Second Nature Once Removed

Time, space and representations

Geoffrey C. Bowker

ABSTRACT. Taking the example of large-scale technological

and organizational change in the nineteenth century, it is
argued that time and space are reconfigured socially by infra­
structural change, and that these reconfigurations are then
mirrored in cultural and scientific texts. The key claim is that
organization and technology need to be looked at together:
dropping out one or the other prevents the uncovering of
causal links. KEY W ORDS • historiography • representation
• sociology of science • sociology of technology • time

Introduction

It is unproblematic to say that societies with differing configurations of

economic and technological development have differing ways of under­
standing and representing time and space. The problems begin when one
tries to move out from this statement in any direction.
It might be argued that representational technology is central to this
correlation. Various forms of technology produce representations. Pen­
cils, pens, cameras, computers and so on are technological means for
producing analogue or digital traces or signals that in turn produce some
kind of representation of the world. A rich vein of analysis in a number
of disciplines has been discussion of the messages carried by these various
media. Thus the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) has looked at the
development of printing, and argued that the very linear layout of text
on a page helped create a linear view of time, which in turn was coded
into scientists’ presentations of the real world. Jay Bolter (1991), among

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4(1): 47-66.

from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

others, suggests that hypertext will provide a technological underpinning
for the shattering of absolute time and space. Or again Roland Barthes
(1980) and John Berger (1975) have, in very different ways, looked at
time, the camera and historical consciousness. This is one kind of analy­
sis, then: the medium in some way sends general messages about the
nature of the world or of human history by constraining the kind of
representation that can be made. Philosophers and historians come on
the scene later and interpret those messages as features of the real world:
and because they are using the very media that are sending the messages
in the first place, they manage to ‘bootstrap’ their message into a coher­
ent picture. The self-conscious, analytical work carried out by the natural
philosophers is itself, it may be argued, epiphenomenal to the ‘real’
process of representational technology framing the world in a certain
regular way.
In this article, I will look at three kinds of technology developed
during the nineteenth century (the factory machine, the railway and the
grain elevator), their associated organization (factory production, the
large bureaucracies of the system-builders and the grain market) and
their active creation of a representational space and time. I am not
concerned here with origins. The scientific use of isotropic, co-ordinate
space and time clearly pre-dates the period I am looking at. However,
it is to the nineteenth century that we must look for the growing belief
that the scientific method - and in particular its way of representing
nature and society within that space and time - could be applied to all
possible social and natural phenomena. In the 1830s, Comte’s church of
positive philosophy stands as an extreme statement of the scope of
science; by the end of the century such scientific fervor was commonplace
(Rosenberg, 1976). I argue, then, that this neutral space and time co­
ordinate frame became a plausible one for two tightly interlinked
reasons. First, a series of infrastructural technologies were developed
that actively extended the applicability of this framework. Second, the
bureaucratic working procedures developed in association with these
technologies took advantage of and formalized this framing. Scientific
work epitomized the rigorous application of these procedures - here my
work develops Serres’s theory of the origins of Euclidean geometry in
social science and the administration of the Greek empire (Serres, 1993).
My argument will be that by looking at infrastructral technology and
organization we can discover a missing link between the political econ­
omy (in the broadest sense of the term, as the general form of the
interaction between society and nature at a given epoch) and the repres­
entational time and space that came to be used across the board in
bureaucratic work and in human and natural sciences.
 Organization, Technology and Representation 1: The Industrial
Revolution and Regular Space/Time

Factory production in the early nineteenth century was largely perceived

in terms of time management. References to time and industrial machin­
ery of all sorts appeared in all kinds of literature - scientific and poetic
works, essays and novels. Exploring these references, we will see that
there was a direct line of influence from the organization of factory
production to a cosmology mediated by the regular working of the
machine.
One of the chief early products of the industrial revolution in Britain
was the watch: from 1800 to 1820 at least 100,000 clocks and watches
were produced every year in England (British Sessional Papers, 1818:
205) - at a key period between 1831 and 1841, the census revealed a
jump from 8000 to 15,000 people employed in this trade. Literary texts
of all sorts from this period teem with arguments by analogy to watches.
Thus animals could be understood through this analogy: ‘As a watch not
wound up remains without motion, still retaining the power of resuming
it, and when the mainspring recovers its elasticity is again enabled to act
upon its wheels: so to animals heat is the key that winds up the wheels,
and restores to the mainspring its powers of reaction’ (Buckland, 1836:
159). The analogy extended to the physical features of humanity, as
evidenced by the following appeal by Neil Arnot for ‘medical men’ to
learn physics:
All these structures the medical man, of course, should understand, as a
watchmaker knows the part of the machine about which he is employed.
The latter, unless he can discover where a pin is loose, or a wheel injured,
or a particle of dust adhering, or oil wanting etc, would ill succeed in
repairing an injury; and so also of the ignorant medical man in respect to
the human body. (Arnot, 1827: xxviii)

