Temporality on Paper: Calendars As Epistemic Media

This is an inquiry into the materialities and practices involved in a new media, popularized in the 19^th century – the personal calendar (a.k.a. weekly planner) – and how it was turned from a record of past events into a central agent of planning the future, and constructing a future-oriented subjectivity. The paper describes the slow transformation from proto-calendars, such as almanacs, and personal diaries, into calendars as a media for time management. Calendars – now a ubiquitous object of modern life – did not enter universal usage up until the mid-19^th century. And their early use shows multiplicity, inconsistency, and versatility – a familiar phenomenon with new technology – only later to be crystalized into a relatively stable and familiar practice. My theoretical move delves on the notion of epistemic media, a media which does not merely registers already-existing knowledge, but instead, a fillable media, where users add information incrementally, and as function of design and practice, facilitated the construction of a new type of knowledge which is not directly inscribed in the media but it deduced. Looking at archival material of calendars printed in (predominantly) England in the 19^th century, I show the malleable and changing design of calendars and proto calendars and discuss how they facilitated different conceptions of temporality. I am particularly interested in how the space of the page serves as an arena for the drama of temporality. Drawing on media studies, and on the sociology and anthropology of time, this paper locates the maternities and practices involved in calendar-keeping, at the center of a historical transformation of modern temporality.