of such condemnations. And while there is some doubt as to whether this particular list constituted any radical watershed in medieval thought (for instance, as the beginning of an open confrontation between science and religion), most scholars agree it at least manifested and helped shape the intellectual environment where schoolmen across Europe conducted their research and teaching.Footnote 1 The thirteenth century saw the recovery (to the West) of many of Aristotle’s writings, supplemented by the works of his Arab commentators, and these had to be integrated into the already-existing synthesis of Neo-Platonism and patristic Christian theology dominating the intellectual culture of the day.Footnote 2 This work of translation and innovation would have been demanding enough for any scholar, without in additionhaving to keep an eye on clerical edicts declaring certain conclusions heretical. The intellectual debates of the period were characterized by arguments over minor conceptual details and honing of newly invented concepts so they might better combine the philosophical insights of Aristotle, the Islamic thinkers who had commented on and sometimes modified his work, with revealed Christian Scripture and official church doctrine. It was in this intellectual culture that Franciscan scholars (in particular) conceived of secular time.

Among Tempier’s condemned propositions, number 200 was particularly relevant to what we are concerned with here. It stated as erroneous the notion ‘[t]hat “aevum” and time are nothing in things, but [exist] only in the understanding [of the mind]’.Footnote 3 Apart from being obscure, the statement posed several philosophical and theological difficulties. It seemingly made it compulsory to affirm the Aristotelian understanding of time as a measure of motion, or change. According to Aristotle, whose philosophical authority few medieval thinkers would question, time did not exist prior to or independent of material changes but denoted a measure or number of such changes.Footnote 4 This meant that time, ontologically speaking, had no existence on its own, but had to be grounded in something other than itself. But in what? On this, the Aristotle known by the scholastics was frustratingly ambiguous. Some of his writings seemed to locate time in the mind performing the measuring of material changes. This suggested time might not be a real feature of created reality at all—precisely the conclusion targeted by Tempier’s proposition number 200. In order to avoid this heretical conclusion, the grounding of time in creation had somehow to be affirmed.

But how could one do this without implying that there was no unity of time, but instead as many times as there were material changes in the world? This question was raised by Averroes, the most important and influential Arab commentator on Aristotle’s works at the time when these arrived in the West. Averroes himself had grounded the unity of time in the Primum Mobile, the realm of the fixed stars and outmost sphere of the geocentric universe, which was understood to be moving in perfect circularity and so as being uniform, continuous, and everlasting. On his interpretation, not only was time a measure of the motion even of this highest realm, but this primary movement was the origin of time as such. This did not necessarily have to become a problem—this was Averroes, after all, not Aristotle. But Averroes occasionally merged his commentary with Aristotle’s original texts, and sometimes his commentaries were the only access scholastics had to the latter, and as a result most of them ascribed this view to the ‘Philosopher’ himself rather than his ‘Commentator’.Footnote 5 Most scholastics assumed it was Aristotle who despite himself had grounded the ontology of time in the Primum Mobile.

To the scholastics, then, it seemed the otherwise respectable Aristotle was posing a direct challenge to revealed Scripture. This was a problem. For had not God made the sun and moon stand still in the heavens while Joshua led the Israelites in battle against the Amorites, winning because this divine tactical move gained them the necessary time to overcome their enemies? Even hundreds of years earlier, Augustine had given this Old Testament story as reason to reject the Greek understanding of time as grounded in celestial motion, and many scholastics were still alluding to this argument in their own discussions of the matter. Additionally, there was the question of time ‘before’ the creation of the world and ‘after’ the final judgement. St Paul’s formula from Titus 1:2, ‘ante tempora aeterna’ (‘in hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before the world began’), suggested the existence of a kind of time before the creation of the material world and its multiple temporalities. Like the story of Joshua’s battle under an unmoving sky, this seemed to call for the conceptualization of a time that existed apart from and above all other created times, including that of the Primum Mobile.

