“This is a major piece of theoretical, conceptual and analytical work which yields

substantive and highly relevant insights across the humanities and the social sciences.
Torres impressively succeeds in formulating a new approach to conceptualise
social time through the notion of ‘temporal regime’ in a way that avoids diagnostic
reductionism: as he rightly points out, approaches which insist that there is only
standardisation, unification and homogenisation in modern temporality overlook the
differences, divergencies and multiplicity of social time, while those which insist on the
latter tend to miss the strong ‘meta-trends’ such as time-compression or acceleration.
Torres’ notion of temporal regimes avoids both pitfalls but allows for the integration of
both trends into one concept. On its basis, he also succeeds at presenting a convincing
account of late modern social temporality. It will stand as an innovative and original
contribution to the notoriously difficult conceptualisation of social time. It is well
written, plausibly structured and clearly argued and as such obviously deserves the
highest consideration.”
Hartmut Rosa, Professor of General Sociology at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
and Director at the Max-Weber-Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in
Erfurt, Germany. Author of Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity

“Fluid, highly readable and profound. This very important book brings together
classical and contemporary scholarship in the social studies of time in inventive and
synergistic fashion. The notion of time regimes will undoubtedly become indispensable
for exploratory and explanatory inquiries across the social sciences that strive to
tackle emerging socio-technical phenomena and the process of 21st century capitalist
modernity. A must read for sociologists, cultural and social theorists, historians, STS
scholars and other researchers interested in how time structures complex dynamics of
the present era.”
Filip Vostal, Senior Researcher, Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies
of the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. Author of Accelerating
Academia: The Changing Structure of Academic Time

““Time has time” is a phrase that will stay with you long after you have read Temporal
Regimes: Materiality, Politics, Technology. This book locates an ongoing and seemingly
incommensurable tension within the burgeoning field of Temporal Studies: how to
reconcile singular generalized narratives of time against the reality that time is multiple
and differentially experienced. Torres urges the reader to consider equally the material
dimensions of both approaches and reveals how to marry them. We learn that both
belong to the other as time’s other time! What emerges is an offering to the field of
Temporal Studies: a time that is “simultaneous but non-synchronous”. It will delight
the temporal theorist that the main characters in this book are in fact other theories of
time. Temporal theories emerge as lively characters - vivid and robust. It turns out that
time theories are a rather motley crew of hot takes, long-views, ethnographies, and
philosophies. The Temporal Regime becomes a way to bring them together in order to
account for the complexity of contemporary social time.”
Sarah Sharma, Associate Professor of Media Theory at the University of Toronto
and Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, Canada.
Author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics
Temporal Regimes

Temporal Regimes provides a theoretical framework for understanding the

temporal structures of society; a conceptually rich, empirically nuanced and
culturally embodied account of temporal phenomena in contemporary world.
What does temporal regimes imply? How the everyday life as well as the
global mobilities coordination requires temporal underpinnings? The answers
to these questions mean more than simply understanding the general thesis on
acceleration or space–time compression, on the one hand, but also a micro-
multiple-localised time experience by gender, class or age, on the other hand.
They also mean understanding in an integrative way the very structural tem-
poralities within the everyday lived, embodied and situated ones. They require
both a robust and flexible epistemic analysis considering their material bed-
rock through political and technological forefront dimensions.
Advancing a rigorous, well-grounded theoretical understanding and
offering a useful way to analytically conceptualise the temporal dynamics on
our societies, this book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars
enquiring a rich set of topics ranging from time and politics, new materialism,
conceptual history as well as technology, collective action and social change.

Felipe Torres is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Pontificia

Universidad Católica de Chile, and Doctor in Advanced Cultural and Social
Studies from the Max Weber Centre, University of Erfurt, Germany. He has
published several articles on temporal studies and social theory in Time and
Society, RIS, Isegoría and Cinta de Moebio.
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

157 The Fascist Temptation

Creating a Political Community of Experience
David Ohana

158 Accumulating Capital Today

Contemporary Strategies of Profit and Dispossessive Policies
Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron

159 Critical Rationalism and the Theory of Society

Critical Rationalism and the Open Society Volume 1
Masoud Mohammadi Alamuti

160 Functionalist Construction Work in Social Science

The Lost Heritage
Peter Sohlberg

161 Critical Theory and New Materialisms

Hartmut Rosa, Christoph Henning and Arthur Bueno

162 Max Weber’s Sociology of Civilizations: A Reconstruction

Stephen Kalberg

163 Temporal Regimes

Materiality, Politics, Technology
Felipe Torres

164 Citizenship in a Globalized World

Christine Hobden

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT

Temporal Regimes

Materiality, Politics, Technology

Felipe Torres
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Felipe Torres
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him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Names: Torres, Felipe, author.
Title: Temporal regimes : materiality, politics, technology / Felipe Torres.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routeldge, 2021. |
Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021010342 (print) | LCCN 2021010343 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032018720 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032018744 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003180876 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Time–Sociological aspects. | Social sciences–Philosophy. |
Social change. | Technological innovations–Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HM656 .T67 2021 (print) |
LCC HM656 (ebook) | DDC 304.2/37–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010342
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010343
ISBN: 978-1-032-01872-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-01874-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-18087-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003180876
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Newgen Publishing UK
To Valeria and who is to come
Contents

List of figures x
Foreword by Hartmut Rosa xi
Preface xv
Acknowledgements xvii

Introduction: towards temporal regimes 1

1 Temporal regimes 20
2 Temporal politics: politicisation of time and history 47
3 Temporal technologies and technologies of time 82
4 Conceptualising future(s): progress, utopia, acceleration 110
Conclusions: between homogeneity and heterogeneity –
simultaneous but non-synchronic times 137

Index 158
Figures

2.1 Time perspectives over mainstream political framework 75

4.1 Scheme of the dialectics from Enlightenment to change 126
C.1 Global society in a temporal division scope 144
C.2 Generality and specificity levels regarding homogeneity
and heterogeneity 151
Foreword

Temporal regimes: a new approach for cultural

and social studies
There are numerous, or better innumerable, studies on social time which
almost invariably start by claiming that the social study of time is in disorder
and disarray, lacking a coherent conceptual framework. This, however, is a
state of affairs that the social sciences share with other disciplines, and with
philosophy in particular. When it comes to questions about the ‘true’ nature
and essence of time, not just the humanities but even the natural sciences are
still caught in Augustine’s enigma trap: if no one asks, we know exactly what
time is, but if we are asked to conceptualise it, we are lost. Nevertheless, it is
obvious that any comprehensive account of modern or late-modern society
needs and requires a thorough analysis of its temporal structures, and for this,
a coherent conceptual framework is needed.
This book now offered by Felipe Torres aims to precisely present such a
framework and hence to close this apparent research desideratum. As the
title of his study suggests, he attempts to solve the conceptual enigma by
developing and defining the notion of ‘temporal regimes’ as the core element
of a conceptual framework for the analysis of temporal structures.
As he diligently carves out in his argumentation, the notion of a ‘regime’
allows to conceptually combine a number of contrasting and sometimes even
contradictory facets of temporality such as persistence and change, homogen-
eity and heterogeneity but also the normative/prescriptive and the material/
descriptive elements of time.
The book thesis is framed by an exploratory introduction, in which Torres
sets out the problem, the goals of the study and its methods, and by a conclu-
sion that sums up the argument and secures its results. In between, the sub-
stantive argument is developed in four consecutive steps: in Chapter 1, the core
notion of ‘temporal regime’ is introduced and developed. Torres constructs it
by drawing on, and connecting, a number of different approaches across the
social sciences. Thus, one of the main sources is François Hartog’s concept
of regimes of historicity, but Torres goes well beyond it in various respects
xii Foreword

across several disciplines ranging from philosophy and conceptual history

(Koselleck, Löwith, Blumenberg) to sociological accounts such as the ones
presented by Harvey, Castells or Giddens and to poststructuralist approaches
in the vein of Foucault or Deleuze.
As a starting point, Torres observes a ‘duality’ in sociological analyses of
time between approaches such as the ‘macro-theoretical’ ones developed by
Virilio or myself who identify one ‘homogenous’ trend (i.e., acceleration)
across different social spheres and other studies which pinpoint an (increasing)
multiplicity, plurality or heterogeneity of social temporalities. Hence, Torres
insists, temporal regimes need to be conceptualised in a way that allows for
both the identification of homogenising trends and general traits which then
allow for the identification and definition of differences and divergencies. By
defining temporal regimes through the aspects of iterability, articulability and
governmentality (Chapter 1), Torres’ concept of ‘regime’ indeed manages to
combine Hartog’s historical-diachronic sense of time with responsiveness for
social differences and a sensibility for the normative-political dimension of
temporalities as a decisive element of ‘governmentality’.
This political dimension is the focus of Chapter 2 in Torres’ argument.
Here, the author substantiates why he believes that time always is historic-
ally, socially and materially situated. It is framed in and through (micro- and
macro-) political struggles and strategies and always connected to political
conceptions of history – of past, present and future. Time politics in this
sense is always entangled with ‘biopolitics’, too.
The materiality of time, however, also is manifested in, and shaped by,
technological developments. This aspect is explored in Chapter 3. Here,
Torres aptly reconstructs how modernity brought about a standardisation
and unification of ‘world time’, and as such a homogenisation of time, which
then allowed for the observation, identification and preservation of social and
cultural differences in the experience, use and structure of time. One most
interesting argument Torres arrives at is that digital technologies in particular
allow for a ‘simultaneity’ of events and processes which are nevertheless non-
synchronous: simultaneity without synchronicity for Torres thus appears to
be the defining element of late-modern temporality (see Conclusions too).
In the concluding Chapter 4, Torres reconstructs and connects the ‘temporal
regimes’ of progress, utopia and acceleration and plausibly demonstrates that
they are connected by a common or similar conception of the future – and
with it of the past and the present. It is precisely this shared conception of the
future which serves to integrate those regimes into something that could be
called a ‘macro-’ or ‘meta-’ regime (of modernity).
In sum, Torres impressively succeeds in formulating a new approach to
conceptualise social time through the notion of ‘temporal regime’ in a way
that avoids diagnostic reductionism: as he rightly points out, approaches
 Foreword xiii

which insist that there is only standardisation, unification and homogenisa-

tion in modern temporality overlook the differences, divergencies and multi-
plicity of social time, while those which insist on the latter tend to miss the
strong ‘meta-trends’ such as time compression or acceleration. Torres’ notion
of temporal regimes avoids both pitfalls but allows for the integration of both
trends into one concept. On its basis, he also succeeds at presenting a convin-
cing account of late-modern social temporality.
To be sure, the study nevertheless allows for critical questioning. I would
like to mention three aspects here: first, it is astonishing how easily Torres
overcomes the relevance of space, given that he draws on authors such as
Harvey, Giddens or Castells (and myself, for that matter) who, when talking
about distanciation (Giddens) or compression (Harvey), all insist that it rather
should be ‘space-time-regimes’ than just ‘time-regimes’. To simply insist on
processes of deterritorialisation might be too quick here (Chapter 3). Second,
and most importantly, despite all his impressive efforts, the notion of ‘tem-
poral regime’ still keeps certain blurriness. The problem in part stems from the
fact that Torres also talks about temporal patterns, temporal schemes, regimes
over time, etc., without discriminating the use of these terms sufficiently. But
the main problem is in the fact that it is unclear whether Torres thinks of one
regime allowing for diversity within its framework (as he rightly points out,
differences can only be identified when there are common points of reference)
or multiple overlapping regimes which create difference. He actually seems
to want it both ways, and this creates confusion: for example, he talks of a
regime of progress, a regime of acceleration and a regime of utopia, but they
all seem to be part of an over-arching ‘future-regime’ (Chapter 4). But for
this, he would need a conception of a meta-regime, as suggested above, which,
unfortunately, is not yet sufficiently developed.
Finally, one recurrent source of confusion is created by Torres’ insistence
that one and the same nucleus ‘produces’ heterogeneity as well as homo-
geneity (Conclusions): only because of such a shared origin the notion of a
‘paradox’ between the two trends is justified. However, as Torres also admits,
the temporal differences between cultural practices and conceptions of time
are not (necessarily) ‘produced’ by modernity; to a large extent, they were
pre-existing, so the idea of a ‘common nucleus’ becomes questionable. Having
said that, Torres seems to solve this blurriness at the end: it is the macro-
trend of homogenisation which makes many of these differences identifi-
able, observable and politically relevant (because of the simultaneity of the
non-synchronous), and this, obviously, is a highly original and most valuable
insight.
Thus, to sum up this short prologue, even though there inevitably remain
some open points for future discussion, this is a stunning piece of theoret-
ical, conceptual and analytical work which yields substantive and highly
xiv Foreword

relevant insights across the humanities and the social sciences. It will stand
as an innovative and original contribution to the notoriously difficult concep-
tualisation of social time. It is well written, plausibly structured and clearly
argued and as such obviously deserves the highest consideration.
Erfurt, January 2021
Hartmut Rosa
Preface

