The Temporality of Political Obligation

Justin C. Mueller, Justin Chandler Mueller

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138915503
• eBook ISBN: 9781317426400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Temporality of Political Obligation offers a critique and reconceptualization of the ways in which our political obligations – what we owe to political authorities and communities, and the reasons why we ought to obey their rules – have been traditionally conceptualized, justified, and contested.

Drawing from theories of time and temporality, Justin Mueller demonstrates some of the unacknowledged assumptions and theoretical blind spots shared among these ostensibly opposed positions, and the problems and contradictions that this neglect of time poses. Enriching the literature on the philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, Mueller demonstrates how their theoretical frameworks on time can be used to analyze a political problem that is usually confined to the concerns of normative liberal democratic theory. Politically, this book provides readers with the means to better identify and analyze the diverse temporalities they encounter in everyday life, and better understand their experiences of them.

A welcomed and timely read which will be of interest to scholars involved in recent efforts to engage with the social and political dimensions and consequences of time and temporality.

1
Time and Temporality

Time is a curious thing. For the greater part of our waking lives, it is invisible. Certainly, as we go about the routines of the day we are sensitive to the clock. Common habits and patterns of daily life – waking up or going to sleep at a scheduled hour, going to work for a certain duration, eating a certain number of meals at certain intervals – are more familiar and hum-drum intrusions of time into our awareness. Calendrical memorializations and holidays provide periodic markers of collective meaning and significance, invoking a renewed sense of continuity and “mnemonic synchronization” between past and present (Zerubavel 2003, 4). Ceremonies celebrating the achievement of new life stages provide affirmations of individual life direction and the fulfillment of collective future expectations. And, of course, death and its harbingers provide an ever-looming horizon for all of our life plans, adding a bittersweet certainty amidst much fragility; the bodily pains of old age can bear both memories of prior youth, as well as reminders of what is to come, while the corrosion of memory itself can provide an immediate experience of the contingency of our grasp of any sense of unity across time. Each of these formal and informal demarcations and perforations within time organize and give significance to the behavior and lives of individuals and populations.

It is not time that we usually reflect upon when looking at a clock, however, but “the time”; our traversal along the face of a clock measured by the passage of the hands between essentially contrived and conventional markers distributed in space. In this regard, is there any significant difference between the passage of the hands of the clock and the rotations of the Earth journeying around the Sun that inform the Gregorian calendar? Perhaps in the scale of durations covered, or in the fact that one is materially a product of human manufacture. There is not, however, a difference in kind, at least in so far as spatial positioning is used as a representation of time’s passage. Markers of life progression – such as birthdays, reaching maturity, marriage, or retirement – are themselves effectively hands on a clock, though the time measured is not quite the same. Instead, these special events mark the achievement of a particular position along an expected trajectory; they are representatives for time, twice removed. Even death can function as a stand-in for time. Rather than just a simple biological fact, death can provide a future horizon in our imaginations – far away in our youth, to the point of effective invisibility, and looming increasingly closer as we age¹ – that directly affects the content and character of our lives.² Time itself generally remains in the background of our experiences and perceptions, and is rarely an extended object of our reflections or concerns. It is, for most people most of the time, effectively hidden.

This general invisibility of time is not a wholly mysterious phenomenon, nor is it something that we can absolutely dispense with. Conventional philosophers from Plato, Descartes, and Kant to the present have considered the nature of thought to be fundamentally truth-oriented, and telically driven toward the discovery of reality.³ On this account, in what Deleuze refers to as thought’s “dogmatic image,” the purpose and character of the faculty of thought is to know (1994, 131). Ignorance, in turn, is cast as an aberration, a stage of incompletion, or a lesser form of real thought. As a result, these philosophers have quite a bit of trouble explaining this ubiquitous and seemingly crucial character of our experience with time. How should we consider the relationship between thought and truth, if both the basic tasks of living and the most rigorous acts of reflection and conceptualization demand a kind of ignorance? As active, conscious, living beings, even simple tasks require some degree of planning, directing, categorizing, contextualizing, organizing, and purposing for survival; bringing fragments of the past to bear on an imagined present, in order to project possibilities for alternative futures.

Complex social organization entails its own temporal demands alongside these. The clock may facilitate coordination among disparate persons, yet may also become a “tyrant,” homogenizing and regimenting our activities to fit a schedule, rather than allowing for variation, shifting tempos, or alternative desires.

