'Time out!': why we're talking about time, all the time.
| Author | Hom, Andrew R. |
Augustine once confessed that 'time' was a word 'forever on our lips', but what did he know about eternity, having never lived through 2020? (1) The first month of any country's COVID-19 lockdown felt to most like a year; and the actual year itself seems to extend interminably and intolerably. We cannot stop talking about time these days. In addition to the ways that the pandemic changed our relationship to time, the ongoing Brexit process resounds with temporal rhetoric, and dauntless anti-racism protesters have invoked the weight of history to call for a new era of police accountability. These episodes attest to time's importance, and reflect an elevated importance for time over the past few years, with both politicians and the wider population describing it as an overwhelming force, an ever-expanding now, a valuable and dwindling resource, a dimension of hope, a lever, even a herald of independence.
While doubtless unsettling, this current moment also offers an opportunity to scholars of time, providing a trove of empirical data about the socio-political importance of time. The sheer volume of time talk is noteworthy in its variety, but it also raises a question: Why now? Why are so many different people from all walks of life talking about time more than ever and - as we will see - never as before? We can learn much by tracking what they are saying, but we also need to pay attention to why and how they are saying it, if we want to emerge from this moment with a greater understanding of time's relationship to politics.
In what follows, I offer a brief explanation for why we are talking about time so much, followed by three examples. I begin by introducing timing theory, a distinctive approach to organising various time symbols in a very loosely unified framework. I then illustrate the importance of timing to our current politics by turning to Brexit, COVID-19, and the anti-racism movement.
Timing theory and the sources of 'time'
As I discuss in a new book, timing is a basic survival skill common across human societies. (2) It also means much more than the colloquial sense in which we often say 'nice timing'. Faced with myriad changes and experiences, we work to time them into a coherent, roughly serial whole that we can comprehend, understand, and ideally mould toward our purposes. Rather than referring to a mere matter of coincidence or when something happens, timing describes creative acts of synthesis that establish new relationships in dynamic environments. By timing, humans forge useful links and processes out of the otherwise chaotic welter of existence, and use these to encourage certain outcomes rather than others, reflective of specific priorities.
Timing theory also offers a unique explanation for the power and proliferation of time terms found in ordinary language and political discourse. Instead of presupposing time to be an autonomous external dimension in which human actions take place, timing theory shows how the times we have come to understand as preformed, given, absolute, and even metaphysical, are actually widely shared symbols of deeply embedded timing regimes - large-scale timing practices used unconsciously by swathes of people, which makes them seem independent of any human effort. (3) The times of our lives and of the universe, according to timing theory, spring forth from nothing more than the phrases and symbols that we long ago learned to use to discuss and imagine our most important shared timing efforts. Various references to time itself and our many other temporal terms thus function as timing indexicals, or signatures of underlying timing efforts. In speaking of time or temporality, then, we work to time processes and events toward particular outcomes. (4)
Finally, timing theory offers perspective on periods of upheaval such as our current one. Significant changes require that societies must ensure their timing modes still enable effective links and practical interactions. Doing so may involve re-timing, or re-establishing useful relationships and processes; or more laborious attempts to time anew, to create novel timing modes in the face of unsettling events. We can turn this around, as well, and note that when time talk increases in frequency or creativity, this signals increased efforts to time, re-time, or time anew, important parts of society. (5)
Upheavals like Brexit, COVID-19, or the unravelling of race relations in several countries, with their catalogue of innovative time talk, are just the sort of phenomena that timing theory can help us understand. It does so by using the character and content of temporal discourse to read underlying timing efforts. When people talk about time as a problem to be solved, tried and trusted timing regimes are faltering or failing in some way. When they talk of time as a powerful resource, a creative wellspring, or a force that demands certain actions, this highlights timing efforts meant to upend and rewrite the status quo, to take current events and stitch them into new paths toward alternative futures. Increased time talk signals that some of the timing modes by which society unfolds are shifting, falling away, or being contested. People are not passive recipients of given time but rather active participants in crafting and changing time itself in order to fit their new realities.
Government on the clock: Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic
Brexit
Over the past few years, the British government and parliament have made a number of temporal moves and remarks in pursuit of Brexit and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These highlight the ways in which powerful political actors can mobilise time and temporality to manage dynamic and complex situations. They also illustrate key rhetorical differences characteristic of different timing manoeuvres. In a pair of forthcoming articles, Ryan Beasley and I theorise such foreign policy-making moves as a form of timing, and identify different types of timing agents based on what temporal symbols politicians deployed in debates over Brexit. (6)
We contend that broaching withdrawal from the EU, securing and winning a popular referendum on the matter, and then realising Brexit over three years of debate, policy-making and decision-taking, required huge efforts to re-time - re-orient, re-order and re-establish - the UK's foreign relations with its nearest neighbours. Brexit grew through claims about dissatisfaction over the UK's position in the EU, and promised a better alternative just over the horizon - if only decision-makers...
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