Timewatch E-Book

Barbara Adam

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 433

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this book the author moves beyond the time of clocks and calendars in order to study time as embedded in social interactions, structures, practices and knowledge, in artefacts, in the body, and in the environment. Adam suggests ways not merely to deconstruct but to reconstruct both common-sense and social science understanding.

Leseprobe

Timewatch

The Social Analysis of Time

Barbara Adam

Polity Press

Copyright © Barbara Adam 1995

The right of Barbara Adam to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1995 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.

Editorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishers 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shalll not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0 7456 1020 XISBN 0 7456 1461 2 (pbk)ISBN 978 0 7456 6554 2 (eBook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Times by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

To the people who have talked to me about time and specifically to Mary and Brian who have since died of cancer

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1‘My’ Time, ‘Our’ Time, ‘Other’ Time

Just one moment of ‘my’ time

Cultural expressions of ‘our’ time: language and clocks

Social constructions of ‘other’ time

Key points

2Of Time and Health, Life and Death

Body time and well-being

Tracking the archetypal time of birthing

Clock time is finite

Cancer time and the prospect of death

Key points

3Education: Learning the Habits of Clock Time

Clocks, timetables and schedules

The Benedictine heritage

Norms, experiences and the joining of life-worlds

Research times beyond the clock-time measure

Theoretical traditions and challenges

Key points

4The Time Economy of Work Relations

Working with rationalized time: clock-time rhythms and their sources

Exchanging commodified time

Clock time mediates complexity

In the shadows of economic time

Efficiency and profit: speed and flexibility

Key points

5Global Times and the Electronic Embrace

Understanding globalization

Two definitions: alternative visions

Clock time standardized and globalized

Global futures

Enlightenment tradition and machine metaphors

Key points

6The Times of Global Environmental Change

Approaches to the environment

Of organic and artefactual time

Running out of time

Everyday life as source for environmental theory

The loss of ‘other’

Key points

7The ‘Temporal Turn’: Mapping the Challenge for Social Science

‘Implication’ displaces the ‘metaphysics of presence’

Relativity beyond discourse

In/visibility outside the materialist episteme

Responsibility in the context of objective science

Coda

References

Index

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to the creation of this book, most notably the people who have talked to me about how time enters their lives and what time means to them. I would like to acknowledge here their invaluable contribution. I would further like to thank Stuart Allan, Jane Lones and Fiona Mackie for reading the entire script as well as Colin Hay and Alessandra Tanesini for comments on single chapters; their constructive criticisms were invaluable and very much appreciated. My special thanks, however, go to my husband and colleague Jan Adam whose critical comment and unflinching support underpin all I have written. Moreover, none of my work would be possible if he had not taken on more than his fair share of work in our labour-intensive household. Thanks also to my family as a whole for being so tolerant and to my daughter Miriam in particular not only for stepping in when I got home late on the days when it was my turn to cook or shop but also for checking my references to such a high degree of perfection.

This book has arisen from research conducted over the past eight years and consequently draws to varying degrees on the following papers: (1988) ‘Social Versus Natural Time: A Traditional Distinction Re-examined’, pp. 198–226 in M. Young and T. Schuller (eds.), The Rhythms of Society, Routledge & Kegan Paul; (1989) ‘Feminist Social Theory Needs Time. Reflections on the Relation between Feminist Thought, Social Theory and Time as an Important Parameter in Social Analysis’, Sociological Review, 37: 458–73; (1992a) ‘Modern Times: The Technology Connection and its Implications for Social Theory’, Time and Society, 1:175–92; (1992b) ‘Time, Health Implicated: A Conceptual Critique’, pp. 153–64 in R. Frankenberg (ed.), Time and Health and Medicine, Sage; (1992c) ‘There is More to Time in Education than Calendars and Clocks’, pp. 18–34 in M. Morrison, (ed.), Managing Time for Education, University of Warwick; (1993a) ‘Within and Beyond the Time Economy of Employment Relations’, Social Science Information, 32: 163–84; (1993b) ‘Time and Environmental Crisis: An Exploration with Special Reference to Pollution’, Innovation in Social Science Research, 6: 399–413; (1994a) ‘Perceptions of Time’, pp. 503–26 in T. Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Humanity, Culture and Social Life, Routledge; (1994b) ‘Re-Vision: The Centrality of Time for an Ecological Social Science Perspective’, in S. Lash, R. Grove-White, and B. Wynn (eds.), Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, Sage, in press; (1994c) ‘Running Out of Time: Environmental Crisis and the Need for Active Engagement’ in T. Benton and M. Redçlift (eds.), Social Theory and the Environment, Routledge, in press. I would like to thank the publishers for giving permission to use some of that material and to express my appreciation to the following colleagues, students and editors who have commented on drafts of the papers: Jan Adam, Stuart Allan, Paul Atkinson, Ted Benton, Dawn Clarke, Tia DeNora, Marco Diani, Ronald Frankenberg, J. T. Fraser, Judith Green, Tim Ingold, Tom Keenoy, Alwyn Jones, George Newell, Martin Read, Michael Redclift, Teresa Rees, Tom Schuller, Ginger Weade, Brian Wynn and Michael Young.