In some cases, there were ways around such problems. The Neoplatonism of earlier centuries had already distinguished between different kinds of time, which the scholastics denoted using several different terms. Scripture, on its part, provided a useful distinction between Creator and creation. This meant that they could accept the Averroan/Aristotelian definition of time and its grounding in the world on the part of creation: the term tempus/tempora denoted the time/times of a material and changeable world made and sustained by God. On the other hand, the term aeternitas (one, but not the only Latin translation of the Greek aion) denoted an attribute of—and was therefore strictly reserved for—the immutable Creator. It was God’s own time. The metaphysical system of Thomas Aquinas is one well-known example of combining Greek philosophy and Christian theological concepts in this way. The Neo-Platonic notion of ‘participation’ allowed Aquinas to say, for instance, that God’s act of creating (or ‘causing’) the world did not necessarily imply any temporal ‘beginning’; it merely pointed to the ultimate dependence of creation upon God for its existence.Footnote 6

Then, there was the question of what to do about a certain queer category of non-material creatures: angels.Footnote 7 Scriptural stories of angels opening prison doors or in other ways intervening in the sublunar material world seemed to suggest that these were creatures able to move between different times and places without ageing or in other ways changing. Crucial here was the fact that angels were at once created and immaterial. As created, they were not to be worshiped on par with the Creator, which is to say, they did not share in God’s time of aeternitas. But since matter, on the Aristotelian view, is that which undergoes change or motion in the created world, their immateriality meant they were not subject to the kind of changes or motions measured by the multiple tempora characterizing this worldly realm. What kind of time could measure the motion of unchanging creatures? Conceptually speaking, there was no time for that.

The ensuing debates saw multiple conceptualizations of time, angels, and creation, and none more original or important than the kind of time conceived as infinite, abstract, isochronic, and independent of motion. This temporality was infinite in the sense that it was distinct from aeternitas and so did not coincide with God’s eternity; it was an ‘improper eternity’, enveloping all other created times in equal measure. While the times of the world were reducible to material changes, as Aristotle had insisted, this concept of time was abstracted from concrete material things and would exist even if no changes were occurring. In other words, it was independent of motion, including that of the Primum Mobile. It was part of created reality. Yet being independent from the varying motions of the material world, it was also isochronic, uniform, everywhere the same. As such, it could measure the progress of Joshua’s battle even if the sun was standing still, account for the time existing before and after the creation or end of the world, and allow the frictionless motion of angelic creatures moving while at rest.

Naming this new concept of time was no simple matter. Scholastic texts are full of ambiguous semantics and internally inconsistent vocabulary. It was not uncommon to use several Latin synonyms for the same Greek term in order to distinguish different philosophical and theological concepts, a practice which could cause some confusion even among contemporaries.Footnote 8 The Greek term ‘aion’ is the common root of aeternitas, aevum, and saeculum, even if these were occasionally used to denote very different concepts of time. Both aevum and saeculum were used to denote long stretches of tempora. But some, such as Franciscan scholar Bonaventure, denoted the newly conceived time independent of motion by using both aevum and saeculum.Footnote 9 ‘In time’, he wrote, ‘there is [...] before and after with aging (inveteratione) and renewal (innovatione)’. In this newly conceptualized kind of time, by contrast, ‘there is truly the before and after which implies the extension of duration, but which does not imply variation or renewal’.Footnote 10 This, in simpler terms, is a kind time that distinguishes past and present only in terms of succession, not development.

This saeculum was neither the aeternitas of God, nor one of the multiple tempora of creation, but located somehow in between these two. As one scholar summarizes the view of another Franciscan, John Duns Scotus (who called it the aevum):

Time is the measure of change in corruptible being; eternity, because it is completely removed from time and is a feature of God’s perfect, unchanging being, cannot be measured. Between time and eternity is the aevum, which governs such created beings as angels and heavenly bodies which have a beginning in time, but only potentially an end, because they do not pass in and out of existence as earthly creatures do.Footnote 11

Note how Duns Scotus associated creatures that do not undergo change (angels) with this kind of time. Before this, Henry of Ghent, deeply influenced by Bonaventure’s theology, had already suggested that aevum/saeculum might measure even sublunar entities ‘at rest’, that is, things that did not change.Footnote 12 Duns Scotus later radicalized these ideas, proposing that aevum/saeculum measured not only created substances, but everything created and uncreated. What enabled him to make this claim was a reversal of the Aristotelian relation between actuality and potentiality: Contrary to thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus allowed the potential priority over the actual. This meant, among other things, that one might speak of time as such, conceiving of it as really existing even if it was only a formal possibility. A time existing as pure potentiality does not depend on there being actual motion anywhere, be it in the mind, the world, or the heavens.