One feature of the analogy was that it permitted a comparison between

two orders of creation through imposing a temporally mediated qualitat­
ive difference between creator and created - a difference that was instant­
iated on the factory floor and in nature. Creators stood outside of regular
space and time, and imposed regular temporal order. In general, scien­
tific work was seen as the imposition of a representative framework of
regular space and time on social and natural time. This is brought out in
a work by Ajasson de Grandsagne and Parisot, French translators of
Lyell’s Principles o f Geology (itself a work whose vision of a changeless
world did much to develop regularities in space and time as a key to the
representation of global process). They started from the position that:
‘industry, so it is said, is a second nature’ (1836: 8). An historical section
demonstrated how humanity had gone from being initially weak to cur­
rently king of nature (1836: 12-14). Science, they argued, caused the
change, and was now all powerful:
Thus, in raising itself above everything else, science has achieved its full
extent: all the arts have been submitted to it; industry has recognized it
for its regulator; it has served and protected humanity in all its states, and
it has interwoven itself in the most intimate and sensitive manner with all
social relations. (1836: 21)

Science had emerged from previous intellectual disorder to govern this

second nature: ‘If, in principle, science has had some element of chance,
and if common people have made some useful advances, henceforth it
is only through the meditation of superior spirits that it can spread new
benefits’ (1836: 20). Thus science stood in the same relation to the second
nature - industry, as did God to the first; the new scientist created order
in artefacts as God did in the motions of the material world. Science was
industry’s ‘regulator’: a word that refers to the timing of the industrial
process. Science was making society conform to the same spatio-temporal
representational framework it was ‘discovering’ in nature: a process that
I call ‘convergence’, and will return to in the conclusion below.
Now neither nature nor second nature were, of course, as regular as
this spatio-temporal framework: and indeed there developed a strain of
politically radical science that attacked Newtonian physics for its
attempted imposition of such a form of representation (for example,
Mackintosh, 1841). Thus ex-St-Simonian Jules Leroux wrote of a differ­
ent kind of time in science:
Beside the philosophy of human history is placed the philosophy of natural
history; for there is in fact only one science, the cosmogony o f nature and
humanity. To make science, art and politics converge more and more
towards the same goal, to introduce more and more in science, as in art,
as in politics, the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life,
and by that to submit them to the same law: this is the goal, the outline,
the plan of philosophy. (Reformateur, 16 Oct. 1834: 4)

Radical geologist Constant-Prevost Daurio put ethereal motion at the

centre of his system, and apostrophized the space of:
. . . that dry and scowling science, which has for head a sphere powdered
with alphas and betas, a cube for body, cylinders and cones for arms and
legs; which lives only in square and cube roots, and doesn’t offer the world
anything but formulas, which dandy geometers find very elegant; a science
which can only move with the aid of winches, pulleys, and the steam
engine. Lacking sensation, it is sensitive as a monolith. (Daurio, 1838:
220)
Conservative scientists and political philosophers endeavored to demon­
strate that beneath the appearance of chaos and irregularity - both in
first and second nature - could be found the reality of regularity. This
time was quintessentially space-like: it lacked direction and granularity.
At first glance this might seem an odd representational framework to
develop for the brash progressivism of the industrial revolution (compare
the progressivist historical vision of the science of Victorian certainty,
see Young, 1973), so we will now trace its logical structure in a little
more detail in two domains: political economy and astronomy - with a
reference across into geology.
The example from political economy emerges from the work of G.
Poulett Scrope, geologist and political economist. As geologist, Scrope
was very sensitive to the importance of time: T h e leading idea which
is present in all our researches, and which accompanies every fresh
observation, the sound of which to the ear of the student of Nature
seems continually echoed from every part of her works, is - Time! Time!
Time!’ (Scrope, 1827: 165). When it came to political economy, the
trouble was that people were not regular: T h e rules of Political Economy
are as simple and harmonious as the laws which regulate the natural
world, but the strange and wayward policy of man would render them
intricate and difficult’ (Scrope, 1833: title page). At this point, as we will
see below, Charles Babbage said that the machine regularizes man. For
Scrope it is the capitalist order. Thus he wrote of the periodic slumps -
much more visible to the early Victorian observer than the unremitting
progress that was to be the mark of later Victorian science and political
economy:
It is . . . strongly to be suspected that such epochs of general embarrass­
ment and distress among the productive classes . . . are anomalies, not in
the order of events which flow from the simple and natural laws of pro­
duction, but occasioned by the force of some artificial disturbing cause or
other, introduced through the fraud or folly of the rulers of the social
communities they so grievously affect. (Scrope, 1833: 152)

