REPORTE DE LOS INDICADORES DE LA ADMINISTRACIÓN

But there are a number of problems with such arguments. In the first place, the work of both Harvey {1989a, 1991) and Kern (1983) remains wholly theoretical. Secondly, though Kern has convincingly traced the temporal dislocations expressed in the work of a whole host of writers, thinkers and artists, his account takes little interest in how such dislocations may have been experienced and expressed in the everyday worlds of the majority, and far less how such experiences may have differed for different people (cf Gregory, 1993; Fred, 1993). Finally, and crucially, there are also a number of inconsistencies within these accounts themselves, and not least a certain confusion over the conceptions of time that they employ. My aim is to provide an empirical sociology of these everyday temporal experiences. Before doing so, however, it is important to assess these arguments concerning the current experience of temporal dislocation in more detail. In particular, 1 want to 'unpack' a few of these rather cursory understandings of different 'temporal shapes' in ways that will allow for a more developed sociology of time-space compression, and one in which any notion of 'temporal retreat' is made more rigorous.

There is a tendency - especially within a Marxist perspective - to underplay the

creative nature of any individual's temporal consciousness, and thus to claim the inevitable

dominance of that mode of time consciousness favoured by capital at any particular historical moment.^ For example, Harvey (1989a, 1991) recognizes the possibility of individuals deploying different notions of time according to the needs of a particular moment. And at a wider level of analysis he is correct in pointing to disagreements concerning issues of time as underlying many social conflicts. Where the needs of environmentalists and business clash, for example, in part the conflict is over which time

scale should gain primacy in decisions over investment (the quick return of the merchant

banker, or the long duration of the environmentalist).

But, whilst such arguments draw attention to the social construction of time - and lead to an understanding of the role of material power in the outcome of these conflicts - they also lead towards a rather static understanding of human temporality. As time is recognized as fundamental to the construction of self-identity, and such identities are

^ This tendency is especially marked in much of the literature around work discipline and time consciousness. Thus though, for example, Harvey (1989) draws upon the work of Hareven (1982) to show how an emergent 'factory time' was imposed upon older notions of 'family' and 'individual' time, Hareven's thesis in fact shows how these older notions of time often acted to

subvert the imposition of 'factory time'. For a more sophisticated account of those many, but complicated, acts of resistance workers undertook in the face of this new time discipline see Thompson (1967).

increasingly understood as inevitably fractured and provisional, so it follows that people may in fact daily negotiate a whole range of 'temporal identities'. In other words, the business person may also be a member of the local environmental group and, in taking a decision over the length of investment return, her decision is as likely to take account of the needs of the environment as of capital. Far from identifying an all-encompassing temporal consciousness, therefore, an analysis of time-space compression needs to trace the possible range of temporal identifications the contemporary subject must negotiate at any one time. More simply, in the context of time-space compression the same subject is as likely to experience the cyclical nature of time, as feelings of temporal speed-up, at the

same moment - and it is these more sophisticated negotiations that need to be investigated.

This investigation becomes even more complex when it is recognized that it is in fact impossible ever to identify a static and singular experience of differing time types, and certainly impossible to reduce the experience of time to the shape of a particular social activity or action as, for example, Gurvitch (1964) attempts. Paine (1992), for example, points to the complexity of these different temporal shapes. Whilst linear time - and particularly a sense of its speed-up - may allow for a recognition of failure and the (threatening) unknown, so too it is only within a sense of linear time that a sense of

progress may be achieved. And whilst one may find the structures of routine comforting -

as for example a 3.00pm meeting 'breaks up' and 'slows down' an otherwise hectic day - for another the same meeting may be the scene of time 'dragging-on' in an intolerable fashion.

These arguments are particularly important when we come to consider the range of temporal 'retreats' identified within a thesis of time-space compression, and it is to these that I shall pay particular attention in the substantive chapters. For example, for some the repetitive and knowable nature of the cyclic may indeed be a source of reassurance. Yet for others the notion of repetition, whilst upholding the 'natural' order of things, may figure a terrible sense of inevitability and the impossibility of escape from previous experience.

Such arguments draw attention to an emergent sociology of time, and the broader experiences of time-space compression, as it becomes clear that the experience of time must in fact differ for different individuals. These different experiences are tied to the relative empowerment of different social actors (Barclay, 1986; Conway, 1990; Sheveli & Rips, 1986).

