Book Review: In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (original) (raw)
Related papers
2001
An explicit focus on time challenges established social science traditions. As such, it changes the ontology, epistemology and methodology of the social study of work. It offers a new perspective on power relations, on past and current employment and production practices, and on the effect of the industrial way of life on the environment. This paper explores the impact of the commodification of time on work and wider socio-environmental relations and considers the valorisation of speed in work and production processes. It brings to the fore taken-for-granted incongruities between different time priorities. Finally, it investigates the implications of the non-stop work patterns associated with globalised information and trade. 4 4 When Time is Money: Contested Rationalities of Time and Challenges to the Theory and Practice of Work.
Revised article for Time and Society
Time and Society, 2019
The current article conceptualizes free time as subjectively experienced and defined, as it explores not only how individuals spend free time, but also how they perceive and interpret it. It challenges established approaches to leisure that relate to it as a realm of freedom distinct from work or duties, suggesting that the discourse of work imbues free time with ideals, which shape, not only how we spend our free time, but also, how we perceive it and utilize it for self-management. My focus is on the relationship between time, freedom and the self, while taking into account the input of culture. The theoretical concept that I offer here in order to analyze free time is disciplined freedom. I use this term to refer to the ways by which cultural paradigms shape conceptions and actions of free time by promoting a disciplinary gaze that encourages a form of management of time and the self that adheres to authenticity, freedom and choice. Based on qualitative data from 43 in-depth interviews, the findings revealed the impact of conflicting discourses that competed in shaping meaning and action related to free time. The article brings into question the freedom of individuals in the face of discursive frameworks that were found to operate as powerful, taken for granted dictates in everyday life. https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tasj Time and Society
Anthropological Quarterly, 2023
Introduction by Jeremy F. Walton, Sasha Newell and Patrick Eisenlohr. In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of “material temporalities” with an eye to the collection’s impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate “material temporalities” in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalities in offering affordances to and constituting forms of recalcitrance for human actors. Following this, we discuss the two orders of time, human and nonhuman, that intersect in the assemblages of material temporalities, as well as a number of key inspirations for our theorization of material temporalities—Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic time and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterochrony, specifically. This discussion of human and nonhuman times supports our critique of “clock time” and its errant aspiration to an objective material basis for temporality. Following this, we offer an overview of both recent and longstanding anthropologi- cal engagements with temporality and historicity, as well as a summary of recent media studies perspectives on time and materiality, which mount a more radical intervention and critique than most anthropological arguments. We then review anthropological debates over affect and materiality in order to argue for the centrality of temporality and historicity to affective matters. Finally, we summarize the collections’s three major thematic clusters—virtuality and latency, material extensions of phenomenological time, and material futures—with reference to the specific contributions.
In the context of ongoing debates about the distinctive temporalities associated with contemporary regulative regimes, this paper explores the interpretive trajectories initiated in contrasting conceptualisations of the politics of time. This exploration is developed through analysis of interview data from a study of unconscious relations in academic practice. Section one uses one moment of data to contrast phenomenological, Deleuzian and Lacanian theorisations of the relation between time and subjectivity. Section two is an exegesis of Lacan's paper on Logical Time. This outlines the way temporality is structured in relation to the subject's guess about the expectations of the Other. Section three uses this to develop an interpretation of three temporalities that constitute the space of contemporary academic subjectivities. The final section considers the intensification of the juxtaposition of these incongruent temporalities, contrasting Lacanian and Deleuzian theorisations of time in the Real/virtual and their implications for both methodological and political strategy.
Chronopower. Time and Power in the Context of Modern Temporality
The project problematizes the notion of time as a specifically political category by exploring the relationship between time and power situating this relationship in the historical, sociopolitical context of late Western capitalist modernity. The work investigates and theorizes certain struggles over the “appropriation” of time for the satisfaction of particular interests by various political actors: business entities, empires, states, scientific authorities, and political groups. The politics of time emerge as a struggle for chronopower, the power to control and manage time by defining what time is and superimposing it over social, collective structures for the satisfaction of specific interests. My dissertation argues that the interests of modern capitalism dominate the politics of time and, as a result, produce a temporal regime. In this regime, democratic political action is emptied out of its emancipatory potential unless it challenges capitalist temporality and the specific notion of time itself.