Times, histories and discourse

Abstract

Social and cultural thought as they emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century commonly declared time to be a function of structure, continuity and eternity, not least with a view to postulate an ontological stability and regularity of social life. Even if the inclusion of time and social temporalities has subsequently been demanded by theories of action, the multiple social notions of time and their practical articulations have been subordinated to the discursive organization of a hegemonic universal world time. Here, three different, yet connected, narratives which order time will be considered and, in opposition to assumptions that there exists homogeneous and linear world-time, it will be argued that only the critical interrogation of the construction of a universal course of time allows for a further opening towards the particularities of situated social and cultural worlds and their multifarious times and histories.

Keywords:

• time and social theory
• time and multiple modernities
• time and action

Notes

1. Augustinus, book 11, chapter XIV, Augustine, Confessions. Newly translated and edited by Albert C. Outler, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.xiv.html (accessed 11 September 2008).

2. Beckett 1998, 89. If not indicated otherwise, all translations are mine.

3. On the problematization of the temporal dimension in the various discourses of social theory, see i.a. Bourdieu 1963, 1972, 1977, 1980, 1992; Durkheim 1912; Elias 1984; Giddens, 1979, 1984; Luhmann 1976, 1979; Mead 1934; Schütz 1974; Sorokin and Merton 1937. Hermeneutic-interpretive sociology drew on concepts of the social constitution of time to understand individual action and social practices. In order to reconstruct subjective meaning and drawing on Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz (1974) aimed at a phenomenological foundation of social times; G.H. Mead provides an interactional foundation of self-identity and shared temporal perspectives.

4. Theunissen (1991, 39) distinguishes between ‘subjectivation, pluralization, universalization and affirmation’.

5. Norbert Elias' ‘theory of human knowledge’ similarly inscribes time into stages of social development (1984: XII). Additionally, the sociologization of time in Elias is quite restricted, because time is seen as the synthesis of a continuous flow of occurrences. This (Aristotelean) definition – which considers time as ‘counted movement’ – equates time with ‘continuity’ and ‘movement’, and thus the moment, rupture, discontinuity and immobility are deprived of their specific temporality.

6. On this aspect, see also Wolf (1982). Even Wolf's presentation of European expansion since the fourteenth century and the history of the center–periphery relations, however, is based on the postulate of a unilinear world-time and does not allow for regional ontologies of time.

7. Cf. the ‘classical’ investigations, Durkheim 1912; Mauss 1978; Hubert and Mauss 1909; Bohannan 1953; Dumont 1964; Evans-Pritchard 1939, 1972; Fortes 1970, Geertz 1973a; Hall 1984; Leach 1961; Lévi-Strauss 1962; Sorokin and Merton 1937; Veyne 1987; for an overview, see Fabian 1983, 41–2. Cf. Bender and Wellbery 1991; de Certeau 1988; Hastrup 1992; Sahlins 1981, 1983, 1987; Trouillot 1995; see in particular Price 1983 and Friese 1995, 1997a, b.

8. In some contrast to the social sciences, philosophy avails itself of an old – even if heterogeneous – heritage in thinking the sudden moment, a concept the elaboration of which, within the philosophy of modernity, reaches not just from romanticism to Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche to Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger or Walter Benjamin. For a further elaboration, see Friese 2001.

9. Cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Communications 1994; Conrad and Kessel 1994.