The date book becomes the master of the master, and the punch clock the master of the servant. We rise not when we are refreshed and ready for the day, but when the alarm sounds. We eat not when we are hungry but when the timetable dictates. We may feel like prolonging an activity we are pursuing with enjoyment, but must turn to another because it is next on the schedule. We may want to take more time for reflection on a troublesome problem, but the calendar calls for a decision.

(MacIver 1962, 119–120)

“Time as measured” is the mechanism by which active life is recorded and ordered, and the means by which a life can be lived, but it contains both instrumental value and dangers alike (ibid.). Rather than being oriented toward truth (a notion that itself takes as given a certain image of time imbued with purpose), the activity of thought is a fundamentally practical endeavor. It obscures our immediate perception of time in order to produce the categories, symbols, and other diagrams of “solidification” and “division” that we apply to the world, and through which we are able to generate a “fulcrum for our action” (Bergson 2004, 280).

It is precisely this obscurity involved in our conventional conceptions of time that makes a serious analysis of the dimension of temporality and its processes so important for understanding social and political life. Conventions, traditions, and routines, collective and individual memories, perceptions of purpose and place, and the imagination of possible futures are all key elements of the constitution of social life, and all depend utterly on temporal processes, including the process of ignoring and forgetting their temporality. As Henri Bergson rightfully observed, however, forgetting the temporal dimension undergirding social life leads to “difficulty after difficulty” when attempting to understand social and political phenomena (Bergson 2001, 139). Practical life demands a degree of amnesia in the face of time, but explanation requires its recovery.

By focusing on time as a dimension to be analyzed and something to be explained in relation to political obligation, we will be able to see “the problem of political obligation” anew. In peering behind the veil of practical life and its (necessary, if stultifying) demands of compliant habituation and affirmation of things as they seem, we can attempt to assess time more directly. Moving out beyond the reach of the flooding lights of everyday convention that effuse the central hub of what Josiah Royce refers to as “the city,” we can make out the faint glimmer of newly visible constellations of problems traveling above the horizon.⁴ Of special concern in doing so are bringing to the fore the different ways in which time is experienced, the different means by which it is segmented, channeled, and suspended, and the processes by which it is sublimated and transformed into forms of stasis and homogeneity in our individual and shared perceptions. These processes are central to understanding how theories of political obligation have been constituted, how they maintain internal coherence as distinct and rival discourses, and how they sustain any effective moral force for those who have internalized them.

In this chapter we will provide an overview of the philosophy of time, focusing on those elements that will be most pertinent for developing the theoretical framework guiding this work as a whole. First, we will dwell on the concept of temporality, clarifying its relationship to time, and outlining some ways it has been conceptualized historically. We will then sketch out the major theoretical contributions of two theorists who will see the most use throughout this project – Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Finally, we will elaborate on the implications and value of their work for theorizing political obligation.

Time and Temporality

Time is unique, and holds a place of special importance in philosophical inquiry. As David Wood argues, even when not directly addressed, the peculiar “hydra-headed” quandaries and challenges that time poses for human understanding and life leave it always lurking at the edge of our perceptions. Behind the most fundamental concepts and problems of philosophy dwells this “shadowy form” whose influence is felt even when unseen. Change and finitude are problems of time, certainly, but just as certainly are meaning, truth, the self, freedom, and society. Time both frames and instigates these (and other) core ideas as problems of significance, and threatens their dissolution and insignificance. Consequently,

much philosophy reads like the construction of sea-walls against it. For time is the destroyer of all we are proud of, including pride itself, and it even threatens the realization of philosophy’s highest ideals. Time is the possibility of corruption at the deepest level. And yet, without time’s synthetic powers, without organized temporal extension, there would be nothing to be corrupted. Time makes as well as breaks. Time giveth and it taketh away.

(Wood 2007, 24)

Time has a pervasive power over us and our endeavors of which we cannot help but experience the consequences. It is a basic structuring dimension of our lives. Like water to fish, it is a ubiquitous and saturating element of the world we inhabit and live through. It is this very saturation, however, that has posed some of the thorniest problems and helped generate enduring theoretical divisions in efforts to make sense of time. Philosophers of time and cognate theorists have often found themselves faced with two primary facets of time that, while distinguishable, are also inextricable from each other (at least insofar as human inquiry is concerned).⁵ David Couzens Hoy provides a useful preliminary distinction between these two facets of time, and this distinction will be useful for framing the general scope of our analysis: the “time of the universe” and the “time of our lives” (2009, xii).