A passage from Penelope Lively’s (1991) City of the Mind has been reproduced by Permission of Penguin Books Ltd and Harper Collins, USA.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge a few very special books that have given me intense pleasure and provided invaluable food for thought, inspiration and, above all, a context within which to think, argue and develop: (in chronological order) Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Capra’s The Tao of Physics; Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life; Giddens’s Central Problems in Social Theory; Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918; Stanley and Wise’s Breaking Out; Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity; Romanyshyn’s Technology as Symptom and Dream; Hayles’s Chaos Bound; Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identity; Beck’s The Risk Society; and Ermath’s Sequel to History.

Barbara Adam

Introduction

Conversations about time

‘When I think about time I think that it won’t be long before I am old and die. We have only so much time to live and that is not very long at all. Well, take my mum, for example, she is old now and she will die. (His mother is thirty-five, suffers from multiple sclerosis and has been tied to a wheelchair for the last five years.) When you think a lot about time it goes by that much quicker which means I grow older that much faster. On school days I just think whether it is nine o’clock yet because school starts then and I must not be late. Next I think about time at three o’clock when it is time to go home. My worst thing of thinking about time is on the days when I come home from school before my parents have returned from shopping or from the hospital which means that I have to go to a neighbour’s house. This is really an awful time because I don’t know how long I’ll be there and when my parents will come home.’

(David, ten years old, pupil in a village primary school)

***

‘How time enters my life? I was born and now I am fifteen years old. We use the word when we ask what time it is. We talk about closing time, lunch-time, getting-up time, and that time is up. What time is, that is more difficult to say. It is not a person, not a thing, not a vegetable. It’s a period and units, the day chopped up into hours, minutes and seconds. But it also divides the past from the future. We can see the past in pictures and writing but we can’t be there – that is a time. Thetime is now, this very second. But I do not know what it is we are chopping up into units. I think it’s an illusion since there isn’t anything to be chopped up.’

(Miriam, fifteen years old, pupil in a British comprehensive school)

***

‘Time is about those things that happen to you and around you, those things over which we have no control. People die, accidents happen. I have no control over when the sun or the moon come up, when the pub opens, or when my friend is going to turn up today. I could get to be 105 years old or die tomorrow. Time has to do with movement. If everything stood still there would be no time, only matter. It’s a mystery which we don’t think and talk about. Only in programmes like Dr Who does time become important with ‘time lords’, ‘time travel’ and the ‘time machine’. Today everything goes by the clock but, if this hadn’t been started, we might organize our lives only by the sun or something else. Time then would be something quite different.’

(Tobias, eighteen years old, car mechanic)

***

‘Time is a scarce resource. I associate it with pressure and with the desire to use it in a meaningful way. I try to keep a very strict separation between my private and my working time; but the association with pressure and a shortage of available time is equally relevant for my private life and my working life: there is always too much to do, more than is possible. Family, friends, the house and the garden, elderly parents and making music all require time, and far more of it than I have available during my private time.

‘For me time is a dimension within which everything moves and happens. In conjunction with space it is a universal framework. We can’t move through space without time and vice versa which means that we can’t pass, spend, or allocate time without occupying space. Nothing exists and happens without time and space.

‘I think that the chronic shortage of time is linked to a steady increase of options and to growth in the potential for choice and action. Cities in particular provide us with far more possibilities than we can ever realize. At the same time, however, this widening discrepancy between the potential and that which can be realized enforces greater concentration and more focused plans and actions. It is also connected to our attitude to speed: if something can be done more quickly, then something else can be fitted into that freed-up period of time. This positive evaluation of tempo and speed – the faster the better – which permeates our contemporary life, derives from a purely economic approach to time: the bigger the quantity and the shorter the production time the better for business. This artificial, economic creation of speed as a positive value has been unquestioningly incorporated into our everyday lives. It has become a taken-for-granted fact.’

(Christoph, fifty years old, Ph.D. in philosophy, publisher, father of three daughters)

***

‘Time enters my life in two significant ways. One has to do with ageing and the life-span and the other with time passing and coping with things to be done in a day. The decades seem important – like watersheds – important points in one’s life where one is so aware in terms of what one would like to be and be doing and that in turn to the social standards and to expectancy. For a mother, the daily pattern seems so predetermined and there is always this pressure to be productive and not to be wasteful. Routines are terribly important because then there is no need for thinking about it and weighing things off. This all takes time and brings with it the danger that one ends up achieving nothing. A routine is essential for security because it represents the possible. I can’t operate without an overall scheme because this represents the frame within which things are possible – the real potential. Plans which are far into the future or for which I can see no potential just get me frustrated. It is the little plans which are achievable that lead to satisfaction, not the thoughts about big major issues. At eighteen you think about solving the world’s problems but you don’t get beyond it. I need to see myself being effective in my actions rather than wasting time with great schemes and plans for the distant future.