Here we see already an astronomical influence: astronomy at this period

was ‘saving’ Laplacean determinism through the analysis of anomalies.
Scrope makes the analogy much tighter though: ‘There is, in fact, a
continual oscillation . . . going on in the returns of capital in most
employments, about the mean level or average of net profit.’ This, he
claimed, went along with or was, rather, caused by: ‘an analogous oscil­
lation in the market value or selling price, of commodities about the
mean cost o f their production’ (Scrope, 1833: 162-3).
The same horror of waywardness - and its solution through the impo­
sition of a regular spatio-temporal representational framework - was
common in astronomy at the time. Consider the following proud
announcement concerning Hailey’s comet: T h e return of the comet of
Hailey at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity
and satisfaction by astonomers, and by the public. This has now become
a regular and well-ordered member of our system. . . .’ The author
claimed that this was a good augury for the development of science:
That a body, differing so much in its appearance and habits from the
ordinary tenants of the sky, should reappear so nearly at the time and in
the place appointed for it by our excellent associate Rosenberger, is a
convincing instance of the progress towards certainty of physical
astronomy. (Monthly Notices, 1836: 160)

The regular flow of time, itself inspired by the watch analogy, was the
chiefest discovery of astronomy - and thence of the human spirit:
In effect, we only know completely one single law; that is the law of
constancy and uniformity. It is to this simple idea that we seek to reduce
all others, and it is uniquely in this reduction that science, for us,
consists. . . . Such is, I believe, the natural movement of the human spirit
. . . of which Astronomy offers us the clearest image. (Poinsot, 1837:
386-7)

Geology’s task was to bring this representational framework to earth.

This was Lyell’s whole project; the result is typified by Huot (1837: 3):
Everywhere one sees such a uniform disposition, that only differs in a few
details . . . that often presents lacunas but never inversion. This order that
one admires, despite so many traces of violent revolutions, of upheavals
and shocks that the Earth has felt, does it not seem, if one dare say it, in
rapport with the regular march imprinted on celestial bodies?

To complete the circuit back from the heavens to humanity, historian

and geologist Buchez believed that the greatest good would emerge from
imposing this astronomical representational framework (based on infinite
space and a timeless present) on our understanding of human affairs.
Thus he wrote that, to all appearances: ‘harmony is nowhere, not even
in the circle of the smallest families’ (1833: 6). This apparent disharmony
would, with the proper analytic framework, be dissolved into regularity:
When one examines the position of humanity vis-a-vis the phenomenal
totality in which it exists, one easily gets to see that it is a function of the
universe, in the full mathematical rigor of this term. . . . Thus one comes
to understand that the very large revolutions of humanity correspond to
small revolutions of the planetary system. (Buchez, 1833: 109-10)

In a similar move, political theorist Charles Dunoyer (1837, 1: 452-3)

averred that the underlying astronomical order would, through the ‘spirit
of industry’, assert itself on humanity:
Under its [the spirit of industry’s] influence, peoples will begin by grouping
themselves more naturally. . . . Peoples will come closer together, mass
according to their real analogies and according to their real interests. Given
this, the same arts will soon be cultivated with an equal success among all
peoples, the same ideas will circulate in all countries . . . ; even languages
will get closer . . . ; uniformity of costumes will be established in all
climates no matter what the conditions of nature: given the same needs, a
similar civilization, will develop everywhere . . . and finally the largest
countries will end up by only representing a single people, composed of
an infinite number of uniform aggregations, aggregations between which
there will be established, without confusion or violence, relations both as
complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be.

In this Laplacean era, then, both astronomical and political bodies would
be organized within regular time and hence be fully deterministic.
In sum, a cosmology inspired by factory production developed in
the early nineteenth century in Britain and France. According to this
cosmology, humanity was working on two fronts. First, disordered
human events were being made orderly through the development of the
capitalist mode of production on the one hand and by the coupling of
wayward people with regular machines on the other. Second, the human
spirit was discovering that all apparent disorder and disharmony in the
wider universe (as revealed to astronomers and geologists) could, with
the appropriate representational framework, be dissolved into a regular
ordering of processes in periodic time. In each case there was an appear­
ance of disorder and progressive change (the appearance of comets,
booms and slumps); in each case the underlying reality was an eternal
present discovered through the use of a representational framework of
temporal regularity. The convergence of these two fronts meant that
each could find rhetorical and philosophical support in the other.

