Timewatch

The Social Analysis of Time

Barbara Adam

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745614618
  9780745610207
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745665542
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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 identities. Humans, like all other beings, have a typical, if continually expanding, life-span of existence which influences actions today as well as plans for the future. When people die before that expected life-span has been reached we consider them to have died ‘early’ or ‘before their time’. When an aeroplane crashes due to metal fatigue its age always plays an important part in the ensuing investigation. It should not have happened, it is consequently argued, since the aircraft was only three, five or however many years old. Within their life-span machines decay and people age. In living beings the temporality of decay is balanced by that of growth and renewal, with the decaying part of that inter-play increasingly gaining the upper hand as we get older. The cycle of birth and death, finally, constitutes the ultimate form of renewal and regeneration.

The temporality of life unto death and the parameter created by the cycle of birth and death are not merely endured; as humans, we have a relationship to that central dimension of existence: religions are based on questions about origin and destiny. Social customs such as the burial of the dead, the marking of birthdays and the recording of births and deaths are developed around that relationship. Even our identity is formed within its remit. Despite the fact that nothing in our body, our physical appearance or our knowledge has remained unchanged, we think of ourselves as the same person now as the one that was born many years ago, hated particular teachers, had measles on holiday in Italy, fell in love, married, had children and studied sociology. Furthermore, we relate to each other as selves with an identity whose past has left a record, whether this be an objective biography of significant dates, a record of socially noted achievements and/or failures, or whether it be in the form of our own and other people’s memory. Some of these traces remain after our death, some fade out with our extinction, others are mere flickers known to but a few. The leaving of records is one of the material expressions of temporality, the census being the social equivalent to the rings in a tree trunk or geological strata.

Entailed within those processes is an irreversible unidirectionality, an arrow of time. There can be no rejuvenation, no unknowing, no reconstitution of pollution back into aeroplane fuel. But it is within the power of the human mind to visit past events, to re-invent them, create alternative versions and plan a multitude of futures. We are able to imagine the world in a projected future-present upon which we can reflect and make our choices. On the basis of this capacity I can be simultaneously in hospital, in college, in an aeroplane and places distant in both geography and history. It is not within our gift, however, to reverse processes. The arrow of time reigns supreme. Humans may slow down the processes of decay and ageing, fix the transient world in concepts and theories, art and artefacts, but they cannot undo their actions. Reversibility has eluded them: ageing and entropy are facts of life and material existence. People get older not younger. Cars rust; they do not get newer and shinier. In any spontaneous interaction energy is dissipated. This energy is not lost to the totality but exists in a form no longer usable for the same work. In the case of technological processes this dissipated energy constitutes pollution. Organic processes, in contrast, create time. Their arrow points not merely towards decay and death but to growth and life. The interconnectedness and interdependence between systems mean that dissipated energy of one system is utilized as a source of energy by another. We are only just beginning consciously to partake in time-creating proce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘My’ Time, ‘Our’ Time, ‘Other’ Time
• 2 Of Time and Health, Life and Death
• 3 Education: Learning the Habits of Clock Time
• 4 The Time Economy of Work Relations
• 5 Global Times and the Electronic Embrace
• 6 The Times of Global Environmental Change
• 7 The ‘Temporal Turn’: Mapping the Challenge for Social Science
• Coda
• References
• Index