There is a fruitful distinction in Spanish between the verbs ser and estar. In
English and German, both meanings are subsumed into the same verb: in
English to be and German sein. In Spanish, however, there is a conspicuous
distinction between ser (‘to be’; ‘sein’) and estar (‘to be’, ‘sein’, but also ‘be-
there’ and ‘da-sein’).1 In the first case, ser refers to a general condition, e.g.,
to be is always to be in time. In the second case, estar indicates a more spe-
cific moment: refers to the ‘now’ as well as the ‘current process’. This is why
questions referring to the current historical situation such as What time do
we are? or What time do we live in? in Spanish is ¿En qué tiempo estamos?
And not ¿En qué tiempo somos (‘are’)? This contextualisation is relevant as it
explains two ways of conceiving time: the first as a transcendental fact (being
in time is always the condition of being) while in the second case is a condition
always embedded in contingent situations of a precise moment. Therefore,
the first case is more related to an ontological approach, while the second to
an historical one. In the first case, there are reflections about the meaning of
time and its definitions, whereas the second is the characteristic of an histor-
ical period: to be on time is to have an end, finitude (as every historical event
does), but to be ‘out of time’ is to be eternal (as a good or divinity). The use
of time is thus a threshold for finitude or eternity. Whenever there is reference
to a place beyond time, there will be eternity, natural laws or structures that
are impossible to be changed. Conversely, everything in time perishes, mutates
and is also permeable and transformable. As I will show, the distinction is cru-
cial for this work since it serves to justify both orders and transformations. In
each case, this distinction implies also normative outcomes.
This book is mainly focused in both a descriptive and a politico-normative
dimensions. The present work is an attempt at an inquiry on the material
conditions of being in time, which is another way of saying to be historical.
Not an abstract nor eternal character of time, but rather the ‘mundane’ forces
that set it up. From concepts to work conditions, the temporal dimension is
coupled with the rest of its material basis. Not all the temporal experience
has been the same, and precise historical moments have their own prevalence
xvi Preface

regarding the past, traditions and memories, as well as expectations, forecasts

or projections. Therefore, time has time. The present work will pursue an
explanation on how its uses and conceptions create speeches and practices
by influencing the historical process. I propose to grasp those discourses and
actions under the light of temporal regimes.
Felipe Torres
Erfurt, February 2021

Note
1 There are some similarities with the English verb to stay and German stehen, but
they are more tied to the moment ‘right now’ (‘I stay here’) or to objects (‘der
Kühlschrank steht in der Ecke’) meanwhile estar is always both spatial and
temporal.
newgenprepdf

Acknowledgements

After four years work, I am in a condition to present this book as the result of
my research stay at the Max Weber Centre (MWC) of Erfurt University. Most
of my time in Erfurt, I have had a pleasant work environment at the MWC.
Since I am convinced that academic development cannot be considered
without the social environment in which it takes place, I would like to mention
the inspiring atmosphere that my friends and colleagues in Germany have
provided me.
This work would not have been possible without the finest suggestions and
comments from Hartmut Rosa, Camilla Smith, Ute Tellmann and Elisabeth
Schilling; also, from the expert opinion of Filip Vostal, Sarah Sharma and two
anonymous reviewers. I am pleased to have received the generous comments
to an early draft from Vicente Montenegro and Darío Montero. Also, I give
my thanks for his long-distance support to Nancy Fraser, Mauro Basaure,
Ignacio Farías and Rodrigo Cordero. I do especially thank one person for the
company, the endless conversations and the love: this book is dedicated to my
life partner, Valeria.
Last but not least, in a context of frenetic publications and likely an excess
of writing, to have time to read the work of someone else is a concession,
not firstly for the reader but rather for the author. In the incredible number
of texts in circulation, especially in the context of an accelerated academy
with huge burden of applications, funding-accountability, peer-review pro-
cess and (certainly some) interesting ideas, reading a book remains part of
formal duties which requires a not insignificant amount of time. Then, in an
endless pool of readings, having the opportunity to be read it is another (new)
kind of privilege. Keeping this in mind, I would like to thank the people who
will have the interest (wishfully the pleasure also) to read this work. I hope
the readership get enjoy and, most gravitating, some useful insights with it.
Introduction
Towards temporal regimes

A quest for integrated temporal studies

This book is focused on inquiring temporality as a structural dimension of
contemporary societies. In order to do that, this writing represents an intro-
ductory study for an approach on temporal regimes.
Due to the connectivity of today’s world facilitated by progressive advances
in media and technology, it is possible to conceive a global atmosphere in
which space and time acquire new states. Coordination among diverse cultural
spaces requires the emergence of universal mechanisms of interaction, from a
standardised global timetable to mobile communication devices with internet
access (such as laptops, cell phones, smartwatches). All these account for a
world that is increasingly globalised, which, in turn, requires the generation
of unified frameworks for interaction. Moreover, the plurality of lifestyles
that are proposed through advertising, identity construction and the con-
sumption of certain distinguishing products points out a reality opposed to
the standardisation or homogenisation of uniform frameworks for interaction,
with diversity as value, a search for cosmopolitanism, and an enhancement
of originality and innovation. Thus, heterogeneity is also a mainstream claim
in contemporary society. This work suggests that this paradox is observed in
a privileged way through an analysis of the experience of modern times: as
a mechanism of social coordination, according to Norbert Elias (1992), time
tends to standardise social relations beyond elements that seek to make it
measurable in order to coordinate societies. At the same time, modern time
has no ‘centre’ to the extent that society is not governed by the existence of
only ‘One’ time: time is experienced differently whether we are in the East or
West, North or South, as well as depending on social classes, age groups and
gender. An illustrative work on the matter is Johannes Fabian Time and the
Other (1983). Then, those diversities allow one to speak about a multiplicity
of times, coexisting with homogeneous trends. How is this apparent contra-
diction possible? What are the possible causes of this phenomenon? Is there
something that ties them together? These are some of the questions which the
following work proposes to address.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180876-1
2 Introduction

Life and its manifestations work in different times. The standardised global
clock-time, both homogeneous and linear, is only one of them. Life unfolds
through a variety of time frames: cyclical and linear, repetitive and cumu-
lative, slow and fast, measured and experienced, short and long. And yet,
during the last few years, a series of new times have emerged due to global-
isation, technological innovation and climate change, e.g., the instantaneity
of digital communication, the many time scales of CO2 emissions and tem-
perature rise along the collapse of the idea of unilineal global progress (or
increased awareness of its unintended consequences at least). To be sure, time
has become a matter of interest of social theory, as well as a field of cul-
tural frictions and political struggles. Hence, it is no wonder that the con-
temporary emerging plurality of overlapping and intersecting times requires
further investigation. Time has become a topicality of scholarly interest and
investigation across disciplinary borders and is opened to dialogue in several
fields, such as history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, science and
technology studies, philosophy and even biology, in order to understand and
to explore the conflicts and hierarchies of the ‘different times’ present in the
multiple forms of life.
For a long time, humanities and social sciences have been concerned with
understanding how temporality works in the so-called modern world. On the
one hand, they have produced macro-theoretical arguments to explain what
has happened to temporality and its order within the onset of modernity.
They are focused on general tendencies rather than particular temporal
patterns. For instance, Paul Virilio (1977; 1986) and Hartmut Rosa (2003;
2005; 2010; 2013a; 2013b) have written extensively about a long tendency
towards the ‘acceleration’ of societal processes, whereas Anthony Giddens
(1981), David Harvey (1989)1 and Hermann Lübbe (1992) suggest the con-
cept of “space-time compression” to explain what happens to structures and
experiences within the modern world. On the other hand, theorists such as
Doreen Massey (1994: especially Chapters 6 and 11), François Hartog (2003;
2015) and Sarah Sharma (2014) have emphasised the plurality and diversity
of times simultaneously present in the contemporary world, providing an
overview of the modern experience but from an angle that captures the vari-
ability of this experience. In this scenario appears Johannes Fabian’s germinal
work Time and the Other (1983), which uses an anthropological perspective to
indicate how time constructs borders and cultural differences. In this regard,
differentiated temporal patterns are constituted.
Within this framework comes the following picture: (a) the lack of dia-
logue between the two approaches fosters the understanding of time as a
paradoxical phenomenon; (b) this leads to understand the homogenisation
and diversification of modern times inside a more comprehensive concept of
temporal regimes (Chapter 1). What we gain is an approach to understanding
the temporal constitution of contemporary societies and their frictions. And
this paradox has a privileged place in the observation of the political and
 Introduction 3

technological development through which, (c) on the one hand, the multicul-
tural encounter allows for a decentralised, pluriversal and multiple experience
of time that can be rendered in political terms (Chapter 2) and, on the other
hand, old spatio-temporal barriers are narrowed, homogenising a global
society via technological devices (Chapter 3). For the latter, a notion of tem-
poral regime holds a central place, to the extent that the structure of time as
a homogeneous-general trend is grasped, while in parallel enables the exist-
ence of more than one temporal logic. In others words, by using the concept
of temporal regimes, it is possible to grasp the compression of old spatio-
temporal barriers and its homogenising global society factor, on the one hand,
as well as the multicultural clash that initiates a decentralised, pluriversal and
multiple experience of time, on the other hand (Chapter 4 and Conclusions).
In short, this work focuses on the study of temporal processes in contem-
porary societies from a theoretical viewpoint. More specifically, it explores the
paradoxical situation of temporal phenomena that are homogenised through
the proliferation of global technological mechanisms related to the econom-
ical process that triggers universal cultural patterns and diversified through
an archetypal global society that encourages cultural exchange, pluralism,
autonomy and cosmopolitanism, along respect of the difference minorities
within liberal democratic values, giving rise to an endless number of poten-
tial temporalities coexisting. For the latter consideration, I take as a starting
point that modernity is an historical moment characterised by the coexistence
of divergent, even contradictory, cultural flows (the simultaneity of the non-
simultaneous).2 Georges Gurvitch was one of the first thinkers to introduce
the idea of multiple times. In The Spectrum of Social Time (1964) particularly
in the section titled “Varieties of Social Time”, he describes eight temporal
types by which the diverse manifestations of time can be expressed in a socio-
historical manner. These different types grasp social temporal structures
as well as their structuring and structured3 character. In the present work,
I opt to classify the temporal varieties as regimes. As I develop the concept
in more detail further on (Chapter 1), there are two main reasons for this
decision: (1) first, temporal phenomena are structured, meaning that they are
outcomes of contingent social processes as well as goal-oriented efforts to
govern and control social life; and (2) the variety of temporal phenomena are
not just circumscribed to groups but it also envelop historical processes which
make the categories of use an emergent phenomena with regularities along
disruptions. Therefore, the workability of the term regime resides in at least
two main conditions: on the one hand, regime is related to particular repeti-
tive and stable conditions that constitute a unity that envelops a homogeneity
within regular patterns in which time is involved. For instance, as I will show,
regularities as linear conceptions of time with evolutionary perspectives and
secularised conceptions in history create conditions for a regime of time in
terms of progress. Instead, perspectives about possible futures and human
incidence on the fate of history make possible a political temporal regime in
4 Introduction

terms of utopia (Chapter 4). On the other hand, as mentioned above, the con-
cept of regime has the potential to account for more than one stable pattern.
In this sense, various regimes can be analysed as homogeneities simultan-
eously interacting with each other. Consequently, we can identify patterns of
‘acceleration’ coexisting with ‘slow food’ movements or decelerated pandemic
contexts; measurable-standardised global clock-time in parallel with sacred,
mystic and non-rational temporal perspectives; ‘futurist’ environmental care
stances with ‘presentist’ economic concerns; urban rhythms with rural paces;
as well as times differentiated by gender groups, job occupation or between
generations.
Hence temporal regimes are not obvious or self-evident. For this reason, a
specific study of the dominant as well as the less powerful temporal structures
becomes necessary. Perspectives on time and its uses, concepts, experiences
and practices are gaining attention since the necessity to ‘understand our
times’ spawn inquiries about the future of Anthropocene, Bioethics or Global
Warming. Considering the future, expectations involve several social fields
crossing temporal concepts and practices. Rather than provide a specific def-
inition about what time is, such approaches are less oriented to time itself
than focused in what are the conditions for particular temporal conceptions
and experiences within theoretical explanations and material practices. Time
is less an object by itself than a precise approach to reach explanations about
the historical moment and to determine its characteristics on socio-political
terms at a local and global level. Thus, this work attempts to thematise
perspectives on time in a large scale.
There is a furnished number of theories about social and cultural time in
contemporary scholarship (Adam 1990; Elias 1992; Osborne 1995; Stiegler
1998; Koselleck 2000; 2004; Nowotny 2005; Rosa 2013b; Sharma 2014;
Wajcman 2015). In all those works, social time is revered as crucial con-
cept. However, all these works do not deal with time in ‘itself’, but rather
with how several phenomena are related to time in an indivisible manner.
In other words, time is not a problem to deal with ‘directly’, but as a social
configuration that affects socio-historical conditions. In this sense, time-
related meanings settle the background that influences social and cultural
processes throughout epistemologies, politics or technologies constituting
specific materialities. Accordingly, time is a conceptual point of convergence
for different fields which connects them and differentiates them concurrently.
Now, in what sense does time connect different spheres? Does it mean that
time is a ‘bound’ for homogenising? The short answer is yes and no. Time
works as a crucial condition for almost every aspect from lifespan to cos-
mogonies about the universe. This might be called the global or homogeniser
level by which macro discourses describe and influence general perspectives
throughout several fields on contemporary history. Among those tenden-
cies, it is possible to point out the emergence of a global standardised time,
processes of acceleration, linear perspectives about history such as progress
 Introduction 5

or evolution and time–space compression. But also mechanism of distinction

between regions labelled as ‘developed’ vs ‘developing countries’ or ‘first’ and
‘third’ world. Such distinctions are related to non-neutral judgments about
evolution stages on the universal history in terms of forward and backward-
ness levels.
However, on the other hand, every field has its own regime. While every
subject relates to general waves, they are at the same time highly structured
by their own conditions, stabilising mechanisms of differentiation. Therefore,
another tendency characterised by the emergence of plural, diverse, cosmo-
politan and democratic values is also possible to be identified. In this sense,
each tendency towards homogenisation always deals with diversifications.
Time is settled up differently whether we are in the ‘East’ or ‘West’, ‘North’
or ‘South’, and also it depends on social class, age group (Altergott 1990;
Droit-Volet 2019; Schilling 2020), gender (Stier and Lewin-Epstein 2000;
Sayer 2005; Arber and Chatzitheochari 2012) or political preferences (Pierson
2004; Coffé 2017). These characteristics indicate a heterogeneous constitution
of temporal reality which paradoxically goes along with a homogenised one.
To sum up, I propose to explain how this paradox can be described as
relations between, and inside, temporal regimes. This notion furnishes the
social and cultural studies of time with a temporal scheme that, on the one
hand, allows the observation of regularities that the very idea of regime
presupposes as a set of rules governing a given field regarding homogeneity.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, pinpoints the coexistence of regularities that
do complement and oppose each other. The latter is relevant in order to con-
sider the regimes heterogeneity and their political implications in terms of
frictions and power struggles.