Organization, Technology and Representation 2: The Railway and

Cartesian Space/Time

Although it is possible to assert a direct link between new industrial

technology and the spatio-temporal representative framework used in
scientific and other literature, we will now see that even such a simple
case as the impact of the railway can best be understood when the
organization of economic activity and of work practices - in this case the
process of commodification - is included in the equation.
 In The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1980) made many
of the same connections as Dunoyer, but he tied them down to the new
infrastructural technology of the railway. He noted that the railway
produces a new way of seeing, saying that within a short period of time,
the ‘industrialization of the means of transport’ (a phrase deliberately
evocative of the liberation of the means of production) changed the way
in which passengers saw the world around them. Within a short period
of time, he argued: ‘the uniform speed of the motion generated by the
steam engine no longer seems unnatural when compared to the motion
generated by animal power; rather, the reverse becomes the case’. He
pointed out that mechanical uniformity became: ‘the “natural” state of
affairs, compared to which the “nature” of draft animals appears as
dangerous and chaotic’ (1980: 18). This latter was a favorite theme in
industrializing Britain and France in the nineteenth century. It was oft
repeated by Charles Babbage (1832, 1837), apostle of the industrial
revolution, inventor of the central device of modern bureaucracy, and
writer on scientific time. For him, the machine acted as a ‘regularizer’
of time, acting against the ‘inattention, the idleness, or the knavery of
human agents’ on the one hand and the ‘irregular and fluctuating effort
of animal or natural force’ on the other (Babbage, 1832: 32-9). Schivel­
busch suggests that there is a new form of social time and space, which
is immediately coded back into representations of nature: causing a
reinterpretation of the natural world.
Indeed, the abstract space and time within which scientific represen­
tations have been made since Newton are in turn reinforced by the
railway:
Realizing Newton’s mechanics in the realm of transportation, the railroad
creates conditions that will also ‘mechanize’ the travellers’ perceptions.
According to Newton, ‘size, shape, quantity, and motion’ are the only
qualities that can be objectively perceived in the physical world. Indeed,
those become the only qualities that the railroad traveller is now able to
observe in the landscape he travels through. Smells, sounds, not to mention
the synesthetic perceptions that were part of travel in G oethe’s time, simply
disappear. (Schivelbusch, 1980: 59)

Schivelbusch notes that there was a definite learning process involved.

Early railroad travelers literally could not look out of the window at all:
they found it disturbing, confusing, it gave them headaches. Only when
they learned to deal with the new form of representation on its own
terms were they able to look out of the train window and appreciate, as
British Rail assures us we should, the landscapes that lay before them.
This new space created a new kind of geographical representation:
abstract and regular. Schivelbusch speaks of the ‘annihilation of space’,
by which he means the de facto and representational annihilation of
lived space between. William Cronon (1991: 259) has described this same
effect in a brilliant passage describing the long-distance transportation
of meat in refrigerated railway cars:
Once within the corporate system, places lost their particularity and
became functional abstractions on organizational charts. Geography no
longer mattered very much except as a problem in management: time had
conspired with capital to annihilate space. The cattle might still graze amid
forgotten buffalo wallows in central Montana, and the hogs might still
devour their feedlot corn in Iowa, but from the corporate point of view
they could just as well have been anywhere else.

