Moving away from reified notions of calendar time necessitates a qualitative approach, which seeks a complex and nuanced understanding of how calendar time works to coordinate and configure historical time. Heidegger’s distinction between time-measuring and time- reckoning, and his concepts of ‘datability’ ‘spannedness’, and ‘significance’, can provide the initial basis for such as qualitative conception. Firstly, he demonstrates that the temporality of calendar time is not reducible to the straightforward chronology of the timeline or calendrical grid, but rather, is rooted in the interconnectedness of ‘awaiting’, ‘making present’, ‘retaining’. Secondly, he shows that that calendar time is materially embedded and related to things or phenomena we are ‘concerned’ with, and is therefore interested and ‘significant’. Thirdly, he shows that calendar time is a social, public time, grounded in a ‘being-with’. However, whilst he underscores the fundamentally social and public character of calendar time, Heidegger in fact falls back on a ‘thin’ and reductive conception of public time, which undoes his insightful analysis of ‘time-reckoning’. Accordingly, we need to formulate a ‘deepened’ conception of public time, as a crucial aspect of our qualitative approach to calendar time (Leland 2001).
Considering the ‘publicness’ of calendar time requires the balancing of two equally important points. The first of these is the importance of standardisation as a coordinating mechanism, given that standardising temporal reference is an integral component of social life. ‘Time could not be a major parameter of the social world if it could not be related to in a
standard way which is shared by a collectivity’ (Zerubavel 1982:85). History as a public discourse requires standardised time frames, in order for historical materials and narratives to be accessible and sharable. Dating frameworks enable us to follow and ‘map’ traces of the past, and to share and coordinate diverse narratives, by providing common temporal references. The problem, therefore, is not with standardness per se, because the creation of temporal reference points and frameworks is an important means of attaining temporal coordination. The problem, rather, emerges when common, standard temporal reference frameworks become reified, or are presumed to have the same meaning or value for every individual or group whose lives are affected by them. Whilst people share public or standard time measures as an integral component of social life, they often attribute completely different meanings to these measures, or indeed, discern a ‘lack of fit’ between their own experience of a particular time span and its public measure (Hutchings 2008:5; Weiss 2011:171). The second key point, then, alongside the importance of coordination, is the inevitability of social diversity, which means that no two people ever experience or ‘live time’ in the same way, including public time (Weiss 2011:171-2).
As we have seen, Heidegger’s ‘thin’ conception of public time takes for granted that public time-frames and measuring devices are encountered and lived in the same way by everyone. Indeed, this thin conception of public time is informed by Heidegger’s thin conception of the ‘public’ more generally as a ‘uniform mass’, which rules out any detailed consideration of significant differences between individuals within a public, and obscures the way in which groups can be differently situated within a given social and cultural realm (Leland 2001:112)108. This ‘thin’ understanding of publicness therefore precludes any
108
This interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein and publicness, it must be noted, is contested within Heidegger scholarship. Charles Guignon, for example, claims that the concepts of ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ refer to the ways in which one takes up one’s cultural heritage, and thus that ‘authenticity’ is not an individualistic conception in Heidegger’s work. ‘Authentic Dasein’, he writes, ‘remembers’ its rootedness in the wider unfolding of its culture and shared history (Guignon 1993). Yet, whilst there is some textual support for this reading, much of Heidegger’s own language and assertions in Being and Time contradicts the picture that Guignon paints. For example, he clearly states that ‘the Self of the everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self… As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the ‘they’, and must first find itself’
consideration of how public time serves different interests, and how it impacts differently according to specific social positions and situations. What is required, then, is an alternative, ‘deepened’ conception of the ‘public’ upon which to base a conception of ‘public time’: a conception which can register the importance of standardised public reference frameworks in terms of enabling shared communication, but which can also register that these frameworks do not have the same meaning or effects for everyone.
