Book Review: In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (original) (raw)

and the emergence of typewriters, mimeographs, photocopiers and digital text while acknowledging the insufficiency of this context to explain the numerous historical articulations of do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing. Depriving the reader of closure, Gitelman implicitly reasserts her approach to media history as an ongoing process of asking questions and reframing contexts. As the book’s subtitle makes clear, Paper Knowledge aims only to work towards a media history of documents. Gitelman’s provocative study lays the groundwork for future research and urges scholars to think through the implications of textual reproduction and of a world that continues to be structured by documents that know and show.

Dimitrios Pavlounis
University of Michigan, USA

Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014.

Sarah Sharma’s new volume demolishes the vanity and conceit of those who argue that a properly political response to an accelerating culture is to slow down. Life is already slow for most people. It is slow for the mass of cleaners, taxi drivers and security guards whose repetitive labour is the very condition upon which a sped-up life can be lived. Those with a platform to talk publicly about speed - critical theorists who attack 24/7 living and business leaders who celebrate it - barely register how their experience of an always-on culture is dependent upon an infrastructure of labour made up of varied intersecting and interdependent temporalities of waiting and rushing, serving and cajoling, supporting and de-stressing. Sharma brings this world to life through ethnographic studies of frequent flyers, taxi drivers, yoga instructors and slow-food lifestylists. Sharma’s thesis is that ‘differential relationships to time organize and perpetuate inequalities’ (p. 137). Claims about a blanket speeding up or need to slow down miss how power works through the synchronising of some people’s patience and others’ haste. A key finding is that everyone, regardless of status or situation, worries about calibrating to other peoples’ and organisations’ schedules, an impossible and individualised desire for a feeling of control. This sense of slipping requires a shared imaginary of a normal time against which to measure this slippage, and this emerges as the nine-to-five. Business travellers soar above it; taxi drivers and cleaners would love to return to it. This nine-to-five imaginary must be challenged, Sharma argues, by a temporal pluralism; one hospitable enough to take those down on their luck as only ‘in the meantime’, one in which we see the management of our own time as entangled and always affecting others. Sharma’s political project is not to produce more free time, slow time or time out, but times that are mutually beneficial, in which all recognise that mutuality.

Sharma’s study rests on two theoretical moves. First, she proposes a ‘power-chronography’, developing Doreen Massey’s theory of power-geometry. Against those arguing globalisation entails a homogenous flattening of space-time, Massey sought to explain the actually existing differentials of spatiality and subjectivity. Sharma’s powerchronography explains variegated and intersecting social temporalities and their power effects on differently situated subjects. Second, Sharma contests the assumption that

communications technologies have primarily spatial effects that enable power at a distance. Instead, such technologies help constitute uneven temporalities: we are not either caught in the network or able to escape to a life more free, authentic and contemplative; rather, we live across these speeds and systems. Political opportunities depend in part on how we navigate this but, for most, on how vulnerable this leaves us to years of political and economic control, intervention and dependency. This control is largely exercised through discourse. Sharma writes,

It is not speed per se but the explanatory power of speed that I argue has the undue effect of preparing more and more sites for the institutions of modern power to intervene in bodies in increasingly invasive and inequitable ways … Shared across the temporal differential is not so much the general speed of life but rather the expectation that one must recalibrate. (p. 18)

Speed discourse legitimates the positioning of citizens as precarious. Those too slow must be helped along or left behind. Those fast enough prove the system works and get rewarded. They excel at rising to the challenge of speed. One business traveller tells Sharma, for instance, ‘Me, I’m probably an 8 out of 10 on the road-warrior scale because I have no need for a secretary’ (p. 36). Their qualitative value lies not only in the financial profit they bring their company but in the way they make ‘qualitative adjustments to the problem of time’ (p. 42), continually finding ways to sustain connectivity and engagement, even if it means subjecting their own bodies to drugs and family life to mere aspiration. Institutionally, too, this discourse has performative effects: policies and pay are allocated via measures that reflect this discourse, reinforcing time differentials for those at the top and bottom. But it is in the account of calibration and interdependence that Sharma’s book makes a leap forward. Sharma doesn’t just describe how people live differentiated temporalities, she explains and theorises how the process works to produce and extend power relations. Once the mechanisms are laid bare, we can have a more serious conversation about how these patterns can begin to be changed.

Taxi drivers must synchronise their routines around business travellers. In Toronto, ‘Abraham’ is happy he gets to choose which hours to drive his cab, but confesses he has not taken a holiday in 4 years and makes below minimum wage. He eventually admits he feels life slowing to a standstill as the financial crisis hits his trade. Meanwhile, his business travellers pay to create ‘quality time’ for themselves - and as Sharma suggests, “quality” time can only exist for those whose time does not literally equal (company) money’ (p. 32). They are irreplaceable; the drivers, cleaners and baristas who wait on them are quantitative, replaceable labour. Yoga instructors believe they are helping others manage the effects of the speed discourse by offering an alternative way of thinking and being. However, the lunchtime classes they offer to beaten-down office workers merely help those workers fit more effectively into their desk-bound routines (and force them to lose their lunch breaks). Taking their money per session while talking about rebellion, yoga instructors have ‘a parasitical role’, Sharma argues (p. 85). They show no interest in those taking their classes and do not advertise classes to the office’s cleaners or security staff. Sharma then takes us to The Ruddy Potato, a slow-food store on an island near Vancouver. Here, she finds the relatively few, affluent patrons want to get away from society, not change it. Discussion involves 'lionizing iconic locals, not

recognising laborers’ who produced the goods or recognising that driving to the store everyday reinforces their dependence on energy, roads and other slow, shared temporalities (p. 127). The cheaper grocery store down the road is a constant hive of activity and community.

In trying to get by and make a living, each group of workers helps the others fit to the system more efficiently. Against Virilio, Hassan, Crary and others, Sharma argues that
the work of the critical Left is not to confirm this world and simply flip it on its head, merely exposing it as corporate, capitalistic, dehumanizing, and antidemocratic. Instead, the goal of critical thought it to rescue the politics of time from domination by structures of power. (p. 25)

Amid all of this, interviews reveal that none of the groups or individuals feel in control of their lives. However, while taxi drivers feel they have no support, frequent flyers at least feel they can improve the experience along the way.

To what extent does the discourse of speed function as an ideological trick, fooling people who don’t need to work or to work so hard that it is in their interests and vital to a successful identity? Sharma shows how discourse works through both material and linguistic mediums at once. Business travellers’ and taxi drivers’ bodies take on and habitualise disciplining ideas they justify to themselves by repeating the speed rhetoric. Neither body nor mind is prior or primary, and individuation and social regimes function together to produce calibration and the imperative to calibrate.

There are hugely enjoyable moments in this book. Many will recognise the ‘public display of busyness’ of people on their laptops in cafes and transport hubs (p. 53). In an airport lounge, Sharma strikes up conversation with a software developer who loves his lifestyle. He reads Zygmunt Bauman between proselytising innovation. He evokes the theorist for whom no movement of political value can solidify in contemporary society, gleefully telling Sharma, ‘I am Liquid Man’ (p. 28). Sharma’s portraits and vignettes are required reading for academics and non-academics alike.

Ben O’Loughlin
Royal Holloway University of London, UK