It is perhaps unsurprising that it was within the featureless great plains

of the midwest that space should first be annihilated!
Historians of America’s Great West have been struck by the commodi­
fication of nature that occurred in the mid-century. This commodification
was itself tied to the development of new means of communication
(especially the railway and the telegraph) and the associated new ways
of doing business. Across the vast, flat prairies, Cronon notes, the land
came to resemble the maps that were drawn of it by government sur­
veyors in the distant east. He says that fields, fences and firebreaks:
‘were concrete embodiments of the environmental partitioning that made
farming possible’. He points out that the midwest was indeed peculiarly
suited to the government practice of: ‘subdividing the nation into a vast
grid of square-mile sections whose purpose was to turn land into real
estate. . . . By imposing the same abstract and homogeneous grid pattern
on all land . . . government surveyors made it marketable’ (1991: 102).
As Cronon says, the grid: ‘turned the prairie into a commodity’ (1991:
103); he talks of a ‘second nature’ being created by the railways, one
which came to seem quite natural (1991: 56). Thus, again, representation
in an abstract, regular space and commodification go hand in hand. This
is not a one-off connection. Taylor and Thrift (1982: 2) note the continu­
ing relationship between business expansion and representation. They
point out that as they have grown in scale, ‘large multinationals have
begun to represent their environment and manage it in increasingly
sophisticated ways’ (1982: 2). One could perhaps describe globalization
as an inevitably ever-incomplete attempt to impose a uniform representa­
tional time and space on a heterogeneous collection of lived spaces and
histories.
The story of the imposition of a new social and representational time
has been well told by Schivelbusch, Chandler and Cronon. As with
the annihilated space, this story is clearly tied to organizational needs.
Schivelbusch (1980: 48) gives the sparsest account: ‘Regular traffic needs
standardized time; this is quite analogous to the way in which the
machine ensemble constituted by rail and carriage undermined individual
traffic and brought about the transportation monopoly’ (for a fuller
account see O ’Malley [1990: 55-98]). The analogy he is drawing here is
to the fact that you could not run a railway line with everyone running
their own personal train. You needed a centralized bureaucracy and
effective monopoly in order to operate with any efficiency. Similarly,
you could not have every train running on its own (local) time: you
needed a centralized time in order for the railway company to be able
to create the representations that would permit efficient operation.
Thirty-five years before the US government recognized standard times
across the United States, the railways imposed them in their own system
(Cronon, 1991: 79).
Chandler (1977), Campbell-Kelly (1994) and Yates (1989) have each
attached the development of new office and accounting procedures to
the development of the railroad. All three chart how the standardized
annual reports, which represented the companies’ operations within an
absolute time and annihilated space (in Schivelbusch’s sense), allowed
the railroad companies to deal with the control and communication issues
that arose. Thus Yates (1989: 68) traces how the various ‘genres of
internal communication’ - the general order, the circular letter and the
report - grew up in railroad companies. Her tracing of the development
of the report form is indicative of the general movement. In the early
days (1830s and 1840s): ‘railroad annual reports were generally designed
as letters with opening salutations and complimentary closes’ (1989: 78).
Thus they were historically specific events, tied to a given locale and
addressed to a particular person. Over time, however, ‘[tjables would
becomes increasingly important, and the letter form would disappear’
(1989: 78). The local dropped out and a regular x and y axis covering
time and distance predominated. Reports became far more frequent too:
the annual report became an hourly report marking the position of each
train on the New York and Erie railroad.
As Chandler (1977) notes, the new accounting forms developed by
the railroads were adopted with minimal changes by the emergent new
large-scale industries of the 1880s. Indeed, he asserts that they: ‘remained
the basic accounting techniques used by American business enterprise
until well into the twentieth century’ (1977: 117). Thus the new industries
were made possible by the railroads and produced organizational rep­
resentations modeled on the railroads. Small wonder that we can find
features of the new infrastructural technology so widely spread.
In Schivelbusch, we get scientific representations being socially and
organizationally imposed by means of the new infrastructural technology.
He views a twin process of commodification and representation as cen­
tral. Let us see how Schivelbusch gets from railway technology to com­
modification. In the first place, he makes a direct connection between
the new transport technology and the process of commodification. Thus
he asserts that: ‘Only when modern transportation creates a definite
spatial distance between place of production and place of consumption do
the goods become uprooted commodities’ (1980: 46). This is somewhat
problematic - there have been seafaring nations in the past not character­
ized by commodity capitalism which have traded over a vast distance.
However, Schivelbusch is surely right that the railway accentuates, reg­
ularizes and naturalizes this process.
He draws an extended analogy between ‘the appearance of goods in
a department store and the appearance of the landscape seen from the
train compartment’, characterizing both in terms of panoramic vision
(1980: 186). This is not paradoxical, because, economically speaking, the
railway journey is a commodity, a service performed, transportation
purchased in the form of a ticket. Thus the panoramic view from the
compartment window can be understood not only as a result of a physical
acceleration but also, and simultaneously, as a consequence of the new
economic relationships, which have made the railroad journey a com­
modity, to a qualitatively new extent. The fragmentation and panoramic
reconstruction of the railway journey’s landscape does correspond, struc­
turally, to the fragmentation and pointillistic reconstruction of the
appearance of the goods in the department store. The city names on the
station buildings are evidence of the same process that attaches price
tags to the commodities (1980: 186).
He also attaches Baron von Haussman’s boulevards in Paris to the
same panoramic view. Thus the department stores that grew up along
railway lines, because only railways could guarantee the throughput of
goods they required, mirrored the railways in the way they treated the
circulation of the humans (railways) or non-humans (goods in department
stores) they dealt with. The same infrastructural technology that permits
a qualitative leap in the process of commodification (the railway) also
enforces a form of representation (abstract space and time) that is
inherent in commodification. It enforces this form of representation not
out of some kind of weird magic (or, worse, Hegelian dialectic) but for
very good organizational reasons of control and communication. You
need to be able to represent the world in a coherent and standard form
in order to run railways and deal in commodities. Emerging here is
Michel Serres’s insight that, since we live in a world where the human/
non-human (nature/society) boundary is less and less well-defined, then
we need analytic categories that allow us to account for the unified
representational time and space applied to both bureaucratic and scien­
tific work (Serres, 1987).