To this end, I suggest, we can fruitfully draw upon Hannah Arendt’s pluralistic conception of the public, which manages to balance the importance of public institutions, frameworks and structures, with a recognition of the inevitable diversity amongst those who constitute a public. This is articulated, for example, in her account of the ‘public’ in The Human Condition (1998). On the one hand, Arendt’s account here affirms the profound importance of the public realm, which ‘gathers us together’ and relates us to one another. The term ‘public’, she explains, means that ‘everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody’, and the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of our world (Arendt 1998:50). As such, the public can be construed as ‘the common world’ itself, as constructed through human activity and conceptual frameworks, and is distinguished from ‘our privately owned place in it’ (ibid: 52). Yet, whilst affirming the value and necessity of the public, here and throughout her work Arendt expresses a keen awareness of the dangers inherent in conceiving of the common world as a ‘mass society’ and presuming a ‘“common nature’ of all men who constitute it’ (ibid: 57). She therefore places a vehement emphasis on the fundamental plurality of the public realm, or common world:
(Heidegger 2009:167). As a re-interpretation of the concept of Mitsein, Guignon’s account is more
‘The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable aspects and perspectives in which the common world presents itself… For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position’ (ibid. 57).
For Arendt, then, the common world is fundamentally dependent upon plurality, as without a plurality of perspectives, the diversity of this common world could never ‘appear’ and be shared. As such, the first key lesson to be learnt from Arendt is the need to affirm and protect the heterogeneity of communities and societies. Attempts to overcome that plurality and multiplicity, Arendt warns, must result in ‘the abolition of the public realm itself’ (Honig 1998:114). The second key lesson is the importance of cultivating spontaneity, imagination, openness, and creativity within public political life (ibid: 103). This emerges from Arendt’s ‘agonistic’ conception of politics, which again, depends upon a plurality of perspectives and voices within a common public context. The example of a truly ‘political’ public realm that Arendt repeatedly returns to throughout her work is that of the Ancient Greek polis. Arendt’s writings on the polis envisage public, political space not only as a competitive space in which ‘moral and political greatness, heroism and preeminence are revealed, displayed and shared with others’, but more fundamentally, as a ‘space of exposure’, where different subjects offer themselves up to others, exposing their uniqueness yet also their dependence upon the others with whom they communicate (Benhabib 1998:69; Cavarero 1997). Though Arendt has been criticised for what has been interpreted as her nostalgic lionisation of Greek political culture (and moreover for her insistence on a public/private dualism109), many feminist theorists of
109 In fact, however, Bonnie Honig argues that the Arendtian emphasis on resistability, openness, creativity and incompleteness—the ‘sine qua non of Arendt’s politics’—means reading Arendt against Arendt and resisting any a priori determination of a public/private distinction (Honig1998).
the public have used her pluralistic, ‘agonistic’ conception of public, political life as a way of contesting liberal or cosmopolitan ideals of universality and neutrality, and emphasising instead the uniqueness of different public subjects, and the open-ended, ‘contestatory and power-laden’ dimension of the public (Fraser 1990; Benhabib 1998).110 In this sense, Arendt enables publicness to ‘navigate through wider and wilder territory’ than usual within political theory (Ryan 1998:8).
