A Tenth of a Second: A History (review)

The argument that modernity has involved a radical reconfiguration of temporality is not a new one. Michel Foucault's The Order of Things (1966), for example, argued that in modernity, everything—life, labour, language—assumed a temporal and historical dimension. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey (1979) contended that the acceleration of experience caused by steam railways produced an entirely new way of perceiving the world through "panoramic perception" ([University of California Press, 1986], 64). In her absorbing new study, A Tenth of a Second: A History, Jimena Canales finds a new approach to the question of the relationship between modernity and temporality through an exploration of the ways in which very small units of time—"microtime"—assumed a stubborn presence in science, philosophy, and culture that was at once disruptive and productive (2).

From the mid-nineteenth century, Canales argues, physicists and astronomers became increasingly aware of a troubling temporal lag between a physical event and an observer's reaction to it. Event, sensation, and perception were frustratingly non-simultaneous: hence "reaction time" complicated the entire experimental process (72). Human consciousness appeared incapable of discerning anything shorter than a tenth of a second; a subtle, universal temporality appeared to underpin perception. The awareness of this structure catalyzed multiple experiments, studies, and technologies designed to either eradicate, correct, or creatively exploit reaction time. On the one hand, in astronomical observations, the disjuncture between physical event and human response threatened to undermine the credibility of data and hypotheses. On the other hand, comprehension of this innate temporal structure formed the physiological or perceptual basis of early cinematic technologies. The tenth of a second was inescapable and ambivalent.

Canales's central argument is that microtime underpinned a multitude of scientific and cultural phenomena, and a great strength of her book is the careful, nuanced exploration of these moments of emergence and the seemingly endless debates they generated. The history she reveals is complex and surprising. For example, the 1873 transit of Venus was intended to be more accurately recorded than previous transits, but tenth-of-a-second observational gaps, compounded by individual idiosyncrasies, produced infuriatingly discordant results. If modernity was to be marked by accurate measurement, then microtime threatened to unravel the project. Hence technologies (like Jules Janssen's photographic revolver) and correction measurements were developed to overcome the problem. Yet this was no simple replacement of fallible human senses with predictable machinic ones, since different technologies produced different results. Indeed, by 1881, drawings of planetary phenomena were back in vogue. These drawings, especially those of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, are of considerable aesthetic attraction and interest and are beautifully reproduced here. In turn, the fashion for human graphical measurements was overtaken by a new wave of technologies again pioneered by Janssen. The tensions between Janssen and Trouvelot were blamed for the latter's early death in 1895; Canales does not lose sight of the very personal and emotional stakes of these debates. The overall history here is nonlinear and fractious, a history of human fallibility partially superseded by technologies which themselves had a frustrating tendency to fail.

In short, microtime was a productive problematic underlying a wide variety of scientific and philosophical debates. At times, the intractability of temporality threatened paralysis, and some scientists, such as Adolphe-Moïse Bloch, seemed to suggest the problematic was insoluble. Canales concludes her study with a revealing appraisal of the famous debates between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson on the nature of time. She sets out to rehabilitate Bergson, who is often depicted as having misunderstood relativism. Instead, she suggests, Bergson simply adhered to a different philosophical and qualitative conception of time, one not fully compatible with relativity. For Canales, Bergson's ideas were entirely in keeping with a modern focus on subjective lag. This provides intriguing historical context to other recent attempts to reappraise Bergson, such as Sebastian Olma and Kostas Koukouzelis's article "Life's...