Even in the case that the first celestial movement did not exist [or were stopped] the very repose that the heavens would have through the cessation of that movement would be measured potentially by the time which measures that first movement when this movement exists in a positive and actual way. And by means of this same potential time all other movements which exist in an actual manner can also be measured. Thus, the movement measured in this way does not depend necessarily for its existence on the movement of the first sphere.Footnote 13

Granting formal potentiality priority over actuality allowed Duns Scotus to avoid locating time in the soul (bypassing the condemned proposition number 200 from 1277) without having to accept Averroes’ (or as he assumed, Aristotle’s) ontological grounding of time in the Primum Mobile which was so difficult to square with revealed Scripture. Later Franciscans, such as John Marbres, would continue to develop these points. And their views were gaining ground. Indeed, intellectual historian Pasquale Porro argues that the fourteenth century eventually saw a subtle but general shift among schoolmen to treating this kind of time as the absolute measure of all kinds of change and motion.Footnote 14

There is some scholarly consensus that the concept of time independent of motion developed by medieval Franciscans has continued to echo through the history of philosophy,Footnote 15 at least down to Isaac Newton’s version of absolute time, which would always ‘[remain] the same, whether motions are swift, or slow, or none at all’.Footnote 16 Fransisco Suárez (himself a Jesuit), publishing in 1597 one of the earliest long treatises devoted to the subject of time, defended the notion of an ‘imaginary succession’ or potential time able to account for the simultaneity of two distinct events each carrying its own temporality.Footnote 17 His work was one of the most comprehensive discussions of scholastic philosophy in his day; it was in use in most universities both Catholic and Protestant, and remained influential for the following 200 years. Among its readers was seventeenth-century atomist Pierre Gassendi, who argued that even if ‘God would wish to recreate the universe, time would flow in the interval between its destruction and recreation’.Footnote 18 In his Syntagma Philosophicum, published posthumously in 1658, he asserted that

[i]t seems that Aristotle …correctly guessed the true nature of time, but he missed it when he defined time as the number of motion. For if time is a kind of flow, …it is independent of motion no less than of rest.Footnote 19

For Gassendi, though, there is no aeternitas beyond the created realm. In this, his philosophy breaks radically from the modified Aristotelianism handed down to him by the scholastics. For him, time independent of motion is simply time, and it envelops even God, who he conceived as entirely immanent.

But these early modern examples are simply that, and I am not intending this to be a comprehensive conceptual genealogy of the saeculum or other precursors to early modern varieties of absolute time. Nor am I suggesting that all these thinkers conceived of time in the same way, nor that concepts have somehow trickled from the minds of medieval thinkers, down through the ages, eventually asserting a mysterious influence on modern technologies and practices. The point of this detour through medieval scholastic debates is to offer a better working definition of secular time for inquiries into the question of secularization in modernity. It helps us avoid the confusion about its specific properties that today characterizes the relevant historiographies. For instance, the above discussion should make clear that secular time does not belong on any side of a dichotomy between worldly, ‘ordinary’ times on the one hand and higher, sacred times on the other. Secular time is not ‘ordinary’ time; it is abstract and independent of the ever-changing flux characterizing worldly tempora. But since it measures the movement of created entities, secular time is equally distinct from divine eternity; there is nothing ‘otherworldly’ or ‘divine’ about it. It is isochronic, everywhere the same, representable as a line infinitely divisible into intervals between geometric points, and as such it has nothing to do with notions of historical development, growth, progress, regression, ascent, or decline. While possessing durational instants (so that it might measure ‘before’ and ‘after’), its mode of differentiation is entirely quantitative; it entails, in Bonaventure’s words, ‘no newness or oldness’.Footnote 20 When I speak of secular time in this book, I am referring to this infinite, abstract, and isochronic time independent of motion.

Immutable Mobiles

Turning to the question of how to operationalize secular time so that we can avoid simply asserting its presence across all things modern, we should note how secular time was a response to a distinct set of questions, a solution to specific philosophical conundrums, apart from the doctrinal questions related to the Scriptures. In scholastic texts, angels feature as a kind of thought experiment meant to highlight features of human nature, similar to the way philosophers of mind in our own day might use thought experiments involving ‘zombies’.Footnote 21 For medieval scholastics, the possible existence and function of creatures ‘moving while at rest’, that is, moving without material change (since matter simply is what undergoes change), seemed to imply some hidden unarticulated condition of possibility; there must somehow be a kind of time that makes possible the existence of creatures with the paradoxically joint properties of immateriality and motion. In other words, the scholastics started with postulating immutable mobiles and arrived at secular time through inference: if some things are immutable and mobile, then by implication the time that measures their potential movement must have very distinct properties compatible with this premise. Or, in short: where there are immutable mobiles, there is also the saeculum.

