Possibility and the temporal imagination

Abstract

There is a clock with three hands in my hometown of Bristol. It sits high up on the sandstone wall of the market hall, above the busy crowds below. One hand marks the hours, while 2 different minute-hands, one red one black, mark ‘time’ 10min apart. A short walk away, fixed into the pavement outside a supermarket on a busy road, beneath the feet of passers-by, you can see a small bronze plaque. This marks the place, it tells us, where ‘London time’ was first brought to the west country, via a telegram carrying the Greenwich Meantime signal to the city. The plaque and three-handed clock are both material reminders that time does not just ‘exist’ as a neutral container for human life waiting to be discovered; rather, the time measures we use are a product of people, technologies and political decisions. They remind us that any measure of time is always selected from many possible measures of change, some of which may be in conflict. And they remind us that such measures come to normalise particular social relations and naturalise particular non-inevitable ways of coordinating and organising ourselves in this case, bringing Bristol’s day-to-day working practices into alignment with the centre of power in London. Timing mechanisms today are wildly diverse, from the calculation of parts per million of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere telling us that it is time for wealthy nations to reduce their consumption, to the rewriting of calendars by populists and demagogues as tools to ritualise collective memory and coordination social relations. The selection of timing practices reflects dominant values and has material, cultural and social effects, bring particular activities into alignment and coordination, alienating others, drawing attention to and valuing different forms of change. In turn, timing practices create what Barbara Adam calls ‘timescapes’, rhythms of life that coordinate human and non-human actors and that naturalise the values and structures of institutions, communities, particular places or whole societies (Adam, 1998; Lefebvre, 2004; Southerton, 2020). Consider the familiar organisation of schooling around the time of the clock and a set of progression targets rather than the non-linear, multidirectional learning practices of young children. Or the international timing mechanisms of ‘development’ used to position and compare nations against measures of industrial and infrastructural investment (Escobar, 2011).