Arendt’s conception of public life thereby offers a way of registering the importance of the public or common world in ‘gathering us together’, whilst at the same time affirming the inevitability and value of plurality. Although Arendt is all too aware that public life can so easily collapse into a ‘dictatorship of the ‘they’’, her solution is not to follow Heidegger and seek a more ‘authentic’ way of life for the individual. Instead, she seeks to develop a more adequate conception of public life itself: a conception of publicness without concomitant presumptions about uniformity, universality or neutrality, which is rooted in the value and necessity of plural perspectives and positions. This is one reason her work has been of such inspiration to many feminist political theorists of the public. Whilst feminists have been sharply critical of models of the public sphere premised upon ideals of universality or neutrality, feminism nevertheless implicitly values publicness, in the sense that publicity enables critical communication, collective practices, the sharing of time, and the linking of ideas.A crucial task for feminist political theory is therefore not to simply critique or abandon the ideal of publicness, but rather, to reconstruct a notion of the public which does not
110 Seyla Benhabib, for example, argues that Arendt’s agonistic’ conception of the public offers an
alternative to the liberal model of publicness, which is premised upon certain kinds of conversational constraints, with the fundamental constraint being neutrality (Benhabib 1998; see also Barber 1988:151). She further contends that it offers an alternative to Habermas’ Kantian cosmopolitanism. Whilst Habermas moves away from the liberal criteria of neutrality towards the criteria represented by the idea of a ‘practical discourse’, feminist theorists have seriously challenged the presuppositions of Habermas’ abstract, universal, rationalistic model of the public sphere. Nancy Fraser, for example, challenges the occlusion of nonliberal, non-bourgeois and competing public spheres within Habermas’ historical sketch of the rise of the public sphere, (Habermas 1989), which means that he overlooks the ways in which counter-publics have always contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public sphere. Ultimately, then, he ends up idealising the Enlightenment ideal of a unified, single public sphere, at the expense of a ‘multiplicity of publics’ (Fraser 1990; see also Young 1987).
‘masquerade’ behind universality and neutrality, but rather can take differences and diversity into account (Landes 1998:143; Young 1987; Fraser 1990)111.
Accordingly, I propose that Arendt’s pluralistic conception of the public can be redeployed as we seek to develop a ‘deepened’ account of public time: an account that is not premised upon assumptions about neutrality, universality and uniformity, but rather, upon the desire for temporal coordination and time-sharing within and across diversity. It must be acknowledged that Arendt’s theorisation of the public and the political categorically privileges the spatial over the temporal, as she posits the concept of public or ‘political space’ as a means of defending and protecting the distinctiveness and particularity of specific fields of political discourse and activity, against the generalised understanding of a universal, ‘infinite’ historical time. Yet, in fact, we can find nascent ‘seeds’ for developing a deepened, qualitative account of calendar time in Arendt’s writings. In her essay on the ‘Concept of History’, for instance, Arendt is highly critical of the emphasis upon quantitative ‘time- sequence’, and the ‘modern computation of historical dates’, which presents the adoption of a uniform dating system centered around the ‘CE’ marker as a ‘mere technical improvement’ to facilitate the ‘exact fixing of dates… without referring to a maze of different time-reckonings’ (Arendt 2006:65-7). She regards this adoption of a neutralised, uniform dating system as deeply complicit in the rise of a reified sense of a general historical time or ‘process’ in which the singularity of specific phenomena, and the uniqueness of different perspectives and experiences, are lost within universalising frameworks and grand historical narratives (ibid).112 What looks like a ‘Christianization of world history’, she argues, is in fact the establishment of a homogenising time-framework that eliminates or subsumes all religious
111
For further feminist readings of Arendt, see Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (ed. Honig 1995).
112 This forms part of her wider argument concerning the reifying imbrication of the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ within modern social and political science, such that social and historical sciences become conflated with the natural sciences which leads to totalising efforts to ‘manage’ human relations through ‘treating man as an entirely natural being whose life processes can be handled the same way as all other processes’ (2006: 59).
and qualitative time-concepts and temporalities within its all-encompassing reach, or ‘twofold extension toward infinity’ (ibid: 68; 81).
Thus, whilst Arendt’s primary solution is to reclaim the spatial as a means of restoring the ‘political’, her strong critique of reified conceptions of calendrical, homogenous historical time does offer critical tools for developing a qualitative notion of calendar time that can register its constructed character. Moreover, Arendt’s pluralistic conception of the ‘public’ can give rise to a different orientation towards, and deepened account of, public time. The pluralistic conception of publicness helps us to explain and affirm the significance and value of public dating frameworks in enabling the sharing, co-creation, and ‘exposure’ of historical experiences and narratives; yet it also requires an acute attentiveness to the variety of meanings and values that temporal reference frameworks can carry, and to the complex social and political dynamics that attend their operation.
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STICKY SIGNS, HOT AND COLD CHRONOLOGIES, ANACHRONISMS, AND