Organization, Technology and Representation 3: The Grain Elevator

and Abstract Space/Time

We will now track a third route between technology and representational

space/time, again mediated by organizational work surrounding the pro­
cess of commodification. The purpose of this example is to show that the
imbrication of organizational work and new technology in the creation of
a remarkably homogeneous and powerful spatio-temporal framework for
the representation of society and nature was indeed thoroughgoing.
Louise Carroll Wade (1987: 33) cites a speaker to a Chicago ship-
canal convention in 1863 praising the hog for its: ‘benevolent and efficient
aid . . . the hog eats the corn and Europe eats the hog. Corn thus
becomes incarnate; for what is a hog but fifteen or twenty bushels of
corn on four legs?’ Corn became incarnate in many ways in the mid­
nineteenth century. Tracing this story, we will again see the interplay
between commodification, railways and representation.
First, though, we need to follow a sack of wheat in pre-railroad days
from the farm to its distant market. At a given farm in the Chicago
hinterland, wheat would be put into sacks which would then be trans­
ported into the city by horse and cart. Arriving in the city, the sacks
would be set down in the street, and dickering would commence with
local merchants to sell the load. Samples would be taken out of the sacks
to display the quality of the produce. If there were no reasonable prices
to be had locally, farmers could put their corn into the hands of com­
mission merchants who, for a fee, would oversee the shipment of the
load by water to New York or New Orleans, say. The farmer would still
own the grain as it moved, each sack being clearly labeled. If the ship
went down the farmer paid (often the burgeoning insurance industry
covered the loss). If a sale was made in a distant port that the farmer
had never seen, the proceeds of the transaction would, after suitable
skimming, work its way back to the farmer. As Cronon (1991: 109)
summarizes: T h e water-based grain-marketing system at midcentury was
thus designed to move wheat, corn, and other cereal crops without
disrupting the link between grain as physical object and grain as salable
commodity.’
With the new infrastructural technology of the railroad and the grain
elevator, grain took on the physical properties of a liquid and was repre­
sented as a liquid asset which flowed to market. Grain was poured from
railroad cars into large buckets carried by conveyer belt up massive
steam-powered elevators. At the top it was graded and streamed into
bins. Thence it could be loaded into other cars or ships in order to
continue its voyage. Numerous observers remarked on this liquid quality.
Thus, Anthony Trollope remarked on his visit to an elevator: Tt was not
as a storehouse that this great building was so remarkable, but as a
channel or a river course for the flooding freshets of corn’ (quoted in
Cronon, 1991: 111). James Beniger has, of course, underscored the liquid
nature of the new process technology in the late nineteenth century that
revolutionized American industry - notably in a superb passage describ­
ing the flow of molten steel through the factory into railroad cars in
Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Pittsburgh (Beniger, 1986:
238-41). The very buildings were designed so as to accommodate the
smooth flow of railroad cars through the works.
Now let us follow the history of the elevators in order to see the
development of new representations of corn. Originally, the grain was
kept in bins assigned to each farmer, so that the same organizational
infrastructure (commission merchants and so on) could deal with ship­
ments. However, the elevator operators themselves objected to having
to keep so many small, unfilled bins. These were powerful new figures
in the marketplace, as indicated by their turnover (in the 1850s a large
elevator could ‘simultaneously empty twelve railroad cars and load two
ships at the rate of 24,000 bushels per hour’ [Cronon, 1991: 113] - a
mere twelve elevators dominated the trade). And so their objections
carried the day. In 1856, the Board of Trade designated three grades of
wheat, and in 1857-9 three sub-grades of each grade. Henceforth, the
farmers would receive receipts for the kind and quantity of grain that
they had had delivered to the elevator. This was the key step in the
product’s commodification - as Cronon writes, the grading system:
‘allowed elevators to sever the link between ownership rights and physi­
cal grain’ (1991: 116).
The telegraph took this weakened product (no longer a physical object
in a sack but rather a set of kinds or qualities on a sheet of paper) and
further severed its link with the local environment. With the telegraph,
commodity price information could be transferred instantaneously coast
to coast. Thus:
If local circumstances forced up prices at one place, the telegraph allowed
knowledgeable buyers to go elsewhere, driving local prices back down. . . .
The result was a new market geography that had less to do with the soils
or climate of a given locality than with the price and information flows of
the economy as a whole. (1991: 121)
Thus through the mediation of a new technology, new forms of represen­
tation were created - local, messy geography became, in fact and on
paper, regular and abstract. Similarly, the immutable mobiles (Latour,
1987) that circulated in this abstract space were matched by physical
objects (grains of wheat) which had become an homogeneous liquid
bearing a minimal number of (Newtonian) qualities.
The grading system did not, of course, fall magically into place. A
number of inspectors had to be appointed to maintain the standards,
and then a number of sanctions had to be put into place in order to
maintain inspection quality. In 1871, a new Railroad and Warehouse
Commission was set up (undercutting the Chicago Board of Trade) to
deal with these inspections. Again the railroad plays an unexpectedly
central role in the process of commodification - reminiscent here of the
role of the Texas Railroad Commission in regulating the flow of petrol
and the organization of oil fields in Texas (Bowker, 1994: Chapter 3).
Once the system was operative, telegraphic orders for ‘to arrive’ corn
could come in from anywhere in the country: the seller promised to
deliver grain of a certain grade and quality to the buyer at a specified
date in the future (Cronon, 1991: 123). Here it was not grain which was
being sold, but certain qualities in grain that were being transacted by
means of a piece of paper changing hands. Often the seller would not
actually deliver grain on the day the contract fell due, but would simply
make up or recover the difference between the contract price and the
current price. By 1875 this trade in qualities and quantities was ten times
greater than the trade in the ding an sich: $2 billion of ‘futures’ as
opposed to $200 million of grain. As Cronon (1991: 146) summarizes:
‘By imposing their own order and vocabulary on the world of first nature,
the city’s traders invented a world of second nature in which they could
buy and sell grain as commodity almost independently from grain as
crop.’ This separation is marked by paradoxical effects such as the fact
that in 1868 No. 2 spring wheat was selling for more than higher quality
No. 1 spring wheat because of a corner of the futures market - desperate
buyers brought huge quantities of No. 1 and had it downgraded. The
paradox proves the reality of the divorce between first and second nature.
Again technology (the grain elevator) and organization (the futures
market, operating in abstract space) conspired to create a new repres­
entational space and time.
Conclusion: Infrastructural Technology and Representational Time and
Space