Just as the concept of ‘immutable mobiles’ was central to the conceptual development of secular time, it is key to locating the latter in modern technological networks. While the term does capture the defining features of angels as conceived in medieval angelology, it was originally French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour who coined it in his 1986 book Science in Action: How To Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (translated to English in 1987). Latour initially invoked it to account for the ways modern scientists keep control over their data as they move these between various spaces.Footnote 22 Communication and reproduction of experimental results are made possible by scientists’ meticulous construction of formalized inscriptions on paper—graphs, diagrams, abstracts, images, and so on—which can be moved between spatial locations without introducing error or modification in the process, and which allow one to backtrack and reverse the process if something fails along the way. However, as Latour has later emphasized, the term immutable mobile might be applied to all entities that manifest ‘the properties of being mobile while also being immutable’, that is, all things that have been isolated from the surrounding processes of change so that they might be transported as if without transformation or deterioration.Footnote 23

This early part of Latour’s work is associated with a precursor to the material turn discussed in Chap. 1, namely so-called Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a theoretical and methodological social scientific approach developed in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 24 Classic ANT centres on the question of how socio-technological networks ensure the stability of their elements, and posits that this happens through the mobilization and integration of multiple heterogeneous actors.Footnote 25 These actors might be human or non-human, concrete or imaginary—institutions, ideas, bodies, natural forces, or technologies. On the network perspective, they are all treated in the same way, insofar as they have actual effects and contribute to the intended function of the network.Footnote 26 Indeed, a recurring theme in ANT is that no distinction can be made a priori between spheres of human culture, nature, or technology.Footnote 27 From the network perspective, all such distinctions emerge from particular ways of ordering particular elements or ‘actants’—a term introduced in order to more equally distribute a form of agency among humans and non-humans.

The network perspective places the concept of immutable mobiles front and centre, together with the question of how their distinct properties are imparted and sustained. One classic example might help clarify what this looks like. In a series of articles, sociologist John Law has explored the innovations that enabled the Portuguese expansion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, innovations that allowed unprecedented levels of long-distance control.Footnote 28 For Law, these innovations can only be properly accounted for if we are willing to suspend, for the sake of analysis, the boundaries between the natural, the social, and the technological, and consider the innovations instead as networks being mobilized in order to move specific entities—in Law’s case, ships—between distant points without deterioration.

Law focuses his analysis on Portuguese sailing vessels. Surpassing the single-masted vessels operating in European waters from medieval times, the new carreira, the carrack, was central to the Portuguese long-distance control of the Indian Ocean. Law describes the carrack as combining a range of heterogeneous elements to overcome various forms of resistance in its environment. Castles in bow and stern incorporated in the ships well-known terrestrial defense systems, making them ‘virtually impenetrable to attack by boarding’.Footnote 29 Smaller triangular and square sails reduced the number of hands needed on deck, while also making it possible to benefit from otherwise overpowering currents and shifting winds. Extension of cargo spaces—combined with the systematic training of marine navigators in how to apply instruments and principles formerly reserved for astronomers—allowed the vessel to stay far from the coast and reduced the need to enter dangerous and expensive ports along route.

Within the networks of the carracks themselves (because on this perspective these can of course also be analysed as networks), other entities were circulating. Documents with inscriptions, combining and preserving the efforts of generations of astronomers; instruments likewise combining in themselves the knowledge and skills of past generations and modified for marine purposes; and people, protected by the carrack from the surrounding hostile environment and trained to perform certain tasks. ‘The right documents, the right devices, the right people properly drilled – put together they would create a structured envelope for one another that, ensured their durability and fidelity.’Footnote 30 This joining of forces, the network’s collective overcoming, mobilizing, and even incorporating of resistances in the carrack’s environment, accounts for their unprecedented capacity for moving to (and not least return safely from) the other side of the globe without deterioration. On this perspective, the carrack functioned as an immutable mobile, and this was the premise for the entire operation working as intended.

Actor-Network Theory is not the topic nor the ‘theoretical framework’ of this book, but as a theoretical and methodological perspective it offers several insights that are useful for operationalizing secular time defined as an infinite, abstract, and isochronic time independent of motion by utilizing the associated concept of immutable mobiles.