Temporal regimes relevance

Social sciences and humanities have described time in many ways. It is not
necessary to repeat a long list of major thinkers that have dealt with the notion
of time. To mention a few, during the last century, Henri Bergson (2013),
Edmund Husserl (1928; 2006) and Martin Heidegger (2006 [1927]; 2019)
have developed crucial theories on the issue from a philosophical point of
view. In many ways, more contemporary contributions inherited those philo-
sophical perspectives trying to go beyond them. Those efforts cross various
fields, studying the relationships between technics and time (Stiegler 1998;
Birth 2012); the social composition of times (Adam 1990; Nowotny 2005);
the studies upon modern temporal concepts from a socio-political perspective
(Blumenberg 1974; 1983; 1986; Koselleck 2004); and, more recently, the con-
temporary high-speed quality of society (Virilio 1986; Rosa and Scheuerman
2009; Rosa 2010, 2012, 2013b; Glezos 2012, 2020). All these influential
approaches have been digging directly over temporal characteristics. They
have paid attention to specific aspects of time that have emerged mainly in the
6 Introduction

Western world during the last two centuries and they can be extensible today
in a global fashion. From temporal logics affected by technics, or historical
acceleration processes crossed by socio-historical conditions (capitalism, mod-
ernism, rationalisation), until Christian aspects inherited by current notions
of time in Western societies, all those efforts for grasping temporal modalities
are meaningful but insufficiently interconnected until now. How are technics
and rationalisation related to acceleration? Does a Christian notion of time
support or deny critical ideas about modernity? Should scholarship consider
the temporal regimes as a pivotal point for any socio-historical knowledge?4
What might social theory gain from a temporal regimes’ perspective?
A starting point for answering these questions is to provide a minimal con-
cept tying all the phenomena in which temporal dynamics might be involved.
This concept is founded in a contra-intuitive notion of materiality of time.
As I will show (Chapters 1 and 2), temporal regimes are incorporated (and,
indeed, ‘embodied’) in social practices to such extent that they serve to
settle almost every aspect of the individual and collective lifespan, i.e., via
institutions that take care of individuals during their lifetime by age (nursery,
kindergarten, schooling, workplace, senior-home). A material time regards
with the path of living. The distribution of life itself can then be described as
a political matter and as a field of struggles consequently. A few examples can
illustrate this point.
Without being exhaustive here (more details are presented in Chapter 2),
various studies pinpoint the gender gap in time distribution. The time experi-
ence by women and men is significantly different, particularly regarding the
orientation of their ‘own’ time. As several influential works have demonstrated
(Davies 1990; Leccardi and Rampazi 1993; Massey 1994), women perceive
their time as a time-for-others, regarding carefulness and donation (even sacri-
fice) to relatives, partners, friends; while men usually relate their time to public
spheres, goals, achievements, social life and (formal) employment. Both have
also specificities by social class, age and educational levels, demonstrating
that their ‘own-time’ is the result of their social positions and cultural (mis)
recognition. Hence, time is socially distributed and cannot be separated from
an intersectional analysis. Time is not alien to a material social assignation
and reproduction of privileges, disadvantages, distinctions and status.
Along with criticising the ‘white-men’ temporality, Doreen Massey (1994)
was one of the scholars who questioned the time–space compression thesis
(Warf 2008) as a universal, ‘white’ ‘upper-middle class’ phenomenon. She
was in tune with the ‘spatial turn’ (Soja 1989) that claimed for a more pol-
itical engaged theoretical primacy of the local, territorial and embodied
within social and cultural studies. By emphasising geographical distributions,
they claim a new status for the spatial. During the 1970s and 1980s, a group
of influential texts on the rescuing the role of the space in social and cul-
tural studies composed what was called the ‘spatial studies’ (Lefebvre 1991;
Appadurai 1996). In this first ‘spatial turn’, there was a critic on the ontological
 Introduction 7

primacy of abstract non-material Western notions such as time in the Western

humanities and social sciences (Lyman and Marvin 1967; Jakle 1971), espe-
cially through the influence of philosophers like Henri Bergson (2013 [1889]),
Edmund Husserl (1928) and Martin Heidegger (2006 [1927]). They were
claiming basically for another kind of cultural studies with a more material
and embodied fashion that may contribute to politicise the social-dominant
analysis on time. They founded their criticism within an invigorated status of
space instead of time. However, during the early 1990s and 2000s there was a
revival for studies focused upon time thanks to Conceptual History, especially
within the work of Reinhart Koselleck (2004) on the temporal constitution
of Modernity, its socio-political role (Blumenberg 1983; Osborne 1995) as
well as the circulation and mobility speed (Castells 1996; Bauman 2000; Urry
2000) and the idea of geographies of temporality (May and Thrift 2001).
Contesting this impulse, another space studies revival emerged within the
works on sociology of space (Löw 2016). Nowadays, though, we are facing
a renewed temporal studies fascination nurtured by the increasing interest
on acceleration (Glezos 2012; 2020; Rosa 2013b; Vostal 2016), time and
technology (Wajcman 2015), especially on the temporal outcomes fostered
by digitalisation and automation (Benanav 2020). This revival may have its
raison d’être in the fact that time envelops almost every life aspect: from indi-
vidual (ageing, scheduling, programming life) to collective milieus. Faraway
of being abstract, time is an everyday, embodied life sphere. Probably Borges
was right when he stated that

we die and we are born every day. We are continually being born and
dying. That is why the problem of time touches us more than any other
metaphysic problem. Because the others are abstract. Time is our problem.
(1998: 138)

Furthermore, another related aspect of dealing with time in different

practical phenomena is apparent. Today, there are several fields linking
politics to ‘life’ in general, involving its production and reproduction. This
concept is currently understood as biopolitics (Foucault 2004; Rose 2006).
Biopolitics envelops diverse spheres of life, including the time setting. It is
not the case that time is something external that affects natural, societal and
singular phenomena, but rather time ‘in itself’ is the matter by which they are
conceived: ranging from calculating the time for production and reproduction
of life – both natural and artificial resources wired (in a timber plantation, for
instance) – until the partitioning of life stages (where each age or lifetime is
associated with education systems, pension, unemployment, security), time
works as material dimension of the governing over life. Temporal regimes
reject an abstract principle by which it is conceived merely as a ‘form of intu-
ition’ or as an objective and transcendental horizon. Instead, as I will develop
in more detail in Chapter 2, all socio-historical processes involved stand
8 Introduction

out their temporal material condition. Therefore, a new perspective on tem-

poral regimes emerges as a consistent research programme deserving further
investigation.

Regimes meaning
As previously mentioned, temporal regimes are not considered a mere
abstract and non-spatialised or non-embodied reality but as a dimension that
could be perceived in several material phenomena. The regime notion plays a
major role in social studies. The utility of the term regime resides in two main
conditions: firstly, regime grasps particular repetitive and stable conditions
that constitute a unity. This unity triggers a homogeneity where temporal
regular patterns take place. For instance, regularities as linear conceptions of
time, with evolutionary perspectives and secularised conceptions in history,
create conditions for a temporal regime in terms of progress. Perspectives
about possible futures and human incidence on the fate of history com-
pose a utopian temporal regime, and both of them furnish the socio-political
underpinnings for temporal regimes of acceleration. Secondly, the concept of
regime has the potential to consider more than one regular pattern. It enables
one to think simultaneously of various regimes as homogeneities interacting
with each other.
In an influential work published in 2003 titled Régimes d’historicité,5 the
French historian François Hartog developed a theory of history in which
the regimes concept is located in a crucial place. In the preface of the book,
the author states the reasons that support his use of the term ‘regimes’ along
‘historicity’. Related to ‘regimes’, Hartog’s definition follows the Greek con-
ception of the term linked to a regulation oriented to a dietary pattern.
A regime creates particular habits or structures in life in order to get a specific
result. In this sense, Hartog’s use of the term regime is closer to the meaning
of discipline. Hartog’s notion of regime provides a useful tool for comprehend
historical graduated, mixed and composed stabilisations. Not just in terms
of order but in the sense of how to organise historical schemes in several
layers. However, more precisely, these layers are tied to temporal assumptions
in structural terms. This turns necessary to deal with a temporal dimension
not as an object by itself, but rather to what extent sociocultural conditions,
conceptions, practises and epistemologies were established and successfully
interconnected, developing identifiable temporal structures, dispositions and
dominant frames of understanding. I have called these multiplicity temporal
regimes in order to specify those conditions that shape the current historical
temporal fashion.
Beyond Hartog, I use the notion of regime in a broader sense and in a
slightly different way. The concept of regimes has the potential of compos-
ition, but at the same time is something else. Following Hartog, a regime
stabilises analytically what is diverse but, in parallel, sets up different layers of
 Introduction 9

time according to one scheme that tends to forget the complexity inside every
regime. In this sense, the diversity of temporal structures has to be considered
as a pivotal point of its own constitution, which is precisely what is missed by
Hartog’s regimes. The mixture to which it is alluded, it is focused mostly on
the three traditional categories of time (past, present, future) which are neces-
sary but insufficient. The concept needs a further step in order to encom-
pass phenomena that are configured in a strong manner by in-between times,
even when they are composed by the traditional categories of time. To some
extent, regimes of historicity drifted by Hartog are more related to temporal
regimes than history in itself. However, this temporal dimension is not suffi-
cient if it is considered just in terms of past, present and future. More pre-
cisely, it is necessary to understand how different temporal regimes overlap
between each other but also inside of them. This different approach provides
an improved manner for dealing with unities of regimes and their multi-
plicity. This is because a temporal regime is a nucleus of unity constituted
by homogeneous tendencies (or tendencies for homogenisation) that creates
stable conditions for mixtures among past, present and future, also providing
conditions for one dominance in terms of linearity or circularity, presentism
or futurism, accelerations or decelerations. In addition, diverse regimes are
present simultaneously.6 This means that every material aspect of regimes can
be described by several patterns simultaneously since not just one single tem-
poral regime is involved. Either way, the need for research work is fully justi-
fied in order to identify what regimes are dominant and how they articulate
with others. In Chapter 1, I deal in more detail with both concepts in Hartog’s
approach on regimes of historicity from an interpretative and critical fashion
in order to clarify what is useful from them as well as what are the differences
with a theory of temporal regimes.
In this context, the following work relates at least three relevant aspects
of the temporal sphere: (1) to conceptualise temporal regimes exploring
their historical conformation (Chapter 1), keeping in mind their rele-
vance and consequences in two main fields: on the one hand, (2) the pol-
itical underpinnings of temporal categories (Chapter 2) and, on the other
hand, (3) technological and scientific contemporary impact on temporal
characteristics (Chapter 3). Then (4) I will provide some examples on how
a temporal regime is constituted by concepts regarding temporal, but also
political notions of progress, utopia and acceleration, a regime is constituted
towards the future (Chapter 4). This will be an example about how a tem-
poral regime does not have just political implications but also a whole sway
in shaping history. At the end, (5) I summarise the general outcomes of the
present study addressing its main contributions as well as questions about the
current situation of temporal homogenisation on par with heterogeneous tem-
poral manifestations (Conclusions).
For several reasons, I decide to explore the political and technological
spheres in this work as a matter of temporal regimes interest. In the first place,
10 Introduction

the political dimension is particularly relevant since other different aspects

of social life are incorporated in it. This is the case when we have to refer
to economical, aesthetical or religious dimensions: all of them have political
stances, or they develop different aspects of the social life that are discussed
in political terms. In other words, the political dimension is transversal to
every potential social dimension. This omnipresence of the political, some-
times explicit, other times less visible, makes politics an unavoidable sphere
for current analysis in reference to temporal studies. In addition, even though
one could think that the political has never gone (Schedler 1997; Carswell
2012), it is also true that there is a new impulse for politics in the public
sphere (Mouffe 2005; Marchart 2007). Since the socio-historical process
and its further developments evolve from the political, this sort of revival
is also a matter that deserves advanced investigation. It is in this sense that
the political renderings of temporal norms hold a central stance for this pro-
ject. Having as a starting point that every crucial concept is also a political
one, temporal regimes must involve a political aspect as well. The temporal
patterns are not neutral and they shape the historical course in several ways.7
Other dimensions of social life as economics can be integrated into the pol-
itical analysis, since every economical decision is also a political one. In any
case, the work of time in economics has already been thoroughly discussed
in a variety of academic publications highlighting the fact that the temporal
use of economics is also a political decision more than an apparent technical
aspect (Garrison 2001; Tellmann 2017; Adkins 2018). In a nutshell,

[f]rom the development of chronometric instruments and the conscious-

ness of time -as from that of money and other instruments of social
integration- it is possible to read off with considerable accuracy how the
division of functions, and with it the self-control imposed on individuals,
advances.
(Elias 2000: 380)