Railways have figured large in the story that I have told - and often in
unexpected ways. Railways were uniquely important in the nineteenth
century because of the interconnection of two innovations. Railway tech­
nology created physically a new landscape - marked by the free flow of
massive physical objects on a straight line. The smells and touch of the
local environment did not exist in the abstract landscape the traveler
sensed (they were replaced by a motley collection of machine odors and
noises); only quantities (time, distance, mass) did. Equally importantly,
the railroads represented their own organization within this abstract
space and time. They imposed a standard, administrative time on the
countries they operated in. They developed organizational flow charts
and command systems that traced out the contours of this abstract space.
The grain elevator, mimicking/adjusting to the railroads also produced
in a single movement the physical abstraction of grain (away from the
local and messy, the farmer putting kinds into a particular bin) and its
representational abstraction (in terms of a receipt given to a farmer - a
receipt to be redeemed at some future date).
Where Yates and Chandler, for example, have concentrated separ­
ately and superbly on railroads, organization and representation and
Cronon and Schivelbusch on railroads, commodification and represen­
tation, I have attempted to show that we should look at commodification,
representation and organization together. Doing so, we can see that this
space and time came to dominate nineteenth-century thinking for good
organizational reasons, and that they flowed out of a set of particular
technological developments.
I have sketched out the operation of a twin process of making nature
and its representation converge (conflating map and territory). This pro­
cess of convergence is a key one in the operation of infrastructural
technologies. Its strongest expression, which we saw in the first section
of this paper, concerns the convergence of ‘man’ and machine. Mumford
pointed to how the same Newtonian quantities that govern the first
convergence are often attached to the second: ‘the new man regulated
his bowels and even his orgasms by clock and calendar, with no respect
to more organic rhythms’. He argued that only measurable attributes of
people were used to build the New World (cf. Hacking, 1990) - leading
to the creation of: ‘a habitat where in the end men were acceptable only
when they took on the attributes of machines’ (Mumford, 1957: 98-9).
Taken separately in terms of either intellectual history or the history of
technology, either side of this convergence appears magical: it appears
that the discovery and implementation of a single universal representa­
tional time and space or a single spatio-temporal language for talking
about humans/non-humans are separate. I argue that they are both in
fact consequences of the same underlying processes underwritten by
infrastructural technology and its associated organizational work. I have
collectively labeled such convergences (map/territory; human/non­
human) bureaucratic convergence, to underline the organizational work
that was involved in operating them.
In so doing, I find that I have reproduced some key findings from
Alfred Sohn-RethePs work on Galilean space-time. In his classic Intellec­
tual and Manual Labour: A Critique o f Epistemology (1978), Sohn-
Rethel focused on the relationship between the commodity form and the
process of intellectual abstraction. His premise was that: T h e form of
commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit’ (1978:
19). Thus, he continued, where use-value was concrete (one could use a
commodity for a certain purpose in the real world), exchange-value was
abstract, quantitative - reckoned in terms of the quintessential^ abstract
quality of money. Sohn-Rethel noted that when a commodity is up for
sale it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of ‘frozen time’
outside of the normal flow of time. It moves in an abstract spatio-
temporal world (which he calls ‘second nature’) unlike the concrete world
of ‘first nature’.
The commodity, then, sketches out (by moving in) a new kind of
representative space. The links in his chain are the arguments that:
1. Commodity exchange is ‘an original source of abstraction’ (1978: 28).
The basic act of representation - separating properties of a thing from
itself and charting those properties in a new medium (with its own
time and space) - is a feature of capitalist organization.
2. This abstraction out there in the economic world (out there in second
nature) ‘contains the formal elements essential for the cognitive fac­
ulty of conceptual thinking’ (1978: 28). Thus when people observe
and describe the flow of commodities, they are in fact creating a
representational space and time of much more general import.
3. This is more than a possible link - it actually describes the creation