‘On reflection I relate time to the day and night and the sense of the year. Whatever you do, time passes – goes on outside our control. We can’t stop that process. We can’t make more hours in a day. We could in terms of a convention but we would not be changing anything in terms of this ongoing process. Hours are only a particular division we have imposed on this ongoing change of night and day. It makes me think of people in places such as Iceland where they have such different daylight and darkness patterns. They must not just be living different lives but also have a different perception of themselves and differ in terms of what they expect of themselves.

‘Now, my husband likes to work at night because there is less pressure. It must have to do with the feeling that he could go on all night and because he is not distracted by what is awaiting him afterwards. All that is expected of him at night is sleep – not so if he wants to do an hour or two of work in the morning as part of a full programme of work and meetings during a day. Night-time seems to be a different sort of time from day-time even in a physical sort of way. The homoeopath has said in relation to my son’s asthma that it makes sense that he coughs most between 3 and 5 a.m. It seems research has revealed that the earth’s energy field is different then – even machines have a minute change in their motion and slow down.

‘Birth and death make up our life-span and yet, when people die they are not gone but leave behind a presence and so did the people before them and those before. It’s a spiritual experience of presence of persons and peoples past. Anything outside the time-span of our own experience is difficult to comprehend. An oak which we know to be 400 years old, a castle or events in history – we can’t really know what they experienced, what it was like then. We can only get rare insightful feelings. We value old things and try to preserve them for the future so that they may serve as records for our present and what then will be the past. We are deeply interested in finds which connect us to the distant past, be they archeological finds of preserved people or of things made by people. We value old buildings, paintings and antique furniture. It somehow connects us to past peoples and gives us an insight into their lives, their existence, which would otherwise be beyond our reach due to the passage of time.

‘That passage can be so variable. I once had my car parked on a slope outside a hotel and my baby was in a cot in the back. As I turned, standing in front of the hotel, I saw my car rolling down gathering speed and aiming for another car. I knew what I had to do. I had to run to the car, open the door, get inside and pull the handbrake. Between my seeing the car rolling and my achieving to stop it not more than a second could have passed and yet, time was suddenly stretched out to become eternal – everything seemed possible.’

[After that we entered an interesting dialogue about the many devices we have to stop, slow down, or speed up time, in other words, how we try to gain control over, or cheat, that which seems so firmly located outside our influence: time. We talked about trying to stay young, about preventing decay and making plans for the future, about insurance, LSD, hypnosis, meditation, religion, art, architecture, writing, printing, language, technology, tradition…]

(Mary, forty-two years, Joint Honours student of psychology and sociology, ex-teacher and art administrator, mother of three boys. Four years after this interview Mary died of cancer.)

***

Time forms such an integral part of our lives that it is rarely thought about. There is no need, it seems, to reflect on the matter since daily life, the chores, routines and decisions, the coordination of actions, the deadlines and schedules, the learning, plans and hopes for the future can be achieved without worrying about what time might be. It is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult to think and talk about time. Only very special circumstances such as these long, interactive, conversation-interviews seem to allow for the necessary reflective attitude to probe beyond the most superficial single associations – clocks and calendars, opening times, timetables, seasons – and for bringing to the surface what we normally take for granted. Such conversations invariably evoke total surprise at the degree of difficulty encountered in attempts to talk about the role and nature of time. It was something none of my interlocutors had ever been asked to think or talk about. When they did engage with the topic, death emerged as an unexpected feature of their reflections. This tended to be the case irrespective of the respondents’ age and personal situation. While they were taken aback by the complexity of the task, I was amazed at the variation and uniqueness of the answers. Everyone, it seems, holds a very exclusive, personal meaning-cluster of time, a distinct but not fixed composition, one open to changes and linked to shifts in personal circumstances, emotional states, health, age and context. That which is rarely thought about thus constitutes a central component in our tacit knowledge-base. Multiple, composite, simultaneous, open-ended and changing, those personal meanings are at variance with the majority of social studies of time and their respective theoretical bases. This book is an attempt to take seriously the complexity of social time as it arises from personal accounts, academic research, and to a very limited extent from fiction, and to explore its implications for social science theory and practice.