Thus, the introduction of techniques on regulating time also has

consequences in the way that individuals organise their collective and
personal lives. In this regard, time measures provoke temporal norms over
social coordination sparking consequently dispositions to the self-control on
the individual level. The relevance for temporal regimes studies is another way
to shed light on the life forms government (Jaeggi 2018), their distribution
and articulation.
Actually, even more generally, every rendering upon our times, the
course of history or the orientation of the future is also a political project.
I develop the temporalisation of history as politisation of temporal regimes in
Chapter 2. There, I expose the implications of an historical consciousness for
the onset and fate of current history. Since waves of secularisation introduced
lay renderings of history, the discussion about the course of the world was
 Introduction 11

opened up to almost every possibility, expelling the pleadings about the des-
tiny of time from merely religious and lineage circles. From then on, every
stance on the way in which history should go could be considered a political
one. One of the strongest mottos for a politicisation of every potential his-
torical project is the modern idea that the world is not fulfilled and, more
importantly, that its destiny is not defined. The latter is connected with the
next field of study.
The other aspect that was selected is technology because its high level of
development influences temporal regimes decisively. This should be briefly
introduced. Technics employ is not a novelty as such: its merely use does
not constitute any change with respect to previous epochs. Then, it is not
the increased presence of technics/technologies what is unique, but the way
in which it is used nowadays and its consequent influence over temporal
experiences. Neither technology nor politics constitute a temporal regime as
such (or not more than the body, memory, aesthetics, religion and so on), but
they organise processes which shape time heavily in several ways. When an
extended lifespan value envelops the possibility to stretch out the lifetime, it
sparks one specific temporal regime regarding technology. In this sense, tech-
nology fosters a temporal regime that unleashes possibilities for an extended
lifespan. This is the case when a lifetime extension is at the core of the bio-
medical experiments or health research. The use of technology modifies the
expectations on the lifespan because it presents the opportunity for something
desirable: an extended life. In this regard, arguable theoretical approaches
can be pointed out. The current version of transhumanism, which is self-
conceived as “… a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation
and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its current human
form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by
life-promoting principles and values” (Moore 2009; my italics). Within this
statement becomes clear that the technology use is a matter of life promo-
tion, although the definition of ‘life’ or the life that ‘deserves to be lived’ is still
unclear. For this transhumanist movement, one thing is taken for granted,
what is the unquestioned attempt to prolong the onset of ageing. According
to their manifesto, they perceive themselves as

[t]he intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and
desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through
applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available
technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual,
physical, and psychological capacities.
(Moore 2009; my italics.)

Consequently, the use of technology is not just a way for making life easier
and better but also a manner to lengthen it. Here, technology shall not be
understood in a narrow sense. There is one technology aspect regarding the
12 Introduction

design and use of machines, such as physical devices. This is one relevant
aspect of their use. However, there is another virtual dimension linked to
social technologies such as bureaucracies, measurements and automation.
They deal with the accountability of populations and with the administration
process in a rational way. They also contribute to the governmentality and the
contemporary societies frame.
Even when it is not possible to say that these two approaches to politics and
technology sell out the explanations about current historical context, they
definitely stress some of the most avant-garde areas in which time deserves to
be analysed nowadays. On the one hand, what have been called ‘politics of
time’ (Osborne 1995; Davis 2008; Hutchings 2008) considering the impact in
social life conditions of temporal notions (acceleration, presentism, utopia,
dystopia); and, on the other hand, the time technologies lying at the very tem-
poral process basis such as the aforementioned automation, digitalisation and
the ‘time-space compression’.

The temporal regimes approach

From this point onwards, temporal regimes may appear as a quasi-
independent dimension through which almost every sociocultural aspect
might be explained. A reply on this is that temporal regimes are certainly not
the definitive character that explains the entire social order, but rather an out-
come of the sociocultural configuration that shed light on some undeveloped
temporal thematisation. Temporal regimes are a micro–macro dimension that
may catch every social level, but first as consequence and then triggering other
outcomes as ‘causes’ (Chapter 4). If everything depends on temporal regimes,
there is a reductionism with no room either for politics or capitalism. In a
different way, I understand a temporal research as a frame. Politics, as well as
capitalist, religious or scientific stances, suppose temporal logics that tend to
organise social life in forms that excluding others.
I decided to avoid the term ‘modern’ for the classification of temporal
regimes since ‘modernity’ restricts its scope to other historical contexts. In
a way, modernity can be considered as a temporal regime by itself, but not
every temporal regime is modern. This means that modernity is an histor-
ical moment where progress plays a major role, but I cannot say that a tem-
poral regime such as progress is applicable just to modernity. In other words,
current socio-political ideas on progress emerge in modernity, but their use
can be applied as an historical category to potentially any process framed as
an ‘improvement’ in social conditions, regardless whether it takes place within
modernity or not. Thus, even when progress has a historical modern develop-
ment as concept, it can be used as methodological term (even anachronistic),
without neglecting its current modern background.
Furthermore, modernity is a sociological concept involving characteristics
such as rationalisation, secularisation (Weber), functional differentiation
 Introduction 13

(Durkheim), individualisation (Simmel), instrumentalisation (Marx) and

industrialisation (Giddens), all of them triggering a temporal acceleration
(Rosa). Then, modernity is a concept that makes the temporal regimes speci-
ficity difficult to grasp. To put it differently, to say that they are ‘modern’ does
not explain their particular character. The preference to name them just as
temporal regimes seeks to avoid a restrictive use to one specific period allowing
its utility to other historical epochs. Notwithstanding, the present work focuses
in contemporary historical times by reasons of extension. And time.
At the beginning of his book Liquid Modernity (2000), Zygmunt Bauman
stated,

[w]hile solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralise the impact,
and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow
or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are
constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of
time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy.
(2000: 2–3)

The last quotation sparks the primacy of time for an analysis of the con-
temporary epoch. Due to the impossibility of maintaining the ‘sameness’ in
frenetic current times, the space is not the most relevant aspect for a socio-
logical study: it becomes necessary to adapt the analytical categories in
order to grasp the changing reality. If this quote is valid and current times
are characterised by increasing modifications, then time becomes an espe-
cially relevant aspect of the current historical process. Temporal patterns are
not acquiring relevance by themselves, but rather in tune with the contem-
porary phenomena of ‘cutting the chains’ that tie social processes to specific
spaces and territories in favour of despatialising and deterritorialising social
dimensions. I develop these ideas in more detail in Chapter 3. For now, and
echoing Rosa’s words on the studies of the temporal patterns of society, it
deserved to be mentioned that,

the cogency of the fundamental reflections underlying this work [Social

Acceleration] cannot be tested by means of a unified, closed method-
ology, because there is no method of empirical social research that can
simultaneously grasp the interrelated theoretical observations concerning
structures, actions, and subjects as well as the complexity of the differ-
ently scaled temporal structures and perspectives.
(2013b: 24–25)

Towards temporal regimes

As shown above, many scholars in social sciences and humanities have
conceived time as a crucial concept in contemporary societies. It is well known
14 Introduction

that philosophy often thematises it, but history and social sciences are increas-
ingly interested in considering such diverse socio-historical aspects that tem-
poral categories contain on several levels. The list is as long as it is diverse.
The structure of time at work and how it determines the distribution of living
time with relatives or friends can be related to different backgrounds defined
by gender, social class and age. The material aspect of time can be grasped
when the subjects realise that “[f]or life, time is a medium that makes itself
felt as reality to the extent of its withdrawal or scarcity under the pressure and
tension of the world’s supply” (Blumenberg 1986: 240).8
In another vein the environmental impact of economy and pollution in
several areas creates conditions for a new age that some people have called
Anthropocene and its consequences for global warming have emphasised the
discussion about the future(s). Human beings and their capitalist mode of
production have changed geological process turning the Anthropocene as an
example of the historical times consequences in nature and environmental
spheres. In Chapter 2, I will develop further the historical times idea in more
detail. Through it, history is tied to the internal movements of human action
and nothing ‘external’ such as a final telos or goddess will. In this sense, the
society production is a re-signified human condition, becoming fundamental
to the mastery of nature and society itself. The geological stage today is a
direct outcome of this claim to agency over the fate of history.9 As a result of
conceiving the world as shaped by human history, the historical conscience
develops technological, economic and political discourses spawning an impact
without precedents in the global sphere, particularly in the world time.10
Last but not least, it is important to point out that this is not a work on the
experience of time, neither an attempt to inquire a sort of list of temporal pos-
sible experiences. For the first case, exhaustive fieldwork study must be neces-
sary and for which there is already milestone samples in various fields (gender,
economics, social classes). Such fieldwork requires huge financial support that
is not easy to reach in a doctoral stage (when I wrote this monograph). It
is therefore beyond the scope of this present work. In the second case, this
book would not truly take care of the commonalities that temporal regimes
suppose. In a nutshell, this research seeks to conceptualise temporal structures
that shape political and cultural current processes. To develop a study on
temporal regimes within society is to provide a clue for such aspects that are
interlinked through temporalities and thus to supply a basis for understanding
their coordination as synchronies, durations and ruptures or, conversely, what
makes hard to mix them up when they are not directly imbricated.

Notes
1 For a criticism on Harvey’s argument, see Postone, Moishe. “Theorizing the
Contemporary World: Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey” in Rob
Albritton et al. (2007: 7–24).
 Introduction 15

2 This is the well-known description of Ernst Bloch’s idea of the Gleichzeitigkeit

des Ungleichzeitigen that is used afterwards by Reinhart Koselleck to describe the
history of the Modern History as a whole. For a brief overview on the concept,
see Mauro Basaure (2018) https://krisis.eu/non-simultanity-of-the-simultaneous/.
Accessed August 12, 2019.
3 It results interesting that this could be an antecedent of the well-known descrip-
tion of Pierre Bourdieu according to which habitus and campus are understood as
structures, structuring and structured. Bourdieu investigates time and practice in a
systematic manner at least in Pascalian Meditations, particularly in “Social Being,
Time and the Sense of Existence” (2000); in The Logic of Practice (1990), specif-
ically, Part 6 “The Work of Time”; and in “The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant
Towards Time” (1963).
4 This is the case of Barbara Adam in Time and Social Theory (1990). She conceives
time as a crucial aspect for social theorists and what they usually avoid. Even
though this is a very reasonable sentence, it is still possible to ask if this downfall
is reducible to just social theory or, in a wider sense, to any branch of knowledge.
5 Considering its relevance to the field, the English version was published with some
delay just in 2015. Translated by Saskia Brown Regimes of Historicity (2015). For
functional reasons, I am alternatively working with both the French and English
versions of the book.
6 In two influential papers, one appeared as introduction to the special issue on
Multiple Temporalities published by History and Theory in 2014 titled “Introduction.
Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization” and another called “Against
Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities” History and Theory
51 (2012) Helge Jordheim argues that necessary new approaches to social sciences
and humanities can provide proper concepts for time analyses, particularly related
to multiplicity of temporalities and synchronies.
7 It is always possible to say the reverse: temporal patterns are constantly influenced
by historical conditions. But such a discussion does not deny the temporal factor.
Far from reducing the relevance of temporal structures, it emphasises its presence
and influence. And this is the very purpose of the present book.
8 “Für das Leben ist die Zeit ein Medium, das sich als Realität bemerkbar macht
im Maße seines Entzuges oder seiner Verknappung unter Druck und Zug des
Weltangebots” (Blumenberg 1986: 240).
9 Along with this, it must be mentioned that such a perspective, as Actor–Network–
Theory (ANT) in which Bruno Latour and Michael Callon are two of the most
relevant exponents, brings some useful analytical tools in order to conceive a
symmetric point of view between human production and nature. Considering the
results of the impact, both environmental and societal, this approach does not
seem to be wrong.
10 Even though there are affordable questions about the notion of ‘Anthropocene’
especially with its indication to the Anthropos (Who are the Anthropos?
Humankind? Does the entire humanity have the same relevance? Is it possible to
say that there is just an Anthropos or, more precisely, a global economic system
beyond?), it seems unquestionable that current human societies received strong
influence on environment and nature, and that this contributes to a new perspec-
tive on time and history particular to what to expect or what is to come (as well as
what kind of futures are possible and how the past can be re-interpreted).
16 Introduction

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 Introduction 19

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Chapter 1

Temporal regimes

Social theory gap: a quest for temporal regimes

Since social sciences, cultural studies and humanities are deeply concerned
with understanding temporality and its connections with historic-political
dimensions, they have produced macro-theoretical arguments to explain what
has happened with temporality and its order(s) within the onset of general
patterns, particularly regarding modern and contemporary times. In that
sense, as touched upon in the introduction to this book, Paul Virilio (1986)
and Hartmut Rosa (2013) have written extensively about long tendencies
towards the acceleration and high speed of social process, whereas Anthony
Giddens (1981) and David Harvey (1989) suggest the concept of ‘space-time
compression’ to explain what happens to structures and experiences in the
modern world. On the other hand, theorists such as Doreen Massey (1994),
Reinhart Koselleck (2004), Sarah Sharma (2014) and François Hartog (2015)
have emphasised the diversity and plurality of simultaneous times in the
contemporary world, providing an overview of the modern experience but
from an angle that captures the variability of this experience under the con-
cept of regime of historicity (Hartog) or “contemporaneousness of the non-
contemporaneous” (Bloch 1973; Koselleck 2004). In the same vein comes
Johannes Fabian’s germinal work which uses anthropological perspectives to
indicate different areas that highlight how time is used to construct borders
and cultural differences (such as advanced vs delayed societies, developed
vs underdeveloped, evolved vs primitive ones). In this framework, empirical
research on practices, uses and conceptions about time can also be located,
which are structured according to social class, biography and gender, among
many others (O’Rand and Ellis 1974; Phoenix et al. 2007; Hagqvist et al.
2019). In synthesis, for these approaches, there is not just one temporal pattern
(high-speed, acceleration or space–time compression) but rather several tem-
poralities coming from the constitutive fragmentation and diversity of the
social.
Therefore, taking into account some of the most influential analysis on time,
we have two major opposed theses about temporality: (1) time is constituted

