Time, Technology, and the Transformations of Social Life

Abstract

Giambattista Vico, that most learned man and rigorous philologist, made a mistake in his birthdate in his Autobiography. Obviously, in his time the precise registration of births was not as important as it is to us today. And again, we do not know the dates of Rabelais's life. This ignorance is certainly not our responsibility alone; it does not merely call into question the gaps in our scholarship. "If today's scholars cannot establish Rabelais's birthdate, we may well ask ourselves if Rabelais himself knew what it was. This is one of the questions raised by Lucien Febvre in his Le probl?me de l'incroyance au XVIme si?cle, ou la religion de Rabelais: 'in Rabelais's time, did people know their own age, or not?' Febvre concludes that it cannot have been a common thing at that time to know one's own age."1 A person's age did not seem to depend on the exact, quantitative computa tion of his or her years. Perhaps it was rather a question of how the individual involved really felt, spiritually and physically. Persons were the age they felt, not necessarily the age attributed to them by the mathematical sum of conventional measurement, linked to a general, and thus abstract, calendar; nor from the subjectively binding facts of a document linked to the extrasubjective structure of social power, alien and distant by definition. So, not only was precision in the mathematical, quantitative sense of little importance, but the very idea that a living, present individual should have to prove with a supporting document his or her own identity must have seemed absurd to the ordinary way of thinking. In fact, when we think of it today, it is an absurdity. My great grandfather, who died in our home in 1940, born in the Piedmontese coun tryside a century before, did not remember the year of his birth with exactitude. However, he had a very clear idea of the season of the year