If one-to-one conversations about time show us the multiplicity and breadth of conceptualizations of time in sequence, workshops on the role and nature of time in everyday life allow us to observe that complexity all at once: the network of meanings becomes visible as it is assembled from the variety of brief and rather restricted reflections of individual group members. It takes on form as one thought triggers off others in the various members of a workshop. In such collective thinking situations, the association of time with clocks and calendars combines with that of deadlines, chores, routines, milestones, stress and ageing. Feelings that time presents constraint, discipline, control and structure are shared with the experience of time in terms of opportunity, points of reference and order or of celestial motion, the rhythms of the body and social organization. A sense of pressure and shortage or the need to prioritize and wait are complemented by an appreciation of time as a process of learning and healing or as luxury and relativity. The past, present and future get joined up with life-stages, activity and the commodity. Weekends, working days and the educational calendar are linked to time as organization, coordination, experience, memories and fears. Thus, once we bring the taken-for-granted to the forefront of our attention, the spell of clock time is broken. The invisible is given form.

In this book I want to continue this process, to move beyond the time of clocks and calendars and to make explicit what constitutes a largely unreflected aspect of contemporary social science: time embedded in social interactions, structures, practices and knowledge, in artefacts, in the mindful body, and in the environment. I do not aim to familiarize the reader with existing studies and theories of social time. I have written about these extensively in other work (Adam 1988, and 1990 especially Chapter 1) and, moreover, since then excellent reviews (Bergmann 1992, Nowotny 1992) and a journal (Time and Society) have been published which can provide that information. Instead, I want to bring time in its multiple expressions to the forefront of our social-science understanding and introduce its central role in and for our subject matter, methods and theories. In all of these domains it is the multiplicity, simultaneity and mutual implication that pose the biggest challenge to established traditions: the rational approach of abstraction, reduction and objective observation falsifies temporal experience and misses the central characteristics of the phenomena under investigation. The chapters that follow set out some of those constantly shifting, transient complexities and explore ways of keeping together what social science traditions have taken apart, namely, time with reference to the personal–public, local–global, natural–cultural dimensions of social life and in relation to the subjective–objective, synchronic–diachronic, linear–cyclical and contextual–general parameters of social theory.

In ‘ “My” Time, “Our” Time, “Other” Time’ I focus on one personal moment and from there I let the social times unfold. I move from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’ to the ‘Other’, from the personal via the collective to the distant stranger, and establish simultaneously both a stronger collective temporal base and sharper differentiating features than are generally allowed for in traditional anthropological and historical studies. I demonstrate the coexistence of multiple times, reveal how language provides us with clues about this multiplicity and show how the resultant complexity cannot be contained within the classical dualisms of social science analyses. I thus pay serious attention to everyday experience and make the personal central to my work. I give a detailed account of clock time and offer a first analysis that serves as broad basis for all the other themes to which clock time is central. This allows me to home in on specific aspects of clock time in later chapters and avoid unnecessary repetition. Finally, I argue for the importance of getting to know the unreflected backcloth of ‘own’ time upon which ‘other’ times are constructed. Concern with the disattended temporalities of the social sciences’ subject matters as well as the researchers’ own methods and theories is central to this work and guides the approach to each of the subjects that follow.

Focus on the taken-for-granted and emphasis on the everyday and personal experience are continued in Chapter 2, ‘Of Time and Health, Life and Death’. Here I stress the mutual implication of time and health, life and death and demonstrate how the times of ‘nature’ and the mindful body are inseparable from human being, well-being and processes of everyday life. I then address once more a theme opened up in the previous chapter: the complex relationship between clock time which foregrounds chronology, finitude and death and the life-generating times of the procreative body embedded in the rhythms of its ‘natural’ environment. Through the example of birthing I explicate how encounters with life and death take those involved beyond the realm of everyday time and how they bring to the fore times that are normally disattended, even submerged in subconscious being. Most importantly, I argue that the times of the mindful body and the physical environment cannot be excluded from social science analysis and that we need to bring together mutual implications and contextual–personal differences of times in analyses of specific events. Finally, I show how the way time is conceptualized makes a difference, how it affects not merely social science practice but our daily lives, our health and our relationship to birth and death.

The dominant approach to time, the way time is conceptualized, related to and used, tends to be established during childhood. Thus, in Chapter 3, ‘Education: Learning the Habits of Clock-time’ I show how the institutional structures and practices of Western-style education work to socialize, habituate and train young people into the clock-time approach to time which, in turn, has the effect of pushing into oblivion the myriad of times that make up the temporal complexity of everyday life. I provide some historical background to the tightly choreographed routines of school life and reveal the roots of the prevalent time discipline in the triad of the monastic rules of St Benedict, the rise of science and the development of clock time for the mediation of natural and cultural processes. I suggest that social scientists in general and educational researchers in particular have to penetrate beyond the dominant times of clocks and calendars, timetables and schedules to the complexity of times – lived, experienced, generated, known, reckoned, allocated, controlled and used as an abstract exchange value – if they are fully to grasp time in educational practice and if such research is to bring about change not only in contemporary education but also in the children’s later lives. I explain how existing approaches to social time mirror perspectives in education and educational research and suggest that the tradition is inadequate for the comprehensive mapping of educational time. I argue the need to take account of time-based invisibles such as aspects of the multiple life–worlds and the past–future extension; and, on the basis of my analysis, I caution against generalizations across time and the belief in an objectively observable reality uncontaminated by observation and unaffected by time. Finally, I analyse the relevance of Marx’s, Durkheim’s, Mead’s and Schutz’s writings on time for contemporary analyses of social life in general and educational practice in particular, before I consider some of the implications for social science of taking the complexity of times seriously.