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180876-2
 Temporal regimes 21

by general tendencies from economy and politics to one standardised clock-

oriented conception that supports the process of acceleration and high-speed
societies – constituting in turn a macro-theoretical approach that methodo-
logically conceives time as one-dimensional and homogeneous tendency. And,
conversely, (2) we observe descriptions that support a conception of time as
multiple, highlighting its variability and diversity that, in turn, demands a
more complex understanding of socio-historical temporal concepts and their
characteristics. During the process of this research, digging through almost
endless bibliographic resources, as well as traditions and authors, I realised
that no theoretical perspective has properly dealt with this difference, enabling
insufficient tools for grasping the complexity of how temporal perspectives
work in current societies.
Within this framework, the lack of dialogue between these two approaches-
explanations1 becomes a matter of interest, limiting the understanding of
social theory on contemporary times as a paradoxical phenomenon that
deserves to be clarified. More precisely, this apparent contradiction leads
us to ask if both homogenisation (macro-theoretical and general tenden-
cies) and heterogenisation (simultaneity and no-synchronicity of multiple
times) are two faces of the very same coin or, conversely, if they respond to
different phenomena. In order to clarify this, I propose to use the notion of
temporal regimes for a better understanding of socio-political consequences
upon temporal phenomena as well as their frictions, complementarities and
parallel manifestations. In other words, multi-dimensional and sub-altern
temporal dynamics, as well as stable and dominant ones, need to be put in
a framework that can provide explanations about their coexistence. Process
through which, on the one hand, old spatio-temporal barriers are narrowed
by technical mechanisms such as internet, flights, and cars, and, on the other
hand, multicultural encounters for decentralised, pluriversal and diversified
times including cultural rhythms, non-standardised clock and sacred times
deserve further investigation in order to grasp their main characteristics,
interconnections and frictions. Considering this, I provide a notion of tem-
poral regimes that allows to address historical ideas about linearity or circu-
larity; synchrony or diachrony; progressive, evolutive and regressive process;
as well as scientific measures of time and its objectivity when all of them
imply specific contingent modes of social shape. In all these cases, several
epistemologies, knowledges, politics and philosophical conceptions involve
temporal perspectives by using temporal dimensions to explain, justify and
legitimise social orders. This means that general temporal structures coexist
with temporal forms that are not incorporated into them. Put in other words,
temporal categories are moulded by the historical materialities over which
they work, to fence them in the very possibilities of material rhythms or
dynamisms of society.
To approximate what might be nominated as the previously mentioned
temporal regimes, the theoretical framework analysis here is subdivided as
22 Temporal regimes

follows: (1) the relevance of the notion regime, (2) the specificities of temporal
regimes and (3) the identification of some of the main characteristics present
in every temporal regime.

Why regime?
As we have seen, the gap among the temporal analysis in social and cultural
studies lies in the lack of a holistic understanding of general-global tem-
poral logics and the more particular and local specifications. Regarding the
latter, the utility of the term regime resides in two main conditions at first
glance. As aforementioned in the introduction, firstly, regime is related to par-
ticular repetitive and stable conditions which constitute unity. This unity is
even better recognised as homogeneity in which it is possible to find regular
and reiterative patterns across which time plays a major role. For instance,
regularities as linear conceptions of time, alongside evolutionary perspectives
and secularised concepts in history, settle conditions for a temporal regime
in terms of progress. In another sense, perspectives about possible futures
and uncertain human incidence on the fate of history make conceivable a
temporal regime in terms of utopia. The open future as a horizon for another
society is combined into several political, religious and economic forms. All
of them contribute to shape the discussion on the speed of facilitating his-
torical achievements in terms of acceleration. I develop the three notions of
progress, utopia and acceleration in more detail in Chapter 4.
Subsequently, the definition of regime has the potential for considering more
than one pattern of regularity. In this sense, it is possible to think simultan-
eously of various regimes interacting with each other, as well as the struggles
in-between and inside of them. By doing this, we can identify patterns of accel-
eration coexisting with ‘slow food’ movements; a measurable-standardised
global time in parallel with sacred, mystic and non-rational temporal ideas;
futurist perspectives with presentist or romantic paths; urban vs rural paces;
as well as differentiations by gender, age or even employment. Then, by using a
notion of ‘temporal regimes’, it is possible to have an overview of several phe-
nomena that are usually considered isolated but can have deep connections
across several fields. A temporal regime will be a way to put dimensions in a
comprehensive perspective that often come from different and also overlap-
ping fields: from sciences to religion, politics to history or economics to phil-
osophy. This is the case when the study of a concept of acceleration reveals
connections with historic and political concepts such as utopia and progress
or how a standardised clock-time is related to implications on measures for
everyday-working time distribution, as well as education cycles and pension
systems regarding age or life expectancy. The list could continue quite exten-
sively: relations between non-sacred times and liberal-progressive politics,
advanced vs delayed categories of societies/communities and assumptions
of a philosophy of history in terms of evolutionism or progress. Since the
 Temporal regimes 23

complexity of the associations between phenomena which come from diverse

sources, involving epistemologies and philosophies but also historic and pol-
itical struggles, I consider the term gravitating to grasp these temporalities.
Then, the justification of the use of the word regimes arises in the first place
due to its double condition, both descriptive and politico-normative, of a
defined order that involves power relations and legitimations. The idea of
regime envelops an epistemic dimension by which a state of art is identified
and named, as well as a normative order that results from dominances and
political decisions. This work plans to face all these connections across the
notion of temporal regimes. At this point, it is important to take advantage
of the fact that the purpose of this work is not to provide an exhaustive list
of temporal regimes since the number of them, as mentioned, may be endless.
Rather, if the work fulfils its goal, is well argued and properly delimited, the
task of providing an analytical tool for cultural and social studies would not
just be reached but may also be applied to further investigations in the future.
In the present inquiry, I am focused in offering some examples of temporal
regimes regarding politics (Chapter 2); technology (Chapter 3); and the tied
among progress, utopia and acceleration (Chapter 4) by finally organising the
current temporal regimes in two opposite tendencies towards homogenisation
and heterogenisation (Conclusion).
Secondly, as long as regime indicates the existence of stable conditions
or patterns and norms, while at the same time it enables the study of more
than one temporal structure, the term can explain how time works in various
fields and social conditions. For example, narrow spatio-temporal barriers
that tend to homogenise a global society seem to be firmly associated with
technical efforts in order to create a world market that promotes a global
culture, turning less relevant local specificities. On the other hand, a current
multicultural clash initiates a decentralised, pluriversal, multiple experience
of time and their connections and frictions, linking liberal, progressive and
democratic stances regarding state policies but also international affairs such
as forced migration for economic or security reasons. Considering those plur-
alities, in two influential papers, one appeared in the introduction to the spe-
cial issue on Multiple Temporalities published by History and Theory (2014)
titled “Introduction. Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization”, and
in another called “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple
Temporalities” by History and Theory (2012), Helge Jordheim argues that are
necessary new approaches in social sciences and humanities that can provide
proper concepts for temporal analyses in a non-easy understandable world,
particularly related to the multiplicity of temporalities and (de)synchronies.
Following Koselleck’s rendering of die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen
(simultaneity of the non-simultaneous), Jordheim claims that temporality

is never a given, but always a product of work, of a complex set of lin-

guistic, conceptual, and technological practices of synchronization,
24 Temporal regimes

which are found in every culture and at every time, but which have become
especially dominant in that period of Western history that we often call
modernity.
(2014: 505–506)

For the latter, the notion of temporal regime addresses the temporal struc-
tural condition of ‘modern times’2 as a long-term dimension in the sense of
homogeneity, pointing out the existence of stable conditions, while enabling
visibility for several schemes and varieties realising heterogeneous temporal-
ities. As we will see, regime denotes rigidity and structure but not necessarily
immobility. Quite the opposite: every regime is a sort of rigidity-in-motion
or, to use Hartmut Rosa’s concept, a dynamic stabilisation (Rosa 2003; Rosa
et al. 2017). This means that changes and modifications – Rosa speaks about
innovations – are an essential part of the current state of things. In other
words, the movement and change (although not frequently radical) are struc-
tural conditions of the stabilised status quo today.
Thus, what is a regime? What is a temporal regime? How is it possible to
identify them? Furthermore, what is different from other similar concepts
such as dispositive or apparatus? These are the set of questions that shall be
addressed in the following.

Critical comments on regimes: towards a temporal

notion of regime
Considering the germinal meaning of the term, regime comes from the Latin
word regere, which in turn indicates to rule, to govern as well as to straighten,
to lead and to address (de Vaan 2008: 517–518). From the 18th century, the
Latin word regere transits to a broader use in socio-political contexts from
which an almost identical grapheme is derived in contemporary Western
languages: régimen in Spanish; régime in French; and regime in Portuguese,
Italian, German and English. In all these cases, derivations of regere indi-
cate a set of rules and the sort of governance that orders a community.
These aspects refer specifically to the rules of the animated and unanimated
organisms and objects inside one specific space (real or imaginary), defining
their distributions, locations, places as well as frequencies, hierarchies and
privileges. This is the socio-political role that is traditionally emphasised.
Further, regere refers to a medical dimension,3 regarding a set of rules about
designed diet and exercise in order to improve or maintain mental and body
health. In this regard, to govern or to rule is a way of making the ruled sup-
posedly stronger, fitness or improved. The last meaning fills the modern char-
acter of the word regime in its double political and dietary dimension, that is
to say, a regular course of action, even strenuous constancy and training, that
must be followed for precise goals such as personal and collective behaviours,
a model of society or types of individuals, ‘body-culture’, ‘soul care’ or
 Temporal regimes 25

‘mental-health’. Then, the broader meaning of the term is referring to a regular

occurrence that characterises attitudes and procedures according to one
form of government, rule or pattern management. In few words, a way to
regulate or to govern the activity. This also implicates a powerful formation
over individual cases as well as collective actions, adopting dispositions to
determine behaviours, wishes and even desires. Thus, the regime constitutes
a predominant pattern for general process and activities. At the same time,
it defines the timing for behaviours, indicating the correct moments, periods
and circumstances. In chronological terms, the proper or opportune time is
structured in connection with knowledge and reasons about why one moment
should be chosen or preferred over another. In this sense, regimes do not refer
just to general dispositions in a socio-political community but also support a
microphysics of practices at the level of subjectivity. A regime is constituted
with habits and social norms such as timing for eating, working, leisure,
sleeping and so on.
Both meanings of regime as a systematic medical plan or therapy, often
including dietary prescriptions – i.e., dosages and restrictions for behaviour
and practices – and the political dimension as authority that governs and
shapes a social body, are included in the use of the current concept. This
double character of the term is particularly relevant for understanding its use
for our purposes. Referring to regime does not mean simply to govern from a
centre but also to regulate activities that are individual and trans-individual,
even pre-individual, at the same time.4 Then, the distinction between micro
and macro levels is integrated through the same concept. Proceeding in this
direction is necessary as I am proposing a study on temporal backgrounds
in contemporary global tendencies without avoiding particular conditions.
That is to say: to see how the microphysics operates at the subjective level
also via temporal dimensions. The latter with the purpose to acquire general
aspects that explain particular ideas about process in which temporal patterns
are involved in defining the social impact of them in our societies as well as
the influence of temporal perspectives that overflows a conceptual abstrac-
tion, indicating concrete practices and ways of living, structuring them via
material bases.