First, it posits that all elements of a network, human or non, can themselves be seen as conglomerates of heterogeneous elements; that is, each of them might be viewed as itself a network combining and associating forces and entities in particular ways, shapes, and forms. This irreducibility implies that for every object retaining its stability while in long-distance transit, some collective work is being performed, even if this work takes place behind the scenes. Making specific entities behave in this way requires hard workFootnote 31; immutability and mobility are contingent properties that must be continuously imparted. In a sense, what is at stake here is how the entities function within a larger context, how they relate to other objects and nodes in the network. Since these relations are always changing, even if almost imperceptibly, there is a constant need for small innovations, adjustments, shifts, and rebalancing if the immutable mobile is to remain functional in changing environments.Footnote 32

Second, the network perspective is designed to challenge the modern notion of an all-encompassing and homogenous time of irreversible progress, which as we have seen has been problematized in the historiographical temporal turn discussed in Chap. 1. Tracing the heterogeneous processes where natural forces, technological instruments, and generations of trained persons are mobilized to create and maintain local stability in ever-changing environments, the network perspective undermines any ‘regime of historicity’ ordering temporality in a way that leaves the past irretrievably behind. If certain entities—technological inventions, or even individual inventors—are seen as fully autonomous and inherently stable, it is as if they appear on stage without pretext, creating the effect of a qualitative shift between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of their appearance. In this way, the past appears irretrievably left behind, the future wide open (since anything might suddenly appear ex nihilo), and the present an empty interval of transition between the two, while the actual work involved in these processes is denied or suppressed. As Latour puts it:

[m]odern time is a succession of inexplicable apparitions […] The present is outlined by a series of radical breaks, revolutions, which constitute so many irreversible ratchets that prevent us from ever going backward.Footnote 33

The network perspective, by contrast, looks to unveil and describe the processes involved in creating and maintaining this effect. In these processes, there are no abrupt breaks, no irreversible revolutions, no sudden forward or upward leaps. Time, on this view, ‘is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection among entities…it is the sorting [of entities] that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting’.Footnote 34

Seen as networks […] the modern world, like revolutions, permits scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, miniscule increases in the number of actors, small modifications of old beliefs. When we see them as networks, Western innovations remain recognizable and important, but they no longer suffice as the stuff of saga, a vast saga of radical rupture, fatal destiny, irreversible bad or good fortune.Footnote 35

The network perspective seeks to show that behind the appearance of revolutionary leaps what is really occurring is an extension of the chain of mediators, which enables increased long-distance control by assembling and maintaining immutable mobiles.

Any kind of time is an effect of the work performed as part of these network operations, and in the case of secular time the construction of immutable mobiles is particularly significant. Bruno Latour explains why in his 2005 essay Trains of Thought: Piaget, Formalism and the Fifth Dimension. With deliberate allusion to Einstein’s ‘twin paradox’, he compares the journeys of two twins between the same two destinations, one cutting her way through a thick jungle, her brother travelling by high-speed train. In order to move their respective bodies between locations through a resistant environment, work must be performed. This work takes its toll, and the sister’s body, argues Latour, pays more for its passage than her brother’s does for his. The jungle offers more, and more kinds of, resistance than the railway track, and her body needs to overcome these while burning its own energy and absorbing every shock.

Her twin brother, by contrast,

[sits] quietly in his first-class air-conditioned carriage and read[s] his newspaper… [Afterwards, h]is body does not bear any trace of the voyage, except for a few wrinkles on his trousers and maybe a few cramps because he did not stretch his long legs often enough… [t]he trip for him was like nothing.Footnote 36

In the brother’s case, the required work has been outsourced. Protective walls are set up between him and the forces of the weather, smooth iron rails remove nearly all friction, and cushions protect his spine from the minuscule repetitive jolts of the carriage. An extensive network—mostly invisible to him—of engineers, iron rails, gravel banks, financial investors, machinists, electric currents, and embroidered cushions cooperate for the purpose of stabilizing his body enough for it to undergo transportation without transformation.

Time passes differently for these two travellers. Or better, less we be tempted to think of it as a case of ‘subjective’ experiences of a nevertheless ‘objective’ temporality, the networks they are part of pass different kinds of time. For the sister braving the jungle, the journey is one of intense bodily transformation. Her skin has scratches, and her muscles and joints ache with pain. The environment interrupts her at every turn, slowing her down. Processes of ageing progress at a higher rate due to the resistance her body must negotiate. In her brother’s case, the environment consists of well-aligned elements, all working together to impart to him the properties of immutability and mobility. The assembled instruments and people perform all the work, collectively creating and maintaining a local effect of movement without friction. As a result, time makes no mark on him, for he moves independently of it. The network mediates a time independent of his motion.