In Chapter 4, ‘The Time Economy of Work Relations’ I examine contemporary work rhythms, their sources and their implications for participants. I demonstrate the connection between clock time, money, speed and efficiency and indicate how the market economy depends on a standardized, decontextualized, commodified time. Closely associated are both my exploration of ‘free time’ and a discussion of the high value of speed and flexibility. I show ‘free time’ to be not free but produced time which renders it inapplicable to all those outside paid employment, and I propose that the valorization of speed and flexibility has to be appreciated in relation to the economic principles of profit, efficiency and competition. In the context of work I consider women’s ambiguous relationship to time and argue that a time that is generated and given cannot be encompassed within the time economy of employment relations. I demonstrate, in other words, that many women’s times as well as the times of all those outside the time of markets and paid employment are not translatable into an abstract exchange value, that such time, therefore, is constituted in the shadow of the market economy. In addition, I suggest that the important feminist deconstructions of social time are in danger of being reabsorbed into the very framework of analysis they make problematic as long as women’s time is conceptualized dualistically, that is, in contradistinction to men’s time and the commodified time of the market. This means that neither contemporary Marxian, Weberian and Functionalist analyses of work time nor feminist deconstructions are adequate to embrace the temporal complexity of contemporary work relations. I insist, instead, on the need to take account of personal experience and a wide range of other sources of information, sources which are normally not admissible as social science evidence, and on the value of establishing these as bases for more appropriate conceptualizations of the complexity of contemporary working times.

In Chapter 5, ‘Global Times and the Electronic Embrace’, I focus on phenomena and practices that entail or bring about globalized times and I speculate on some global futures. I explore the influence of technology on the global present, global time zones, standard time and world time, all of which constitute the framework for a global perspective. I examine the technologies of clocks, heat-engines and electronic communication for their suitability as metaphors for the social times of contemporary social life and argue the need for social scientists to reconceptualize some of their basic premises such as the exclusion of technological principles, the evasion of ontological questions and the dependence on nation states as a primary unit of analysis. The traditional conceptual tools need to be supplemented and to some extent displaced by simultaneity, instantaneity, uncertainty and implication, all key features of global time, if social science is to become adequate to its contemporary subject matter.

In Chapter 6, ‘The Times of Global Environmental Change’ I explore substantive issues of pollution and identify their temporal character before investigating some of the conceptual issues relevant for effective action. I show how the time characteristics of pollution – out-of-sync time-frames, time-lags, vastly expanded time-horizons, uncertainty and longevity of materials – are handled with political ‘short-termism’, economic production for obsolescence, and positivist science. I demonstrate further how in the face of global environmental hazards the construction of nature as ‘other’ is losing its meaning and natural status. The focus on environmental time thus aids the re-vision of social science, its assumptions about the nature–culture relation and the role of nature for and in the social sciences. Like Chapter 2, this chapter on environmental time highlights the fundamental implication and interpenetration of nature and culture. Beyond this corrective, it stresses the need for active engagement and concern with the uncertainty of a science-based im/material future. The circle then closes with a demonstration of the importance of everyday life as a source for theoretical inspiration: we are back at ‘“My” Time, “Our” Time “Other” Time’ with a densely woven net of inseparable connections and nodal points, each one implicating the rest and vice versa.

In the last chapter I draw out the consequences for social science of both the findings and the approach. This involves drawing on contemporary theories of the complexity of life and identifying common bases, points of departure, and potential directions for a time-sensitive social science. That is to say, in ‘The “Temporal Turn”: Mapping the Challenge’ I step back from the material presented in Chapters 1–6 and locate the implications of my time-based approach with reference to issues raised in postmodernist thought and chaos theory. I discuss the importance of the re-visionary concept of implication and show its relevance for as well as its relation to postmodernist critiques of a ‘metaphysics of presence’, ‘logocentrism’, objectivity and truth. I make visible the in/visibilities and im/materialities of contemporary existence and explore the tensions that arise from taking seriously what remains disattended in traditional approaches. Finally, I demonstrate the inescapability of responsibility. I argue the need for engagement once we appreciate that not only is the personal political but the political personal, not only the scientific subjective but the subjective scientific, not only the local global but the global local. Recognition of this changes personal responsibility from an option to a moral imperative and from a scientific taboo to a necessity.

