In delineating the culture of market society in a previous chapter, I proposed that the market-form projects a distinctive sense of reality and, with it, certain clear epistemological standards, strategies, and forms of knowing that are intrinsic to it. These new protocols of knowing suffuse the whole social and mental order where that order has shed much of its traditional, precapitalist moral and political constraints. One aspect of the market-form's uniqueness lies in the character of its time-sense or the individual and collective experience of temporality. As in the concept of relativity in physics, market society weakens the concept of a singular, collective historical time. Public time exists, but only by segmenting the day strictly into work-time, leisure-or consumption-time, by the opening and closing bells of various activities, like the school-day or the operations of a bourse. Temporal segmentation lays over the lived experience of duration an abstract time-scheme that regulates the form and content of daily routines. Premodern forms of time-reckoning were tied more intimately to natural, environmental processes, like the rising and setting of the sun, the changing of the seasons, and the like. These natural processes persist, but today they have slipped into the domain of rhetoric as powerfully nostalgic metaphors.

Other experiences of communal time have also withered away altogether or run aground within religious sects or in the varieties of fundamentalism we find lodged awkwardly in modern societies.