Regimes and social theory

Discussing the idea of regimes for social and cultural studies is nothing
new. There are several attempts to enforce the word, especially in social
sciences. The list is quite extensive and considers the term over a wide range
of topics. Among them we can find ‘regimes of memory’ (Hodgkin and
Radstone 2004), ‘regimes of historicity’ (Hartog 2003), ‘political regimes’
(Tilly 2006), ‘bodily regimes’ (Pinkus 1995) and also the popular ‘regimes of
truth’ (Foucault 1977). In creative and even sometimes foundational ways,
these works provide fruitful overviews on collective memories, governments,
26 Temporal regimes

politics and epistemologies enforcing the notion of regime as a useful tool for
several phenomena. Unfortunately, even when they often provide suggestive
approaches to their respective fields, they do not contribute to the configur-
ation of a proper concept of regime, applicable without precaution to an ana-
lysis beyond the field for which they were developed. In fact, most of them do
not offer any definition for the understanding of regime in an extensive way
and what would consequently be the specific link with the specific matter that
they propose to inquire.
Going deeper, for the specific case of ‘social studies on time’, there are at
least two works in which ‘time regimes’ are mentioned. One of them is Aleida
Assmann’s book Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes
der Moderne (2013) [Is Time Out of Joint? Rise and Fall of the Time Regimes
of Modernity] in which the author intends to show that modern times are
characterised by the loss of memory or, in other words, a past that cannot be
connected in a continuous locus with current times. Whenever one refers to
modern times, she will point out an epoch ‘out of joint’ due its lack of past and
its untamed uncertain future. Beyond whether that description is true or false,
Assmann does not provide any definition of the term Zeitregimes [regimes
of time], even though she uses it often. She stresses that modern times have
been described in different ways as a particular stance on history, and because
of that, according to her, modernity is understood as Zeitregime in which
crisis and discontinuities are, paradoxically, the rule (Assmann 2013: 15–20).
In her thesis, a historical moment arose with modern times when certainties
began to be lost and when the past and future acquired new renderings. This
description is not original, rather part of mainstream discourses on mod-
ernity (Habermas 1963; Brunkhorst 1992; Harvey 2003). However, for the
purpose of my work, the weakest part of the book is that there is no definition
of the notion of regime at all and, subsequently, why time should be under-
stood as a regime.
Another case is Klaus Dörre with “Capitalism, Landnahme and social
time regimes: An outline” (2011) which develops a suggestive idea about
current capitalism and its Landnahme [appropriation of the land/territory],
but it provides an insufficient mastery about social time regimes. According to
Dörre, social time regimes can be divided into linear and cyclical times, where
linear is identified mainly with production and cyclical with differences among
social groups (i.e., by gender, rural life). Interestingly, in current capitalism
both regimes coexist in an underhanded struggle. For Dörre, “the simultaneity
of the unsimultaneous” emerges “as a topic for analysis of society” (2011: 74)
when capitalism forces different social spaces to get on the train of current
productive development. In a sense that resembles Ernst Bloch’s (1991)5 criti-
cism and Reinhart Koselleck’s description (2004)6 about Gleichzeitigkeit des
Ungleichzeitigen [the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous or the
simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, alternatively], Dörre suggests that cap-
italism is not serving itself from merely a linear time but englobing different
 Temporal regimes 27

chronologies into syntheses that mix traditional stances with novel forefronts,
which signifies overlapping old rhythms with new paces. This suggestive
appreciation, however, is not supported by a proper concept of (social) time
regimes. Probably, this is because Dörre’s focus is to develop a diagnosis of
current capitalism and not to explain regimes of time in an isolated stand, as
his text does not provide any clue about how we can identify one regime from
another or, more simply and deeply, what constitutes a regime of (social) time
as such.
A third example is provided by Hartmut Rosa who also addressed the
idea of temporal regime when referring to the modern acceleration process.
Although he uses the term in a few passages, he does not try to put forward
a comprehension of temporal regimes by themselves. Unlike the other two
examples above, his main purpose is to identify the causes and consequences
of the modern social acceleration and his appeal to temporal regimes is sub-
sidiary. Therefore, he labels the process of acceleration as a ‘time regime’ to
shed light over the constrictions within a speed-up society. According to him,

modern societies are regulated, coordinated and dominated by a tight and

strict temporal regime which is not articulated in ethical terms. Hence,
modern subjects can be described as minimally restricted by ethical rules
and sanctions, and therefore as ‘free’, while they are tightly regulated,
dominated and suppressed by a largely invisible, de-politicized, undis-
cussed, under-theorized and unarticulated time regime. This time-regime
can in fact be analyzed under a single, unifying concept: The logic of
social acceleration.
(Rosa 2010: 8)

Several pages later, Rosa himself recognises the absence of a theory on tem-
poral regimes (he speaks about norms) when they often are – wrongly – taken
as given dimensions:

Even though they clearly are socially constructed, they do not actually
come in an ethical guise, not even as political norms, but as brute facts, as
laws of nature which cannot be disputed or discussed. Temporal norms
simply appear to be ‘out there’, and it is up to individuals to fulfill them
or not. Thus, there is no moral or political debate about the powers of the
deadline and the dictates of speed at all.
(Rosa 2010: 77)

Then, in order to solve this emptiness and to provide a clue for the concept
of temporal regime, one option is to address how time is embedded in social
practices as well as involved in concepts with strong temporal underpinnings,
paying attention to their particularities. Taken in this way, it is useful to grasp
specificities about meaning and semantics that are involved in socio-political
28 Temporal regimes

dimensions, as is the case in the tradition of Conceptual History, although

it supposes an insufficient approach to represent power relations.7 Concepts
conceived as isolated parts of reality, in the worst case separated from their
materiality, aptly define uses and ideas upon historical process, but do not
represent an accurate manner to express social struggles. Consequently, the
notion of regime that I make use here is closer to a post-Marxist use of the
notion dispositive since I try to show that time operates simultaneously in
traditional temporal notions such as continuity, duration, expectation and
memory; while in parallel they also foster a matter of government, social
coordination and hierarchies (at both individual and collective levels).
To briefly summarise, in a text called “What is a dispositif?” Gilles Deleuze
thematises one of the crucial notions for late structuralism upon power
relations, particularly in critical terms. In that text, Deleuze emphasises the
“onto-creative aspect” (Bussolini 2010: 100) of the dispositive. Precisely
because the use of the notion dispositive is often related to controlling
through rigid mandates, Deleuze slightly turns the Foucaldian mainstream
definition for a mechanism in which both, creativity and control, are engaged.
Thus, dispositives are observational machines without a static centre – or flex-
ible in any case – defined by how they establish and maintain the differential
positions of their elements to give rise to outlined ‘regimes of enunciation’
(Bussolini 2010). For him, dispositives are “neither subjects nor objects but
rather regimes” (Deleuze 1991: 160) that determine what one can see and say
in a given historical configuration of forces. In this light, the dispositive is nei-
ther a static nor highly stable apparatus, but rather the result of a constantly
renovated and recreated regime of practices. Foucault calls this methodo-
logical imperative ‘historical nominalism’ or ‘historical ontology’. The diffe-
rence among dispositive and regime is that while a dispositive is mainly related
to power, a regime is a collective-personal dimension where creativity and
brutality coexist in a correlative way. Thus, according to Deleuze, dispositives

are neither subjects nor objects, but regimes which must be defined from
the point of view of the visible and from the point of view of that which
can be enunciated, with the drifting, transformations and mutations
which this will imply. And in every dispositive the lines break through
thresholds, according to which they might have been seen as aesthetic,
scientific, political, and so on.
(1991: 160)

In this sense, a regime is first of all a heterogeneous materiality, a sort of

‘network’ within an ensemble of discursive and non-discursive elements,
subjects and objects, without neatly distinguishing between them, composing
a state of being. It is a composition that seems to include virtually every aspect
of life, ranging from discourses and institutions, passing through bodies,
nature and feelings as well as where they inhabit: architectures, urbanism,
 Temporal regimes 29

segregations and circuits. In this apparent chaos where everything is connected

with everything else, it is relevant to pinpoint how diversity is articulated and
what bounds are preponderant, without assumptions on seemingly unrelated
domains. Returning to our notion of regime, this involves multiple and com-
plex compositions of ‘objectifications’ through the abstract and practical dis-
tribution of criteria, operators and objects to operate. The creative character
within a regime is to some extent wrapped up close to control. Meanwhile,
the dispositive is similar to a prosthesis that can be imposed and controlled,
remembering Louis Althusser’s notion of apparatus,8 a regime is a mechanic-
organism in which there is room for creativity, albeit an intended one.
Following that, a temporal regime will not be a mere ruling and un-
spatialised or unembodied reality, but a material dimension that could be
perceived in both levels. On the one hand, regime relates to particular repeti-
tive and stable conditions that constitute a singular order. This singular-
generality could be even best conceived as a homogeneity within it is possible
to find regular expectations over social reality. For instance, the painstaking
experience of waiting for a response after a job application in a pauperised
labour market can be turned into a collective action for a better employment
system, inside an historical context within a temporal regime establishes an
open future making sense of another contingent order. Or, conversely, a
homogeneous closed-temporal regime can boost an apathetic expectation
since time is perceived as empty and vacuum, without compounding convin-
cing narratives about a future that will not repeat the past.
On the other hand, the concept of regime has the potential for considering
more than one regular pattern enabling to conceive simultaneous regimes as
homogeneities interacting with each other. In this regard, regimes involve
patterns or ordered ways of doing things. This is the material level in which a
regime works: it defines dispositions and practices as well as what to expect,
when to expect it and from whom to expect what. When we observe concrete
aspects about how temporal regimes are interconnected with material aspects
for setting life, we can count the social distribution of waiting, which is not
equally widespread, for instance, depending on social position (Auyero 2012).
According to Auyero, the experience of time for people in the margins of
society is characterised by a particular disposition of waiting. They develop
this temporal disposition since their experience in life is wrapped up by
enforced moments of pending around employment, social system and ser-
vices legitimating, in turn, beliefs on delayed better times and even religious
hopes on a well-deserved life after death. This is called the ‘politics of waiting’
by Auyero because the distribution of the temporal experience of waiting
would have more impact on specific groups of the population than others
(usually those less privileged), producing some dispositions to time in a per-
manent delay, turning into a value for a patient attitude towards their struc-
tural conditions. Consequently, developing skills for waiting and sometimes
even resignation. This example is especially relevant in the present study as
30 Temporal regimes

demonstrated with empirical support the materiality of temporal regimes.

Since temporal regimes are determined by historical and social conditions,
and non-split from its concrete substratum, this research seeks to observe the
temporal domain as a material realm, as a real abstraction (Toscano 2008). In
another record, Rosa has a similar argument when he says that

in the context of everyday practices, temporal strategies like letting others

wait, holding back, beating them to the punch, hesitating, changing the
rhythm, varying the duration, etc., often lie at the center of social contest-
ation, while on the middle level of time the struggle for time in life, that
is, concerning time for education and retirement, vacations and holidays,
weekend and night work, or periods of compensation for sickness or
unemployment, often shapes economic and political debates in capital-
istic societies even more than demands for a certain wage level.
(Rosa 2013: 12)

In the same way, other examples show that the material temporalities can
be also linked with the politics of debt by which individuals are in a stressful
disposition about the future due to economic and religious feelings of liability
(Stimilli 2017). Additionally, the Bourdesian analysis on empty and filled
times highlights the materiality of temporal axes. In Bourdieu’s words,

one would need to describe the different ways of temporalizing oneself,

relating them to their economic and social conditions of possibility. The
empty time that has to be ‘killed’ is opposed to the full (or well-filled)
time of the ‘busy’ person who, as we say, does not notice time passing
-whereas, paradoxically, powerlessness, which breaks the relation of
immersion in the imminent, makes one conscious of the passage of as
when waiting.
(2000: 224)

With the last quotation, we observe another example of the material char-
acter of social time. There are several positions in social space that can be
linked to specific possibilities to articulate time: some with more flexibility,
others without precise schedules, some with more ‘free time’, others with rigid
agenda and long days. The same can be pointed out across the academic fields
where the condition of scholar is defined by a relatively flexible use of time
with deadlines but not a rigid working time (Vostal 2016).9 In the same vein,
social mobilisations claiming for specific changes are also possible thanks to
the relative ‘freedom of time’ whitin universities or high schools. Temporal
regimes are a tool to grasp those material uses and practices of time.
Up to this point, and beyond the necessary differences in perspectives, it
is advisable to mention that beyond their differences, studies on the influx of
temporal regimes in social fields share some common ground across several
 Temporal regimes 31

levels that I will address in the following section. On a general level, one of
the most relevant agreements is linked to the abstract and exceptional condi-
tion of temporalisation of history from the 18th century onwards (I develop
this point in a more accurate manner in Chapter 2). To put it briefly, this
stands out as the connection established between the emergence of modernity
and historical times (Torres 2016; 2018). Since the emergence of the ‘histor-
ical time’ (Löwith 1949; Koselleck 2004), the world has been experienced as
something mutable and variant. Until the 18th century, the time of the world
was essentially a teleological reality. From then on, with the emergence of an
historical consciousness in the 18th century time began to be conceived as a
place of change and variation: Stability became the exception. This essential
permanence of change would be supported by systematic technical advances.
This is how Marx arrives at his celebre conclusion that Alles Ständische
und Stehende verdampft [All that is solid melts into air] (Marx and Engels
1974: 459–493) from, primarily, their specific modes of production expressed
in technical progress. On the other hand, as a mechanism that reproduces
material conditions of existence resulting from cumulative insights, tech-
nique is essentially a memory support (Stiegler 1998), namely, a process that
constructs relationships with the past by condensing knowledge in devices, as
well as omissions and struggles.
The former explanations encourage the need for generating observations
about the contemporary world that do not reduce – without unnecessarily
simplifying – the pursuit of more accurate explanations of the materiality
of time (its concepts, uses, practices as well as limits and boundaries). In this
sense, a dimension so obvious, internal and even ‘self-evident’ such as time
deserves further inquiry considering that the organisation of societies is based
on accurate, defined and measurable temporal ideas enabling social coord-
ination, hierarchies and structures. The temporal regime notion takes over
this materiality grasping the temporal logics specificity as well as the multiple
elements upon them.
In the following part, I will develop the specificities of a temporal regime in
a comparative and critical way with an apparently close concept.