This book is not conceived as a story with a beginning and end. With the exception of the first and last chapters, which ought to be read first and last respectively, readers may enter anywhere, start from any point, and begin to weave the web until the point is reached where the connections of each to all are established. Each chapter tells a different part of the story, focuses on different aspects of the complexity of time, and brings to the fore different theoretical and methodological considerations. Thus, the first chapter provides a very detailed account of clock time which is then presupposed in the other chapters which, in turn, highlight different aspects and implications of the dominant clock-time view of time. Chapter 2 uses focus on the body to give a detailed account of ‘natural time’ which is then taken as given in other chapters, particularly in Chapter 6 on environmental time. Chapter 3 on education is utilized to show the importance and relevance for contemporary social science of the classical approaches to time of theorists such as Heidegger, Mead and Schutz and to draw out methodological considerations that apply equally to all the other chapters. Chapter 4 elaborates the link between Weber’s writings on the protestant ethic and economic approaches to time, taking as given the discussion in Chapter 1 on clock time and Marx’s theory of the commodification of time. This chapter also details feminist responses to theories of time, as do the accounts of body and environmental time. Finally, the chapters on globalization and the environment focus on the impact of technology on everyday life and theory. Thus, while able to stand on their own, the chapters tell a networked story. Each single chapter implicates the others, presupposes them for an adequate grasp of the complexities of times at the level of everyday life, social theory and social science practice. With this book I put into practice Derrida’s (1982: 6) insight that ‘there is nowhere to begin the sheaf or the graphics of différance. For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure.’

Insofar as there has to be a sequence and a rationale for the order of the issues raised, I move from the personal to the global and from the substantive to the theoretical. These divisions and ‘progressions’, however, are merely ones of emphasis in a book where focus on any one sphere implicates the others and where attempts at linear, cumulative exposition are continuously foiled by multiple connections, relations and permeations. Multiplicity, simultaneity and implication are therefore key features of this work, while the struggle to ‘tell a story’ that can have no beginning and no end determines its particular style. For inspiration and for ‘evidence’ I draw on a multitude of sources ranging from personal experiences and fiction to research findings and media coverage. I am particularly committed to giving an authoritative voice to the many people who have talked to me about time and to foregrounding the everyday and the personal. This embodying and contextualizing of understanding is to be achieved, however, without losing sight of the equally important universal and global features of social life. With respect to style, I have resorted to using a more literary mode of expression wherever the linear, rational method of social science discourse failed me in my endeavour to convey the complexity, simultaneity and mutual implication of social times.

Finally, it is important to note that the explicit focus on time forces us to question established traditions, deprives us of old certainties and presents us instead with potential. It puts us under pressure to make theory rather than reinterpret existing thought, to become theorists rather than historians of classical and contemporary ideas. Even more importantly, it suggests ways not merely to deconstruct but to reconstruct both common-sense and social science understanding. It offers openings for important reconceptualizations which will be necessary if we as social scientists, as citizens, as educators and as parents are to be active participants in the creation of a viable twenty-first century.

1

‘My’ Time, ‘Our’ Time, ‘Other’ Time

There is no single time, only a multitude of times which interpenetrate and permeate our daily lives. Most of these times are implicit, taken for granted, and seldom brought into relation with each other: the times of consciousness, memory and anticipation are rarely discussed with reference to situations dominated by schedules and deadlines. The times expressed through everyday language tend to remain isolated from the various parameters and boundaries through which we live in time. Matters of timing, sequencing and prioritizing stay disconnected from collective time structures, and these in turn from the rhythms, the transience and the recursiveness of daily existence. It is a central argument of this book that this complexity needs to be understood and conceptualized, that it must not remain an untheorized backdrop to contemporary social science analyses. I begin this process of explication by focusing on just one moment of my time, a point in time that illustrates the mutual implication of own, collective and other time.

Just one moment of ‘my’ time

She points to the exits, shows us how to breathe through an oxygen mask and demonstrates how to put on and inflate a life-jacket. The early morning sunshine is blazing through the tiny windows. The newspaper gives detail and background to yesterday’s news and to the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia.

No other form of transport separates my life so remorselessly into distinct before-and-after sections. A flight interrupts the flow of living. Everything about it contributes towards a watershed between what I had been doing so far and what I was going to do: the necessary trust in a technology far removed from my daily interactions, the distances, heights and speeds involved, the emergency procedure, the performance of getting on and off a plane, the crossing of time zones and the attendant gaining or losing time depending on whether we move west or east respectively. And yet, there is continuity. It extends backwards from concern about the safety of my car in the long-term car park, to the smooth journey to the airport and the correctly estimated travel time from home, to worries about whether the house has been left in a safe condition, decisions about packing, via reflections on unfinished work in college right back to my childhood. Equally, it extends forward to the impending meeting, hospital visits, friends and relatives, work in progress, immanent and long-term plans for the future.

My ears are popping. I change the time of my watch and despair about the (all-too-customary) incurred delay at take-off. I think of my brother. When I rang last night he had not regained consciousness. They said in the hospital that even though this was an unusually long delay it was still within the range of the normal for open-heart surgery – not yet cause for concern. When we left this morning it was too early to inquire. There will be no more news until I meet my sister at the airport. The lack of information places him and our relationship in limbo. Images of injuries and pain in instances where I had been with him merge with visions of him now: in hospital on a life-support machine, a severed ear on a skiing holiday, a bad tooth extraction, a fall from a tree.