The “time of the universe,” or what Hoy also refers to as “universal time” or “objective time,” is the first facet of time to consider. It is the aspect which has traditionally been the concern of scientists, as well as many metaphysicians, naturalistic and otherwise. This is time considered as a dimension of the fabric of the universe itself. Some of the major questions posed by the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time (1998) are representative of this manner of framing and problematizing time. Does time have a beginning or an end? How are speed and the passage of time related according to Einstein’s theory of relativity? Does the apparent speed-of-light barrier in this universe render time travel impossible? Are there multiple or infinite coexistent threads of time corresponding to multiple or infinite possible realities? Manifesting as a set of certain kinds of problems with a correspondingly limited range of admissible types of answers, this approach to conceptualizing time corresponds to the mode of practical reasoning that has defined modern science. This way of thinking about time is not the manner in which we will be primarily dealing with time in this project.

The second facet of time, and the one which is the principal concern for this project, is that of “lived time” or the “time of our lives.” It concerns time at its intersection with lived existence, experience, and perception.⁶ Hoy usefully refers to this facet of time as “temporality” in order to distinguish it from the common conflation of universal time with “time as such,” and we will generally continue using that distinction here (Hoy 2009, xiii). As implied at the beginning of this chapter, temporality raises questions that cut to the heart of human experience and understanding, and poses some rather significant problems for both the maintenance and understanding of individuality and social life. It concerns, at bottom, our attempts to engage (or disengage) with the inevitable, yet often unpredictable quality of change itself, and all of the thrill, anxieties, and possibilities this encounter can engender. Is there a unity to the self across time, and if so, of what sort? What is the role of memory in constituting personal and shared experience? How are perceptions of collectively shared pasts, presents, and futures generated, and what are the consequences? What does it mean to perceive time as “flowing” in a particular direction, doing so at different speeds, or as having a particular shape? How do norms or traditions endure across time? What are the political consequences of nostalgia for the past, or hope for the future? If universal time raises questions about the materiality of time, and what (or whether) it is independently as an operative mechanism of the universe, temporality asks us to interpret our experience of time. The manifestation of that experience is a given (the “reality” or “ideality” of that experience is a separate issue). When thought of in terms of temporality, time becomes a key category through which we can problematize our certainties and touchstones, and reassess some of the more enduring questions of human experience.

It is especially important to distinguish this approach to conceiving of time from that of Immanuel Kant, whose influence on modern philosophies of time (and modern philosophy in general) would be difficult to overestimate. Kant’s analysis of time was both revolutionary and profoundly unfortunate. His overarching concern with regards to time was its source; whether time came from our minds, or from “the starry heavens above.”⁷ In order to answer this question, he developed a more comprehensive account of the nature of experience, aimed at the prevailing philosophical traditions of his day. Against the empiricists who argued that the mind experiences data immediately and directly, and the idealists who denied or highly doubted that we experience the existence of objects in the world at all, Kant posited a nuanced synthesis of the two positions that aimed to overturn them both, called transcendental idealism. The complex details of Kant’s transcendental idealism are beyond our present scope. What is significant to note here is that Kant concludes that the mind does indeed have a role to play in structuring our experience of the outside world, through a synthesizing process of the faculties of the mind. Even so, the operation of those faculties pre-supposes the independent existence of “objects that exist in space, and time outside me” as a priori and universal conditions of possible experience (Kant 1996, B274). Kant thus conceives of time (along with space) as an unchanging, universal, and homogeneous a priori condition for the possibility of experience in general (A34).

Time, for Kant, is vital for understanding the possibility of human experience and cognition, yet simultaneously it appears in his account to be oddly removed from the determination of any particular experience. Ultimately, he does not distinguish between time and temporality as we have parsed them here, largely it seems as a result of his focus throughout his philosophical projects on the identification of ordered, universal, and generally applicable rules and conditions of possibility at work in the world, as well as his pre-phenomenological acceptance of the intelligibility of a mind-world dichotomy. His efforts were revolutionary in that they interpreted time as partially a function of human cognition, and recognized th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Time and Political Obligation
• 1 Time and Temporality
• 2 Modernity and Political Obligation
• 3 Vertical Time-binding
• 4 Horizontal Time-binding
• 5 Chronarchy and Obligation
• Index