Conceptualising temporal regimes

In the aforementioned influential work called Regimes of Historicity (Hartog
2015), the French historian François Hartog developed a theory of history
where the concept of regimes is located in a crucial place. Within the preface
of the book, the author declares the reasons that support his use of the
notion ‘regimes’, on the one hand, and ‘historicity’, on the other hand. In
the following, I will deal with both terms in an interpretative and critical way,
in order to clarify what I consider useful from Hartog’s definition of regimes
and, most interestingly, which are the differences with a theory of temporal
regimes.
32 Temporal regimes

Related to the notion of regimes, Hartog’s definition follows the Greek con-
ception of the term linked to a regulation oriented to dietary patterns. This
conception seeks defined results in a specific area of living beings in order to
create life goal-oriented structures or systems. Hartog’s regime highlights the
role of a provisional stabilisation that is associated with the term. More pre-
cisely, Hartog uses the concept to emphasise the capacity of mixture that a
regime involves, in order to connect realities that are not connected without
its action. In Hartog’s words,

Why ‘regime’ rather than ‘form’ (of historicity)? And why ‘regime of
historicity’ rather than ‘regime of temporality’? The term ‘regime’
encompasses the senses of dietary regime (regimen in Latin, diaita in
Greek), of political regime (politeia), of the regime of the winds, and in
French the term extends to an engine’s speed (le régime d’un moteur), its
revs per minute. What these relatively disparate domains have in common
is the idea of degrees, of more or less, of mixtures and composites, and
an always provisional or unstable equilibrium. Speaking of a ‘regime of
historicity’ is thus simply a way of linking together past, present, and
future, or of mixing the three categories, in the same way that one talks
of a ‘mixed constitution’ in Greek political theory (combining elements
of aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, one of which was always dom-
inant in practice).
(Hartog 2015: XV)

The regime notion provides to Hartog a useful tool for understanding sta-
bilisation which is graduated, mixed and composed. Not just in terms of order,
but by providing also a concept, making possible to organise the schemes of
history in several manners. In this sense, Hartog’s use of the term regime is
closer to the meaning of discipline regarding dietary uses and also evokes
some features of dispositive considering governmentality. However, more pre-
cisely, Hartog’s regime is firmly tied to a composition of times. Even though
Hartog is not focused on time as a principal analysis, his approach is always
supposing temporal perspectives. Then, following Hartog, a regime stabilises
which is diverse either by force or recognition (most of the time both). The
concept of regimes defines conditions of historicity but, in parallel, sets up
different layers of time according to one scheme that tends to avoid complex
relations inside of them. In this sense, the diversity of regimes needs to be
considered as crucial point inside every established homogeneity as well as
among them. And this is precisely what Hartog misses in his regime’s analysis.
The mixture that he refers to focuses on the three traditional categories of
time (past, present, future), which are necessary but insufficient for describing
a regime.10 The analysis needs a step further in order to encompass phe-
nomena that, even when they are composed by these traditional categories of
time, are configured in a strong manner by times in-between, on the one hand,
 Temporal regimes 33

and for concepts that involve temporal dimensions such as duration, linearity,
circularity, synchrony or desynchrony, on the other hand. Considering this, it
is possible to affirm that Hartog’s ‘regimes of historicity’ have paved the way
to establish a reflection on temporal regimes in itself. Nevertheless, this tem-
porality is not sufficient if it is considered simply in terms of past, present and
future; it must rather be able to integrate composed times as well as differences
among them. More precisely, it is necessary to understand how different
temporal regimes are mixed in-between but also how they have overlapped
material socio-historical temporal processes inside of them. Doing this, it is
possible to identify more than one temporal logic simultaneously, considering
their (de)synchronies with other temporal regimes in differentiated layers and
fields (such as political, religious, economic or aesthetic ones).
Going back to Hartog, putting the present in perspective and making a
critical standpoint about history, he uses the term ‘regime of historicity’ as a
trail examining break-experiences of time or ‘crises of time’ through moments
when the past, present, and future lose their evidence and are articulated in
unexpected ways (Cordero 2017). This is based on the formulation developed
by Hartog, according to which a ‘regime of historicity’ is a way to under-
stand the ‘borderline’ experiences of time, i.e., those which manifest the mul-
tiple forms that history adopts. Through comparative exercises of the ‘crises
of time’, it becomes possible to reflect on how the current time differs from
other pasts or simultaneous presents. Thus, the observation moves from a
univocal stance of modern history to one centred around multiplicities. In
the same manner by which I refer to ‘temporal regimes’, Hartog’s regime
grasps this multiplicity. This line connects to an analysis of the ‘moments of
crisis’ that each ‘regime of historicity’ entails. Hartog argues that the regime
of historicity is a tool that seeks to understand ‘moments of crisis’, i.e., when
the connections between past, present and future stop seeming obvious.
Following Reinhart Koselleck, at this point, the author explains that ‘histor-
ical time’ is generated in the tension that exists between the space of experi-
ence [Erfahrungsraum] and the horizon of expectation [Erwartungshorizont]
(Koselleck 2000: 349), tension throughout which the regime seeks to shed new
light on the ‘historicity’ of the field of history. Thus, the historicity regime
becomes a new route between the experience of time and histories. It is note-
worthy that the notion of ‘regime of historicity’ drew on the contributions of
the anthropological perspective rather than the philosophical. Hartog defines
that the ‘regime of historicity’ is not a given reality nor is it directly observ-
able but instead is constructed by the observer, which is why it is necessary to
reflect on its implications because, usually, the views are ‘naturalised’ and/or
‘instrumentalised’. Beyond trying to discuss this last epistemological stance
extensively – which may become longwinded – a temporal regimes proposal
would operate in a slightly different manner. It is not a matter of constructive
or realistic paradigm, but rather a way to grasp the temporal dimension and
its connections with socio-political phenomena. Whether this is a result of
34 Temporal regimes

an observer viewpoint or not, is not the crucial question for this analysis.
Furthermore, unlike the stated above focus on the ‘crises of time’, a tem-
poral regime stresses the singular character of temporal logics involved in
the construction of social history. Certainly, they do not exclude the study
of moments of crisis – quite the opposite – but they are not reduced to them.
In addition, while the notion of ‘regime of historicity’ operates sufficiently
with the respective relationships between past, present and future (referring
to possible conditions in the production of histories making certain types
of history feasible and others impossible), it also paradoxically neglects
substantial considerations on temporality. This claim is close to Koselleck’s
temporalisation of history that moves the focus from historicities to tem-
poralities, settling a justified theoretical route to temporal regime. The ‘tem-
porality’ is in this case not only a way for articulating the past, present and
future but a crucial pinpoint for modern history and an unavoidable tool for
social sciences in order to gain a better understanding of socio-political phe-
nomena, that is to say, ordering it and making sense of them. Based on this,
it is hypothesised that along the ‘regime of historicity’ proposed by Hartog
lies in parallel, and more deeply, a ‘temporal regime’. With temporal regimes
not only are highlighted the plurality of temporal experiences, practices and
forms, but also, and more importantly, how time is produced and ordered,
what kind of temporal concepts provide justifications that operates as legit-
imation mechanisms considering that every order implies technologies,
media, hierarchies and systems of maintenance. In other words, the useful-
ness in adding a concept of ‘temporal regime’ to social theory resides in, on
the one hand, the observation of regularities that the idea of regime evokes
(as we have seen above: a certain set of rules governing a given field, a homo-
geneity of relationships, dispositions in behaviour) while, on the other hand,
accounts the regularities that coexist, are complementary or even opposed
to each other. The regularity configures the regime as stable dispositions
to temporal logics that can be grasped in different layers. Relying on this,
a useful tool for the identification of one regime is constituted by the ana-
lysis of iteration. For instance, in the case of progress, a temporal regime
develops regularities towards the maintenance of expectations about future,
waging iterative speeches and justifications in order to keep up linear tem-
poral expectations. Another temporal regime such as acceleration identifies
regularities of change when the iteration of change occurs in shorter intervals
producing the speeding up perception.

The ‘time’ of temporal regimes

As we have seen, the research framework proposed observes how temporality
can be understood under one concept that reflects patterns and regularities,
as well as different forms and layers of temporalities. In order to do this: how
does a notion produces homogeneity displaying temporal regularities and
 Temporal regimes 35

schemes under a certain set of rules? How does it account for the coexistence
of regularities that are complemented, overlapped, parallel and even opposed
to each other in several ways? These kinds of questions should be specified
with some considerations about the notion of time itself.
From a perspective on temporal cognitive science, “temporality derives
nor from objective properties of events and the relations between them, but
rather constitutes a subjective response to such events” (Evans 2004: 21).
That means that time is, at the end, a subjective or internal property of
mind organising perceptions and moments triggering flow and continuity
experiences. This definition is close to the phenomenological notion of time
developed by Edmund Husserl (1928; 2008), for whom time is an internal
stream that takes place in the consciousness and, consequently, acquires
the characteristics that consciousness imposes on it (among them: imma-
nence, intentionality, protention, impression, retention). However, for our
purposes, the internal character of time is secondary. Since this work is
focused on socio-historical forms by which time is materialised, organised
and distributed, our use of time is procedural and methodological. That
means that the inquire of temporal phenomena is functional for social
understanding and not an isolated research field, that is to say, this is not a
study on the meaning of time (What is time? What are its characteristics?)
but rather the practice and concepts use that influence cultural and histor-
ical levels nurturing the production and reproduction of social conditions.
This is precisely why the use of the term ‘temporal’ makes more sense than
just ‘time’, since it represents a course of moments rather than a static and
omnipresent notion of ‘time’. More concretely, there are at least two clear
advantages for the use of ‘temporal’ instead of ‘time’ regimes. On the one
hand, ‘temporal’ refers to a process that better grasps the socio-historical
dimension of time-related structures and, on the other hand, highlights
the bound amid temporal concepts with their social conditions defeating,
thus, an assumption of temporal terms by themselves as independents and
objectives: every temporal regime as well as their material conditions is,
in turn, temporary. An alleged independence of time (as abstract-neutral-
objective) remaining partly in that is often taken as cause and not result. As
Eric Alliez says, “ ‘[t]ime gets unhinged’ because it has overturned its sub-
ordination to the regulated movements it was measuring” (1996: xvii–xviii).
Then, the methodological and procedural use of the concept deserves brief
indications in order to bring its specificities.
In a classical work titled Time: An Essay (1992), Norbert Elias developed
one of the more accurate manners by which time has been explained for social
and cultural studies. For Elias,

the word ‘time’ is a symbol of a relationship that a human group of

beings biologically endowed with the capacity for memory and synthesis,
establishes between two or more continua of changes, one of which is
36 Temporal regimes

used by it as a frame of reference or standard of measurement for the

other or others.
(1992: 46)

According to this definition, time is a social category setting up individual

and collective life (from good production to rituals). More precisely, tem-
poral concepts organise life in episodes and moments, continuities and dis-
continuities, points of inflections, endings and beginnings. By stipulating the
opportune ‘when’ (via rituals, calendars or schedules), the ‘timing’ of society
is defined. In Elias’ words, “[t]iming thus is based on people’s capacity for
connecting with each other two or more different sequences of continuous
changes, one of which serves as a timing standard for the other (or others)”
(1992: 72). To put it differently, as Simonetta Tabboni summarises, temporal
phenomena should be understood as an “… ability to work on the experience
of change, to react, to organise and to confer meaning in the experience”
(2001: 7). In this sense, the temporal notion

substantiates how individuals and social groups inhabit time, act on it,
and intervene [actively or passively] as actors. In a more operative and
heuristic way, it allows to account for the mobilization by actors ‘in
presence’ of a ‘time in situation’.
(Vrancken 2008: 118; Albuquerque 2016: 268)

This ‘time in situation’ is a manner to emphasise the spatial and embodied

aspect of time, that is to say, it is not an ‘internal’ but rather material decisive
character.
Consequently, the temporal dimension is settled as a group of conceptions
about meanings, feelings and perceptions of the self and others that are
situated in connection with different physical and symbolic ubications – from
geographical stances to class position. The aggregation of several layers
constitutes the temporal ‘mode of existence’ that is proposed to study. In
other words,

the temporary mode of existence which defines an intense episode,

manifesting presence of … [places, people, landscapes, sounds, aliments,
ancestors, cosmogonies], needs to be created and unveiled from their
relational and interdependent life-world driven by their agencies (… ‘the
inner part of a being’, ‘understanding, thoughts and feelings’) and ways
of doing things.
(Telban 2017: 191)

Then, the temporal regime emphasises the multiple constitution of time

against neutral and presumed objective stances. To affirm that time works
by putting different layers of socio-historical dimension in coordination is
 Temporal regimes 37

also a way to criticise ‘atemporal’ perspectives on time; it is to emphasise the

static implications when a suitable temporal concept is missed. One of the
consequences of keeping a temporal perspective in mind is to avoid absolutisms
about universal linear-history or objective-Newtonian perspectives that con-
tribute to atemporal stances. In other words, the lack of a concept on material
temporalities “posits the danger of returning to the atemporality and univer-
sality of the history of ideas” (Telban 2017: 191). Thus, the temporal frame-
work intends to grasp the perspectives that show the political implications
that temporal stances suppose. As said by Alexandra Lianeri,

this is a temporality not of continuity and discontinuity, but of ‘recovery’

and ‘conflict’; not of autonomous discourses, but of discourses through
which actors bring forth a long-term perspective by identifying the past
as lost and in need of finding it anew or by fighting against its survival
and seeking to expel it from the present.
(2014: 482)

And I would add: it is a ‘recover’ and ‘conflictive’ temporality as well as

‘discontinuous’ but also ‘continuous’ one: Without a minimum continuity, it
would not be possible to identify any temporal regime at all.
Allow me to digress briefly and interestingly on Niklas Luhmann who
proposes to avoid the recurrence of the term ‘time’ for social studies, and
instead he proposes ‘chronology’. In his view, it is not ‘time’ what is the rele-
vant concept with which social theory and history should work but with the
conception of succession and change. In this sense, ‘chronology’ is the proper
sphere which can be an object of changes in the mode in which continuity and
discontinuity is perceived, not time properly. Just regarding this, it is possible
to describe a process of acceleration or futurisation

to the relational structure of time. These multiple functions are

interconnected by the use of one standardised movement for creating dis-
tance between dates. Not time, as Aristotle would have it, but chronology
makes distance … We should avoid, then, any confusion of chronology
and time.
(Luhmann 1976: 137)

Even though Luhmann’s portrayed direction of the difference among time

and chronology is useful and deserves to be kept in mind, it is advisable that a
temporal perspective remains, in terms of time and not just in terms of dates
and historiography, but in the sense of temporal focuses.
At this point, it seems necessary to summarise at least three relevant aspects
that are part of the task that I propose: (a) to develop an approach to explore
historical reasons and consequences of temporal regimes; (b) to identify
prototypical cases in which to observe patterns and multiplicity of times; and
38 Temporal regimes

(c) to address examples such as political and scientific-technological contem-

porary conditions, regarding their influence in social change and culture. Even
if it is not possible to pretend that such an approach on temporalities could
sap every explanation of the whole complexity of a given field, it is never-
theless possible to stress some relevant areas in which temporal structures
exert their influence: this is the case for what have been called ‘politics of
time’ (Banerjee 2006; Davis 2008) in which it is considered the impact of tem-
poral conceptions in life conditions, i.e., focalisations upon age differences
(childhood, adulthood, old age), and the technical and scientific impact as
a reconsidered relationship between life and technology, contributing to
decreased spatio-temporal barriers.
As it can be seen up to this point, this proposal deals with time not as an
object by itself, but rather as interconnected practices, discourses and ideas
that constitute regimes via temporal dynamics, shaping, in turn, specific forms
of life within the social.