He was showing off in the school garden. He had climbed higher and more daringly than ever before that summer and now he was showing off. I don’t know what I was more worried about, that one of the teachers would find him or that he might fall down. I went back to the class-room so that I could not be implicated. As the older sister I was always held responsible for his bad behaviour.

I did not see him fall. I only heard the kids give a subdued scream in unison and I remember that the school yard went unnaturally quiet after that. It took a while for the realization that something was wrong to sink in. I can still feel the crisp air, the bright blue sky and the warm September sun, the clothes I was wearing, the argument I had had with my father about wearing knee-socks.

Almost as soon as I had turned to leave the class-room I knew that something was wrong and I wished, I wished so hard, that it was not true. They were all clustered around the tree at the end of the school garden. No teachers stood out in the crowd. As I got closer the tight knot of kids had already begun to loosen. I think some of my friends told me that he was all right but I don’t think I heard that. All I remember is the deep panic, the laming feeling that engulfed my whole being while I was trying to get there.

And then I saw him standing – he looked very pale – in almost unflustered cockiness, investigating his limbs.

As the years went by, the height from which he fell increased with every telling of the story and so did the magnitude of the miracle of his unscathed survival. I had no means of putting my usual dampener on his story. I was not there. Mine is a memory of worry and terror.

My father died because they had not developed open-heart surgery when he needed it thirty years ago . They say it is a routine operation by now. My brother assured everyone, including himself, that he would be all right; all the same, he said goodbye and put all his affairs in order. Unlike the routine confrontation with the potentiality of death during a flight, this encounter is more unique, more direct, goes deeper and resulted in action: I regularly plan to see the notary – he made a will. There is, however, a similarity in the trust we both had to extend: to the pilot, the design of this plane and its maintenance on one hand and to the surgeon, the anaesthetist, the medical technology and drug companies on the other. There is a personal dimension in the case of my brother’s open-heart surgery that is lacking in a flight situation, but the degree of distance from the respective expert systems seems quite compatible. ‘I put myself in thy hands’ used to be an integral part of the dialogue with God. Today it is an irreducible part of secular existence: we live it on a daily basis each time we interact with the products of science and with expert systems.

While the one stewardess is still busy taking off her demonstration life-jacket, another offers me a drink and asks me to put down my tray. Securely rooted in my past and extended towards my future, I have no choice but to embrace uncertainty.

***

The last few pages describe a moment which lasted no longer than it took for the stewardess to point to the exits and demonstrate the use of the oxygen mask and the life-jacket. This brief moment, though unique in my life, is not exceptional with respect to time. Memories – sudden sharp ones and generalized amorphous ones – are integral to every moment of our being. The simultaneity of mundane, extraordinary and global events, of past, present and future, of being at home, in hospital, in college, in an Eastern European region ravaged by war, in a different time zone and in a school garden of an earlier historical period, all this constitutes part of contemporary temporal existence. Contents differ but the principle remains the same: we are temporally extended in time and space. We transcend not just our present but our historical, socio-cultural and geographical location. Moreover, our temporal being expands beyond our personal boundaries to significant others and even to strangers. Our relationship to them constitutes part of who we are.

If we reflect on that moment we find that time enters into every tiniest aspect of it. Time is implicated in the attention to instructions and the headlines in the newspaper, in the expectations, images and reflections, in the memories, worries and enforced trust. It is central to the considerations and calculations, the weighing off and the decisions. It is fundamental to the sequences, durations and simultaneities of thoughts and actions, to knowledge of traffic rhythms and to routines on aeroplanes, in colleges and hospitals. It is part of seasons and our relationship to them. It permeates the multiple systems of communication from language to telephones and radio as well as the knowledge that there are good and bad, right and wrong times for doing and saying things. Moreover, the time inherent in that moment is multifaceted: time has something to do not only with clocks or timing but also with sequential ordering according to priorities. It further relates to irreversible changes, records and identity, to both cyclical and linear processes and, last but not least, it is used and controlled as a resource. Time is simultaneously experienced and constituted, abstracted and reified. All these aspects of time are equally important. None can be excluded when one seeks to understand that moment in its temporal entirety. To isolate one aspect for study without having all the others implicated is to falsify the experience. Moreover, those thoughts, feelings, memories, awarenesses, the working knowledge and the states of consciousness did not happen in sequence. They were present simultaneously. The order in which I recounted them seems irrelevant. Other sequences would have been equally valid since nothing was causally related. There was an instruction about actions to be taken in the event of an emergency. What followed coexisted in that moment of consciousness. The awareness of the engine noise, the renewed resolve to make a will, the knowledge of my brother’s suspension between life and death, all were coeval with the memory of my brother’s fall and seeing the headline about the war, with the uncertainty and the anxiety tinged with hope, with the irritation about the delayed take-off and my contemplating the possibility of dying in an airline crash. The multiplicity of awarenesses, choices, memories, considerations as well as the trust in technology and expert systems were all present at the same time. Yet, despite this simultaneity, there was sequential order. Nothing was jumbled. Nothing happened backwards. The coexistence was coherent.

