A summary of Chapter 9 - Time and Memory

The chapter examines time and its relationship to social systems - time and space are constitutive features of all social systems.

Time is a social, not a natural phenomenon - time is distinguished between societies, with elements such as weeks varying in length from 3 to 16 days. Most societies now have agreed to follow the same divisions but the divisions in time we all follow are abstract, not natural. As this development has occurred, days have shifted from being organised by task with a sundial as a background element to the exploitation of mechanically divided labour time. One of the constrains of capitalism was the limiting effect the rulers put on lengths of working days and as such the working hours became denser and encouraged improvements in technology:

'The great improvements made in machines of every kind have raised their productive power very much. Without any doubt, the shortening of the hours of labour……..gave the impulse to these improvements. The latter, combined with the more intense strain upon the workman, have had the effect that at least as much is produced in the shortened working day…..as was previously produced during the longer one. (Quoted in Marx 1976: 540)

Time separates work from the context of work - time becomes the measure of work instead and employees are seen as temporal subjects, having an orientation to time as well as being disciplined by time. This change in attitudes started to happen between the 16th and 18th centuries with the burgeoning cash economy and the strives of the Puritan society to make everyone abide by a day of rest on the Sabbath, with six days of work in between. Social conflict became focused around time as units of clock time became measures of work, hence the term "time is money", although this can be interpreted in a different manner and it is worth noting that time, unlike money, cannot be stored or saved - every moment is a movement towards death. People vary in their ability to use time effectively, hence the modern ideas of time management and time and motion studies. Time becomes a limited resource when it's the very thing you haven't got enough of to the extent that men will pay to delegate work in order to free leisure time.

As societies have advanced, so the ability to travel and communicate have become all the more important as essential elements of this cash economy - as time and space grew smaller with these advances, so the measurement of time over larger distance became all the more important. ie, firstly, all time in towns on stagecoach routes conformed to London time, followed by the country, and then other countries in time zones with a relation to Greenwich mean time. This is thus a mathematical fiction signalling the attempted emasculation of the human experience of time (and space).

Adam considers the concept of time as a resource in contrast to Giddens who puts time at the heart of contemporary social theory, believing social activity is organised temporally and spatially. Heideger approaches from a more distant view point, understanding 'being' as fundamentally temporal, going on to clarify that the nature of time, and thus of being, should not be concerned with the means by which it is measured. Time can instead be defined by event paths - individuals moving through time-space meet at 'stations' and comprise 'bundles'. Individuals pursue 'projects' that have to use the inherently limited resources of time and space. There are 'capability constraints', such as the need for regular sleep or food, and coupling constraints, which constrain activities that are undertaken with others, at least for part of the time.

There is the concept of co-presence availability, the degree to which people are available to one's social milieu - this has seen dramatic advance over the last two centuries through the development of transportation technologies and the subsequent separation of communication from transportation.
There is also Giddens concept of space-time distanciation - the stretching of societies over longer or shorter spans to meet with other society's parameters. i.e. denser days or longer hours means time becomes separated from lived experience and becomes a universal public measure. 'There has been a long standing philosophical debate as to whether time and space are to be viewed as absolute entities, possessing their own natures or particularities.' Adam argues that there are two different types of time - natural time and social time, and that it is clock time, paradoxically the characteristic which social science has thought to be the defining feature of natural time, as that came to be historically separated from social time.

Our understanding of time is still evolving however, with major discoveries of the last century reshaping our views of natural time. Einstein demonstrated that there is no fixed time - time is a local, internal feature of the system of observation. He also showed that time and space are fused into four dimensional entities, curved under the influence of mass. Hence time in nature is now intrinsically temporal as time is most definitely directional - the arrow of time. Thus we have summarised a notion of time that is non-spatialised, non-reversible, multi faceted, and where no strong distinction is drawn between the times of nature and those of humans. Hence we have a distinction between the present and the here and now - there is always a movement of time that we are intrinsically linked to - time is lived, not captured.

The last portion of the chapter deals with time as a social organiser, and our view within this social milieu as a limited one within a larger picture. Generally we deal with the duree of daily time, the diasein of life time and the longue duree of history. However, these time scales relating to our existence fall between the micro seconds of quantum physics and the imperceptibly long periods involved in studies such as astronomy. Clock time lies in the middle, and it has been clock time that has been the organising principle of modernity. To the extent that we are passing into the post modern, to disorganised capitalism, then we are moving to time as glacial or evolutionary and to a time that is instantaneous.
Instantaneous time is enabling - electronic data transfer allows us to juxtapose time and space and hence cultures - we can give a contemporary reflexivity.
What we have now as time under disorganised capitalism is the idea of the immediate future - we want the future now. And so we have a collage effect - events become more important than location - we have an intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness. This also leads to panic - because of this instantaneous culture the category of deferred gratification - is slipping from us as we realise the future is not set from year to year or day to day:

Nowotny:
'we are about to abolish the category of the future and replace it with that of the extended present…..The category of the future is shrinking towards becoming a mere extension of the present because science and technology have successfully reduced the distance that is needed to accommodate their own products. (1985:14-15)

Our time space interactions become increasingly complex as the worlds societies move towards a society with pockets of stretching to accommodate co-presence availability. There is now no fashion - but fashions, no choice, only choices. Hence there is a profound change upon what we imagine as instantaneous time - the time space paths of individuals are completely desynchronised, which can be seen in the importance now laid upon pockets of 'quality time' with key individuals or groups among our social interactions.

This emptying of time and space establishes a single world - a single community - a 'we'. The consequence of this is a re-evaluation of the larger picture - the longue duree of the future, as we start to think of the planet as a home for 'us'. The instantaneous is informing our understanding of evolutionary time - our position in history and place.