For example, to invoke heritage and nostalgia as inevitably comforting, by simple virtue of their positioning with the past, is particularly problematic. In the first place such arguments employ an understanding of nostalgia that may be culturally specific (Bishop,

1992). In the second they rely upon a rather singular understanding of 'heritage' itself, one that positions such sites as always disruptive of an 'authentically' linear historical process and that dictates a conception of memory and the process of rememberance that has recently been called into question (Arcaya, 1992; Crang, 1994a & b).

More significantly, whether history is somehow comforting, or not, cannot be separated from a wider politicization of the act of historical (re)presentation. In terms of the 'retreatist' nature of local heritage whether representations of the past are considered history or 'heritage' is itself an important issue, one determined in part through the question of whose history such sites claim to represent (Jacobs, 1990). Within Britain, and certainly Stoke Newington, debates around heritage are powerfully structured by issues of class (Hewison, 1987; Wright, 1985). As newly arrived middle class residents invest sites that have long served as sources of local identity with their own needs and desires, so such sites may take on new, and less comforting values for an area's original working class residents. In other words, rather than representations of the past always forming a source of comfort we need to look more carefully at what it is that constitutes 'the past' and whose past is being 'preserved'.

Just as constructions of the past differ for different social actors so too those other arenas of temporal retreat identified within a thesis of time-space compression need more careful consideration. In particular any notion of the home as an arena of either spatial or temporal retreat, needs be put in the perspective of a wider gendering of the household. As household tasks still tend to fall to women, so for many women the home may present anything but a retreat from the pressures of work and the 'outside' world (Dalla Costa & James, 1975). Moreover, with an expansion in female paid employment so increasingly may work in the home come to present a double burden for a number of women (Wilson, 1977).

A materialist perspective thus undermines any simplistic notions of time and temporality, and reinscribes a sociology of the experiences of time and time-space compression. As our understandings of time and temporality are constructed through material practice the temporal understandings of any individual are liable to differ from the experiences of another subject located in a different social position. For example, a number of workers have pointed to the gendered nature of time itself, as well as to the gendered nature of arenas like the home within which time is experienced. These arguments often seem to reassert a set of patriarchal understandings. By delimiting women's temporal consciousness to the cycles of menstruation and 'Mother Nature' so women become excluded from the linear progress of 'History'. But these differing experiences may also be explained without recourse to essentialism (cf Forman & Sowton,

1989). Though it would be incorrect to dismiss the importance of 'bodily time', a differing temporal consciousness between men and women may be explained by reference to precisely the differing material practices of each (Hantrais, 1993; Davies, 1990), and a careful analysis of such experiences may lead in surprising directions. For example, Leccardi and Rampazi (1993) found that though contemporary social theory tends to identify a universal fear of the future, conceptions of what constitutes the future may itself differ considerably according to gender. For many young women in the West it may in fact be the short term future that represents the most secure temporal moment - as, taking advantage of increased employment and educational opportunities for women, it is understood as the temporal moment over which they have most control.

In contrast, however, whilst it could be argued that it is women, more so than men, that have traditionally been connected to the structures of cyclic time, and notions of re-birth and repetition, so too social pressures may act to make women more aware, and fearful, of linear time than men. As the 'beauty myth' attaches more significance to the aging process for women than for men, for example, so this process takes on gendered significance (Wolf, 1990). Such fears indeed emerged most powerfully with the female respondents, for whom a Heiddegerian philosophy of time 'running out' proves a powerful metaphor.

Thus, though the social sciences have long recognized the material specificity of our understandings of time and temporality this awareness has yet to be carried over to the theories of time-space compression. Yet it is not only the differences of gender that are liable to be important to this analysis. As new regimes of accumulation arguably draw an increasing division between a core and peripheral labour force, so too any experiences of time constructed through work practices are liable to differ considerably according to

class. If so we might expect differences to emerge in the temporal experiences of the 'new

service class' and working class respondents and, as the experience of work is carried to other arenas (most obviously within oppositional understandings of the home and leisure), these class differences may emerge in other arenas too.

Considering the emphasis given in history, and the social sciences more widely, to precisely these issues of work discipline and time consciousness (Hareven, 1982; Grossin, 1993; Le Goff, 1980; O'Malley, 1992; Smith. T, 1986; Stein, 1992; Thompson, 1967; Thrift, 1981) it seems surprising that theorists of time-space compression have continued to argue for some kind of monolithic temporal consciousness.

Far from singular and universal - built simply around the experiences of temporal speed-up - notions of time and temporality experienced within a period of time-space

compression are liable to be complex and multiple. Not least this awareness comes when it is recognized that there also emerge a number of contradictions within better known theories of time-space compression as different critics have related their theories to a particular understanding of time itself (cf Giddens, 1991; Rifkin, 1987).