Focus on just one moment, therefore, allows us to see what tends to be obscured in studies of longer events and research on, for example, work, education, city rhythms, hospital routines or daily time use. It brings to the forefront the multiplicity, simultaneity, boundedness and extension of times without masking their direction and order. It makes our tacit knowledge visible and shows that the time of clocks and calendars is but one aspect of the many times that bear on our lives simultaneously. It demonstrates that the time which marks minutes and hours, the days of the week and months of the year, the time that fixes decades and centuries as well as time zones, is only one, if a central, part of contemporary Western time.

Calendar and clock time are important but they take no priority within that brief moment. As multiple parameters and frames within which life is conducted and organized they are an integral component of this fraction of life. There can be no doubt that they matter. The time of the day, for example, makes a difference. There is little traffic between four and six o’clock in the morning so this was a good time for a smooth journey to the airport. But, it was the wrong time to ring up the hospital. We had a one-hour delay at take-off because seven o’clock is one of the busiest departure times at London’s Heathrow airport, with planes taking people to early-morning meetings all over Europe. Travelling times on the road and in the air can be predicted on the basis of past experience and the common knowledge that traffic follows a daily rhythm of peaks and troughs. Equally relevant is the time of the year: the peak travelling period is just coming to an end. School has started back after the long summer holidays. In (British) universities preparations are well on their way for the Michaelmas term and a new intake of students. The days are getting shorter and the periods of darkness expanding. The glorious autumn sunshine has an uplifting effect on everybody and keeps at bay the expectation of winter, the spectre of darkness and gloom. Those examples are some of the more accessible aspects of the importance of the time of day and of the season. As clock and calendar time they constitute the most social dimension of temporal influences which span from the cosmic to the atomic level of our being, all equally important if not equally visible.

Hidden from everyday understanding and social science concerns are the effects on our being to the very last cell in our body of our environmental rhythms: day and night, moons and seasons (see also Chapter 2 on time and health). They underpin our development as humans and as living organisms. They mark us as creatures of this earth. Those environmental changes from dark to light, warm to cold, wet to dry set the developmental pattern for all living forms on this planet, to be internalized and adapted for specific evolutionary and environmental niches. From cells to organs and even brain activity, our physiology is tied to those periodicities. Women’s reproductive cycles are tuned to it and so are our collective activity and rest patterns, all superbly timed and orchestrated into a symphony of rhythms. Sickness and even death tend to cluster around specific times of the day, synchronized with the temporal patterning of our earth: asthma attacks shortly after midnight, heart attacks and strokes around nine o’clock in the morning, onset of fever from bacterial infection between early morning and midday, from viral infections between early afternoon and evening (Rose 1989: 87–90). The multitude of coordinated environmental and internal rhythms give a dynamic structure to our lives that permeates every level of our existence. They constitute temporal frameworks within which activities are not only organized and planned but also timed and synchronized at varying speeds and intensity.

Thinking about time, therefore, involves rhythm with variation, a dynamic structure of framing, timing, synchronization, duration, sequence, tempo and intensity. This cluster of time characteristics is implicated at all levels of being from the most physical of planetary movements via physiological rhythms to patterns of social organization, from the taken-for-granted via the invisible to the obvious, from the imposed via the lived to the culturally constructed. All interpenetrate and have a bearing on each other. All coexist and are lived simultaneously. All are known on an everyday level with varying degrees of clarity, from the most tacit to the theorized. Social scientists, of course, tend to delimit forms of time to the social level only and within that to some very select areas. In contrast to this tradition, I want to show the advantages for social science of a closer alignment with the knowledge embedded in everyday living, of shifting the emphasis from single-perspective visions and discipline-governed concerns to the less bounded, less certain complexity we interact with on a daily basis. This necessitates that we take seriously the transitory dimension of social life. It means embracing the entropic and the creative with a commitment and resolve thus far largely evaded by social scientists, avoided for fear of the spectre of relativism.

The account of that moment on the plane is imbued with temporality, with the transient aspects of social life: the prospect of death, the awareness of the fragility of life, the continuity and ephemerality of news, the ageing of people, the technology and the machines into which they place their trust, cooling cups of coffee, disintegrating sweets, used-up fuel and energy to keep the aircraft flying. We relate tacitly knowing to all these expressions of temporality. Temporality, however, is only an aspect of the complexity of times; it is always accompanied, in addition to those already mentioned above, by aspects such as time-spans, continuities and