In this way, the secular time we conceptualize as isochronic is really a local ‘effect of isochrony’ mediated by networks creating and sustaining immutable mobiles. Even if conceptualized as all-enveloping and uniform, secular time does not exist independently of concrete networks; it only comes into being through finite and concrete mediations. Like anything ‘global’ (literally ‘spherical’, denoting an all-enveloping surface, but one geometric and entirely abstract), secular time’s actual existence is always mediated through connections that can never be anything but local. Every little element counts for something, and every minute modification or extension of the network makes a difference. Secular time is relative to the successful alignment of elements in particular networks. If the function of the network is premised on successfully imparting immutability to a moving object, then to the degree that this operation is successful, the network mediates a time independent of motion.

Victorian Networks

This chapter has developed the theoretical navigation points needed in order to challenge as well as advance (albeit in a very different direction) the historiography of secular time. Drawing on the intellectual origins of the concept of aevum or saeculum in medieval scholasticism and combining it with insights borrowed from perspectives developed under the umbrella of Actor-Network Theory, it offers a clear working definition of secular time as an abstract and isochronic time independent of motion. This time is conceptually connected, in scholasticism as well as in the network perspective, to immutable mobiles: where there are immutable mobiles, there is secular time. This enables us to focus on specific networks centring on creating and sustaining immutable mobiles, thereby locating precisely where and how secular time is being mediated.

The following chapters describe three networks emerging and expanding in England between 1800 and 1900, connecting an unprecedented large proportion of the population and range of geographical spaces. These networks all involved new technologies whose significance and implications were subject to intense debate, and all were increasingly part of people’s everyday world across the country and all social classes.

Crucially, each of the networks centred on creating and sustaining immutable mobiles and had to integrate or overcome multiple forms of resistance in their environments in order to succeed in this and function as intended. The railway network could not move passengers safely between cities without mobilizing navigators, iron and steel rails, cushions, timetables, steam engines, electric currents, gravel banks, and the passengers themselves, to create a ‘Newtonian road’ along which human beings could be moved without resistance. Hills were tunnelled or cut through, valleys were raised or crossed by bridges, and even the physical conduct of passengers was mobilized, monitored, and guided in order to successfully achieve their frictionless flight.

Similarly, the news network could not move information about events from imperial peripheries to newspaper pages without overcoming resistances such as shifting weather on land or sea, which had always threatened to slow down the import of news from continent or colonies. To do so, rotary presses, moveable types, journalistic principles, Morse code, ships, Malayan rubber trees, railways, news correspondents, editorial offices, stenographic symbols, and telegraph clerks had to be assembled and put to specific tasks.

Finally, the Bank of England, whose network connected country banks and lent local notes a sense of legitimacy beyond regional borders, had to find a way of making paper notes as reliable, immutable, mobile, and impossible to counterfeit as the gold they represented. Achieving this depended on mobilizing artists, chemicals, heavy and expensive machinery, locked chests, newly invented inks, and booksellers. Their joint efforts would eventually overcome the resistances—social, technological, and natural—that had for so many years made banknotes untrustworthy and their intended function dependent solely on the state’s punitive system.

All three networks centred on constructing and sustaining immutable mobiles and hence mediated secular time. But it is worth repeating that this does not mean secular time was the only kind of time associated with railways, newspapers, and money. Indeed, contemporaries sometimes cast all three networks as manifestations of irreversible and revolutionary historical breaks between the past, the present, and the future. Cutting through ancient rural landscapes, the railways embodied a new industrial world laying waste to the old pastoral one. The newspaper press was full of temporal paradoxes and ambiguities, for instance related to questions of how journalists might be ‘ahead of’ the public opinion manifested in their written texts. Bank of England notes were at the heart of debates over political economy and questions of whether paper currencies represented a progressive upgrade from an outdated metallic standard, or a dangerous fall from the golden zenith of civilization. In short, they were all associated with many different temporalities.

Yet on the level with which this book is concerned, as the networks gradually succeeded in overcoming the various forms of environmental resistance and sustaining certain entities as they moved them across increasingly longer distances, the networks also mediated with increasing success a time recognizable as isochronic, abstract, infinite, and independent of motion. This is how this concept of time gradually became a part of particular ‘social imaginaries’, how it came to be established as an unarticulated idea implicit in specific collective practices. This is secularization.