As these critics chart the dislocations of time-space compression - whether they be the simple linear 'speed-ups' of Harvey (1989a) or the more fundamental dislocations of linear time identified by Kern (1983) - all in fact act to tie together a number of different conceptions of time and temporality. In effect such dislocations are argued to emerge as an increasing awareness of shifts in the nature of the commodified, objective, public and

cyclical time of the clock (articulated within an increasing public awareness of

international time zones, for example) is somehow tied to both an underlying sense of

linear time, and to quite new concepts of time emerging with the simultaneous temporal

structures of new communication technologies.

Through tying together these different notions of time these theses move to contradict themselves. Shifts in the nature of clock time, for example, can only be disorientating if people connect them - but also allow them to disrupt - this more fundamental sense of linear time. And yet, if for a long time people have lived with the

contradictory coexistence of a cyclic clock time and an underlying and fundamental belief

in linear time (whether its roots be thermodynamics or theological) it is unclear how a change in one should suddenly and radically destabilize a belief in the other (see chapter 2.2b).

At the same time, rather than being more disorientating than those experiences traced at the turn of the last century, recent developments may be having rather less impact upon people's time consciousness than is often assumed - as people have, quite simply, got used to them. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century the arrival of the telephone undoubtedly had a dramatic impact on peoples lives (Stein, 1992). But the impact of the contemporary fax machine may be rather less dramatic. Its functions are essentially the same as the telephone (both move to sever any connection between spatial and temporal distance), such that the experiences it generates are only quantifiably, rather than qualitatively different from those engendered by its predecessor.

What may characterize the contemporary period is the coexistence of a number of, contradictory, temporal shapes - such that "the multiplicity of times has become an inescapable feature of contemporary life" (Adams, 1992:184). Thus, as Adams (1992) argues, whilst the current multiplicity of time may be acting to disrupt any 'master temporal narrative' most of us still live, day by day, according to the structures of both

a commodified clock time, and an external (and subjective) linear time. At the same time we may all move to identify with, and deploy, quite different temporal shapes and 'speeds' - from the long duration of ecological time and the cycles of nature, to the micro­ second timing of the computer - without, it seems, experiencing any dramatic feelings of temporal dislocation. To a greater, or lesser extent, this has always been the case.

Within this complex variety of times I shall not therefore be attempting to characterize a singular and universal contemporary temporal experience. Rather I shall be aiming to draw attention to the multiplicity of times through which people now live, and which are both expressions of - but also form the responses to - the experiences of time-space compression. But, I do not follow Adams in arguing that these different time- types articulate a "multitude... of voices speaking simultaneously and with equal authority" (Adams, 1992:189, my emphasis). Rather, some temporal shapes still speak more powerfully than others. For example, unless there was still a fundamental belief in, and use of, linear temporality I could not have conducted the interviews, nor hoped to express my findings to the reader. I shall not therefore be tracing the more profound sense of temporal disorientation described by Kern (1983), though I shall argue that all the respondents will sometimes attempt to escape a more threatening sense of linear time, or a sense of temporal 'dislocation', by moving towards other, and more comforting temporal shapes. Those shapes that most often emerge as more comforting are the cycles of a more 'natural' time connected either to the family (and inter-generational time), or to nature itself, though as might be expected these acts of temporal 'retreat' are also powerfully influenced by the relations of class and gender.

Finally, though I have sought to extend a materialist perspective of time and temporality to construct a more sophisticated sociology of time and time-space compression, even this sociology needs to be made more complex. If the universal nature of time-space compression is to be assessed - in the sense that its experiences are argued to be effecting all arenas of people's everyday life - then it is essential to be able to trace the experience of any individual across a number of experiential arenas. To this end I have tried to construct the thesis so that the experiences of any one respondent can be traced through the thesis as a whole (see chapter 3.5b). This concern with the individual often sits uneasily with the methods of the social sciences and certainly makes more complicated any materialist analysis of time and temporality. If the fundamental

experience of time differs for every individual, though broad social patterns may emerge

in the nature of temporal experience, so too is any sociology liable to be 'complicated' by individual experience. For example, as well dependent upon material activity a sense of time may also be dependent upon the shifts of mood. The comforting routine of

housework one day may become an unbearable chore the next, depending primarily upon

how w e feel. Once such influences are recognized any broad sociology is always liable to

be 'disrupted' by the 'contradictory' experiences of the individual in question. But, if the analysis is to attempt to understand the meaning, and subjective experience, of time such disruptions cannot be ignored.

PARTS