of: ‘the ideal abstraction basic to Greek philosophy and to modern
science’ (1978: 28).
The concrete creation of a representational space and time comes first;
abstract work by philosophers and scientists in this new space and time
is consequent on that prior creation and an accidental feature of it.
Sohn-Rethel’s commodification process is in the last instance deter­
ministic and hegemonic. A number of recent works in science and tech­
nology studies have, for a variety of good reasons, attacked any idea of
social determinism (MacKenzie, 1990; Pickering, 1994) or even of society
itself (Latour, 1987). We should not, the chorus goes, attribute any pre­
existent reality to society and social process: these are products of our
technological, scientific and organizational work. In this paper, I have
explored a way of embracing these positions while at the same time
looking to the creation of large-scale regularities over extended periods
of time. I have argued that by looking at the intertwining of organiz­
ational forms and infrastructural technology we can trace in operation the
development of a convergence between nature (which becomes second
nature) and the bureaucratic representation of second nature in forms,
flow charts and other representational devices (second nature once
removed). The immutable mobiles of the bureaucratic representation
flow in a space and exist in a time which the infrastructural technology
is conjuring nature into. The representation and the technology have
grown up together - notably in the great railroad companies of the
nineteenth century. The convergence of (second) nature and organization
creates the highly contingent world in which Latour’s (1992) hybrids can
proliferate. If we want to truly understand the contingency then we must
also look to its flip side - convergence.
The resultant representational framework was never hegemonic: it
was never universally imposed nor universally true. Postmodern geo­
graphies and histories have questioned whether any society or economic
system has created a uniform representational space and time (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987; Appadurai, 1990). Alongside and in direct opposition
to the discourse of featureless time there developed a discourse of time
as progress and change: as a direct causal factor in historical events; and
it is well known that later in the nineteenth century historical and
scientific time was more active. Further, for many social worlds these
representational discourses were irrelevant and false. The reality of the
convergence lies in a particular contingent convergence of political and
scientific discourse mirroring a shift in the political economy, widely
considered. The convergence was an extremely powerful one: it gave
scientists the imprimatur of the state (since scientists produced apparent
social truths) and awarded the state the copyright to the Book of Nature
(by intermediary of the scientists). The motor of the convergence was a
(failed) attempt by a modernist state to make itself more and more real,
by simultaneously projecting nature and society into the same co-ordinate
space and time.
It is easy to assume that the time of the industrial revolution was one
of speed and progress; we have uncovered a representational time that
was static (an eternal present) and featureless. The relationship between
these two times is an intricate one. A consideration of both, however, is
central to an understanding of modern times. It is through the analysis
of organizational work and infrastructural technology that such an under­
standing will come. Both the work processes and the technology are a
necessary part of the analysis: the watch was at once a symbol of the
principle of the division of labor (Babbage, 1832: 52) and of the techno­
logical ordering of social and natural time; it was also the archetypical
scientific instrument (Comte, 1832). As social and scientific work pro­
cesses and technology developed together, so too did their products -
humanity and scientific knowledge - converge. And so co-ordinate space
and time came to mediate social and scientific co-ordination.

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GEOFFREY C. BOWKER is Assistant Professor in Library and

Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Cham-
paign. He completed a doctorate on social and scientific ideas of
time in the nineteenth century, and his recent book Science on the
Run (MIT Press, 1994) is partly devoted to time and information
management. He is currently working on the history of medical
classification and the history of cybernetics. ADDRESS: Graduate
School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, 501 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL
61820-6212. T e l: (217)3332306; fax: (217)2443302; e-mail: bowker
@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu.