Temporal escapes: Deployments of ‘time work’ as a methodology for addressing subjective experiences of time

Michael G. Flaherty, The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. ISBN 1439902631

The Textures of Time is dedicated to the defence of the sociological concept of agency, which Flaherty engages with through a non-deterministic perspective on time. The primary method for achieving this defence of agency is through explicating how individuals attempt to manipulate their subjective temporal experiences along the lines of six perspectives on time: duration, frequency, sequence, timing, allocation, and ‘taking time’. Flaherty has previously described these practices as ‘time work’ (see Flaherty, 2002, 2003), and he returns to the idea in order to present the concept in relation to a large number of fascinating case studies. ‘Time work’ is any practice that modifies temporal experience, whether in the self or in another. This could be as personal as the attempts to make time pass more quickly – such as the example of a young student who ritualizes doodling during her lectures in order to speed the progression of time; or the attempt to slow temporal progression by inhabiting a particular temporal space to its fullest, for which Flaherty cites the Zen Buddhist exhortation to ‘Be here now’ (p. 31). While the entirely intrapersonal temporal manipulations are, at times, intriguing examples of the self-determination that Flaherty seeks to expose, the attempts by individuals to impose temporal experiences on others act as the most compelling data when allied with the concept of time work. The paradigmatic example seems to be the anecdote of a crowd-averse librarian who, unlike her husband, wishes to never be the first to a dinner party: ‘I want to arrive a little late to ensure that we are not among the first ones there … I find little things to do to delay our departure, like finding just the right accessory to wear, or remembering there was “something” I wanted to bring with me’ and thus subverts her husband’s own attempts at temporal control (pp. 96–97). As Flaherty understands interpersonal temporal contexts of frequency, ‘one person’s agency is experienced as another person’s determinism’ (p. 46).

Time work shows great critical potential in its ability to classify a wide range of differing practices from a new perspective, in such a way as to expose temporal agency amidst or as a product of social, cultural, and individual activity. Time work is not delivered as merely a new critical perspective; Flaherty takes the concept further in The Textures of Time in order to address the self-determining individual. The idea that the individual can consciously engage particular practices in order to have some experiences and not others, to be able to savour or speed the beautiful or boring moments in life, the routines that become personal devices for remembering some schedules or as a means for the employer to control employees, all become examples of self-determined temporal subjects eliciting a modicum of resistance against being externally determined. The capacity to expend the most precious resource we have in the form of either ‘intervention or forbearance’ (Giddens in Flaherty, p. 143) through means developed in formal cultural practices, or informal personal rhythms, all make for a compelling argument for self-determination.

The contest between having the free will to influence the world and being subjected to the determining qualities of material existence is the debate that Flaherty wishes to contribute to. Being determined by one’s environment is contrasted with the self-determination to choose how the social environment reacts to the individual. By wilfully placing oneself into the path of certain chains of events, an individual becomes capable of choosing how reality is manifested. Flaherty does present some of the possible forms for this self-determination in the last chapters of The Textures of Time: at the point of its greatest cynicism towards agency this leaves the individual engaging in consensual determinism, but, as he notes elsewhere, these perspectives lead to a case where, ‘We could dismiss [their] behaviour as an instance of cultural determinism but only by reducing these people to mindless cultural dopes who act without electing to do so’ (p. 85). Such perspectives on behaviourism versus agency help to unpack limiting demarcations that both perspectives tend to employ. Flaherty’s first chapter presents an informative historicization of the debates between those sociologists who advocate for the existence of agency (or something like it), and those that disregard the possibility of free will within a model of behaviour that is entirely predetermined by physical laws.

In so far as the theoretical processes surrounding temporal agency are concerned, The Textures of Time makes one move that essentially guarantees that behaviourist etiologies are thrown out before the debate over the activity of the individual can begin. One of the first requests that Flaherty makes is for social sciences to move away from deterministic frameworks for understanding temporal experience that are ‘imported from the natural sciences’ (p. 1). Why is this significant for behaviourism? Because the notion of behaviourism itself is historically indebted to empirical natural sciences research; that is, behaviour as it is determined by cause and effect. When time is no longer considered as operating on a deterministic framework, then determinism has no purchase. It should be no surprise that, after this move, Flaherty’s conclusions can hold no place for any notion of the subject that is not based in agency. Cause and effect require a linear and deterministic perspective of time in order to function. Indeed, time is the determining factor in all processes of change within the natural sciences that Flaherty cites. Speed? Distance over time. Acceleration? Speed over time. Flow? Volume over time. Population growth? Births, minus deaths, over time. Without a deterministic vision of time, it should be no surprise that behaviourist conceptions of the individual become meaningless. While he does present a ‘spectrum’ of agency – covering consensual determinism, cultural reproduction, reactionary agency, time play and ambivalence – the question of behaviourism has not so much been resolved as it has simply been disappeared.

Whether this means that behaviourism is nothing more than a curiosity of deterministic perspectives of temporality, or if it is a legitimate construct that Flaherty has merely obscured, The Textures of Time presents a highly developed and intriguingly nuanced approach to the question of agency. The case studies presented run the gamut of current social conditions, and Flaherty’s ability to present even the most seemingly mundane details of individual life as insurrectionary or sublime temporal achievements by the individual make for a compelling discussion of temporal agency.

The evidence that Flaherty has amassed is varied and compelling, although completely contrary lives show similarities that are, at times, slightly unsettling. The domestic narratives of a family dinner mirror the cold anecdote of an ex-convict’s control of his cellmate, ‘On the first day, I came up with rules for when he could do certain things. I basically controlled when the talking started and stopped and when the lights went on and off’, and Flaherty reads both examples as the benign or exploitative imposing of ‘interpersonal commitments’ on another individual (pp. 91–92). Again, without apology or condemnation, Flaherty points to some forms of drug use as devices that some users employ to aid their attempts at temporal control, providing an alternative to narratives of escapist fantasies as found in some ethnographies of drug cultures. There is a sense of bemusement on Flaherty’s part when he recounts some individuals’ experiences: the difficult case of getting information from chronic marijuana users, or the whimsical anthropomorphism in a young man’s description of his leisure-time pottery. Flaherty’s research data is thorough, and presents myriad ways of interrogating time work on interpersonal and social levels. The evidence as to how individuals use time work to manipulate the behaviours of other individuals shows that time work is not limited to internal, subjective pressures, and, rather, has real consequences outside of individual experiences of time.

The Textures of Time has provided relevant insights into my own field of media and communications. Flaherty makes a comment that

Human beings are not trapped in the present. Language empowers us to transcend the here-and-now of our immediate circumstances. It follows that one of the distinctive features of human nature is our capacity to take time from the present in order to plan the future. (p. 124)

In addition, the capacity to present a qualitative means of describing a form of social surplus emerging from the discussions of ribald workplace behaviour points to useful material for Autonomist Marxist theory. Furthermore, the capacity for discussing modern philosophy’s most famous piece of time work, that of eternal return, points to the working of Neitzsche’s ‘heaviest weight’ from a philosophic concept with a limited audience into a measurable cultural practice for self-determination (Neitzsche, 2001: 194).

Flaherty’s text is coloured by a singular comment that was, in itself, unshakable once read, ‘Does agency exist? And if so, does it matter?’ (p. 11). The question is, in all likelihood, unanswerable, but The Textures of Time provides a great amount of material examples and devices for discussions within the context of temporality for future studies where some form of agency is assumed to exist.