Temporal regimes: three major characteristics

To summarise what has been presented up to this point, it is possible to
identify three different aspects that are co-implicated when we refer to
regimes: iterability, articulability and governmentality. Iterability refers
to the recurrence of temporal perspectives; articulability to the possibility of
observing multiple temporal regularities in relationships as well as temporal
directions (such as linearity-circularity, retrospection-projection-expectation,
duration, rupture); and governmentality, as the notion of regime implicates a
set of rules that govern individual and collective actions.
With iterability, the presence of the past is remarked since repetition is a way
to keep the past in the present. In other words, a temporal regime that impulses
a stance from the past, as is the case of tradition, will promote the perman-
ence of a set of values or rules that are already relevant to the past. In this
sense, the past is maintained into the present. Repetition is the way in which the
past shapes the present. Although no temporal regime can avoid repetition, not
everyone deals with it at the same intensity. There are temporal structures that
privileges continuity in which rupture is not desirable, for instance, in traditional
discourses or long-term political projects. Also, there is an unconscious aspect
of the repetition process according to which there is no total attainability – if
control is possible at all – over the available chances for repetition, but instead
a desire of repetition by itself. This was thematised by Freud in his celebrated
essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1976; 2003) where he speaks about the
‘repetition compulsion’ [Wiederholungszwang] which is a pattern articulated
towards a permanent experience. Freud concluded that there is an instinct to
repeat in every organism, and he introduced the ‘repetition compulsion’ as a
principle governing all behaviours. Thus, “remains to justify the hypothesis of
a compulsion to repeat; and this compulsion appears to us to be more primal,
 Temporal regimes 39

more elemental, more deeply instinctual than the pleasure principle, which
it simply thrusts aside” (Freud 2003: 170). Freud, therefore, establishes a tie
between primary impulses and repetition, which can also be connected with
tendencies to maintain a state of things instead to change it. Then, an impulse
for repetition could be understood as a primary instinct towards preservation.
As preservation, repetition is the way in which an aspect is settled in temporal
terms. Through this, a significance to the practice is provided: “[r]epetition and
periodicity are important features of many ritual and religious traditions and
are components of … the ‘ritual manipulation of time’ ” (Kern 1983: 81).
Every point seeks to formulate precise aspects of the temporality involved
in each field, taking over to not one-dimensionalise explanations. In other
words, the purpose shall not be to devise one category that will be imposed
on a multiple reality. Rather, the goal is to develop a processual concept that
describes elements in the constitution of regimes, such as various forms of
articulation that can be understood without being rendered uniformly –
considering a microphysical level according to gender, class, ethnic group,
age and sexual identity, and their relation with patterns such as west/east,
rural/urban, or regarding progress, utopia and acceleration. Thus, broadly
speaking, the purpose of using the notion of ‘temporal regimes’ is to study
several social layers from a perspective that explore the diversity of temporal
phenomena between societies and inside societies as well as in the concrete
individual lives who inhabit them, from a perspective that recognises regular-
ities and standardisations of diversity.
It is important to be aware that a complex reflection risks being unfair with
regard to different levels of explanation. While such generalisation can affect
specific or local phenomena, by contrast, so much specification can affect a
broader stance. Trying to avoid both cases, it is necessary to use a concep-
tual tool that represents every level of understanding, grasping dimensions
that can be perceived as separate at first glance. In that direction, ‘temporal
regimes’ are neither unique nor the first attempt. Several solutions have
been provided for social sciences and humanities in order to do so. From
Gabriel Tarde’s distinction between invention and imitation (2014 [1903]),11
Michel Foucault’s aforementioned dispositive, until Gilbert Simondon’s
individual and trans(pre)individual forms (2007)12 to name a few; human-
ities have developed conceptual schemas about different levels of specificity
or generality, making the difference between particular and general tenden-
cies more problematic. In a broader sense, it is possible to understand these
descriptions as attempts to explain general patterns and singular differences
in an integrated way. In order to explain the regularities and singularities in
constitution of temporal dynamics for the temporal regimes case, it is neces-
sary to keep in mind the substrate in which social reality uses time, not just in
a traditional distinction between past, present and future but articulating and
tying every level. Social temporalities cannot be analysed merely in terms of
extension (micro-macro) or focus (general-particular) but also according to
40 Temporal regimes

tangential projections, durations, rhythms, retrospections and expectations.

This is a different course that provides improved manners to deal with hidden
unities of regimes and their multiplicity. On top of that, temporalities do
not deny the influx of spaces, bodies and materialities, shedding light on the
particular aspect linked to temporal aspects (Is the acceleration society lived
within the same intensity in the city centre and the urban periphery? And
the last in comparison to the countryside?). Regarding this, a time concep-
tion as neutral and objective dimension reduces its complexity13 and conceals
material aspects of the time measurement within concrete locations by terri-
tory, social class or gender meanings. According to Alliez,

[e]verything is reversed, for abstract, homogeneous time, the measure

of the exploitation and subsumption of the socius under the regime of
equivalence (time is this regime’s very matter), is undoubtedly opposed to
every idea of a creative duration, though it invokes creative duration as
its natural complement (be it only for this: the subsumption of society has
turned itself into the production of society), just as a science calls on the
metaphysics that founds it.
(1996: xviii; italics in original)

This is something that differentiates again the temporal regime here

proposed, with a regime of historicity, since Hartog’s regimes did not develop
properly their embodied or spatialised condition. A regime is produced by
virtue of multiple constraints and it induces regulated effects of order. Thus,
a temporal regime is produced, sustained, valorised and regulated by a series
of mechanisms, techniques and procedures that are ‘political’ in the sense that
politics are not concerned solely with institutional levels, but with the complex
and constitutive field of power relations within everyday life is settled. This is
the third level on temporal regimes, governmentality, which refers to the tem-
poral uses which reinforce and induce effects of power. This is the case when a
lack of opportunities facilitates people to think that ‘there is no future’, acti-
vating presentist models that tend to close changes. A regime that involves
temporality is thus the strategic field within time is produced and becomes a
tactical element in the operation of a certain number of social relations. In add-
ition, as I have noted before, the existence of diverse regimes simultaneously
(Jordheim 2014), in which every material aspect of them can be described not
just by one temporality involved, make plausible to grasp several temporalities
coexisting, not just in parallel regimes, but inside of each regime. The task is
to identify what of those temporalities are involved and then what are those
predominant among them. When a temporality is preponderant, we should
evaluate if this predominance one-dimensionalise the rest of the possibilities,
monopolising or closing other chances. As Giordano Bruno once pointed out,
“[t]he principal homogeneity’s attribute carries to extend conditions of a par-
ticular region to the whole space and universe” (1993: 24).
 Temporal regimes 41

In the end, a temporal regime is a nucleus of unity constituted by ten-

dencies to homogenise, creating stable conditions for mixtures among past,
present and future, nurturing conditions for one dominance in terms of lin-
earity or circularity, presentism or futurism, accelerations or decelerations.
Following this path has “[t]he advantage of a theory of sedimentations of
time [that] lies in its ability to measure different velocities – accelerations or
decelerations – and to thereby reveal different modes of historical change that
indicate great temporal complexity” (Koselleck 2018: 6). This is useful for
an historical theory but does not explain the formation and stabilisation of
temporal forms within the social life. To this respect, in our approach, accel-
eration is considered a temporal description of process within a regime but
also as a temporal regime as such among others. In this case, acceleration is
a regime that tends to homogenise the experience of time under precise ideas
about economic development, as well as technological and cultural change;
which means that it operates at the level of perception, experience and prac-
tice of time, contributing to shaping the historical potential on a global scale.
Temporal regimes work with tradition and vanguards. It is not a surprise
that they operate over the past, present and future. The relevant argument
is, instead, to highlight the manner by which temporal structures organise
a precise world form. By promoting changes or, opposingly, by promoting
traditions, two very different ways of dealing with the present are addressed,
either with a view to the future or to the past.14
As it has been exposed, temporal regimes are one plausible way to treat the
diversity of the existing temporal materialities. Temporal regimes are one study
programme within social and cultural theory, not denying nor superposing
others but complementing them. In Chapter 2, I will develop in detail the case
of the temporalisation of history as a form of politicisation. Due to socio-
political conditions, from the 17th century onwards, several projections and
reinterpretations of history were placed in a political threshold. As I will show,
this also led to a rational attainability over humans and nature throughout the
temporal organisation of life itself triggered by the promise of human agency.

Notes
1 One macro-homogeneous-global conception of time opposite to multiple-diversified
and heterogeneous ones.
2 More details about this temporal condition in Chapter 2.
3 Especially notorious is this connotation in Romance Languages.
4 In the sense that every process of individuation is preceded and accompanied by a
pre-individual process that is at the same time trans-individual (Simondon 2007).
5 Regarding the temporal overlaps in Bloch:
Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through
the fact that they can be seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the
same time with the others. They rather carry an earlier element with them; this
42 Temporal regimes

interferes. Depending on where someone stands physically, and above all in

terms of class, he has his times. Older times than the modern ones continue to
have an effect in older strata; it is easy to make or dream one’s way back into
older ones here.
(1991: 97)
6
Within the plane of progress, the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous
became a fundamental datum of all history – an axiom that was enriched in the
course of the nineteenth century by social and political changes which led to
the absorption of the phrase by everyday language.
(Koselleck 2004: 239)
7 This is one of the main criticisms to Conceptual History, in spite of this trad-
ition has served as strong source for recent revisions upon the history of political
thought (Palonen 2002: 91–106).
8 Even though ideological apparatuses (such as censorship, churches, educational
systems) and state (repressive) apparatuses (police, law, army) are not equivalent,
in both cases they share the idea of apparatus as a machinal reality to the service of
the ruling class, whose undeclared aim is to repress and make the political struggle
invisible and impossible (Althusser 2001: 142–146).
9 More precisely:
The specific condition of the scholar – having the time and leisure to think, reflect
and so on (skhole) – can, if not checked by reflexivity, lead to the scholastic fal-
lacy of projecting one’s own way of thinking and defining the world, as an adap-
tation to that condition, on to others, as when Sartre thinks everyone is as free as
he is or the postmodernists think everyone is as playful and boundary-blurring
as they are … Nowadays we might question whether academia is quite so leis-
ured, what with creeping pressures to be ‘productive’ and to have impact coupled
with increasing casualisation of employment …, which even Bourdieu (1998b)
admitted was beginning to envelop higher level public sector workers, but the
point still stands that homo academicus inhabits a world unlike others – being
paid to read, write and teach on processes others simply live – and develops
dispositions attuned to it which may then bleed into their scholarly output.
(Atkinson 2019: 955)
10 This is the meaning for the sentence “Speaking of a ‘regime of historicity’ is thus
simply a way of linking together past, present and future, or of mixing the three
categories” already quoted above.
11 The notion of singularity-invention and regularity-imitation is a suggestive idea in
which Tarde (1903) explains exceptions and change in a framework that incorp-
orate reiterative patterns and stable forms.
12 According to Simondon, the pre-invidividual as well as the trans-individual are cat-
egories that explain and make possible the process of individuation. Proceeding
in that way, the individual is an epiphenomenon of both categories, turning them
analytically non-detachable (Simondon 2007: 9–69).
13 This was already the case when in the 17th century arose questions about the
unicity of time and its possible unified measures:
 Temporal regimes 43

The metacriticism of Herder to Kant and his formal representation of time

as aempiric presupposition of entire experience has finally been extended to
all the sciences: «Properly speaking, all thing susceptible to change it carries
within itself the measure of its time, and this measure still being even though
there was no one else; there does not exist two things in the World that have the
same measure of time. My own pulse, the flow or flight of my own thoughts
they do not constitute any temporary measure for others; the course of one
stream, the growth of one tree it is not a time meter for every stream, tree, plant
… There is thus (one can say own and boldly) in the Universe, for one time
innumerable other times …». Inside the spectre of multiple times, time rela-
tivity, just as was conceived by Herder after Leibniz and before Einstein, and
as illustrated by Friedrich Cramer in the theory of science, requires its own and
new determinations of the relation between repeatability and uniqueness for
each field of knowledge and experience in order to analyse different process,
even if they are mutually dependent.
(Irmscher 1998: 360; italics in original)
14 In Rodrigo Cordero’s words,
the discontinuity of the new cannot be meaningfully articulated without the
continuity of a common memory or being affected by the past. To be sure, we
may wish to guide our present actions toward the future without any anchorage
in prior experience (utopia), and we may too try to seek security from the con-
tingencies of the future in images of a frozen past (tradition).
(Cordero 2017: 93)

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Chapter 2

Temporal politics
Politicisation of time and history

Temporal political dynamics

In this chapter, I will explore reasons for conceiving the temporal underpinnings
of political matters, as well as different ways in which time acquires a pol-
itical condition from early Western modernity until today. During the last
few decades, academic discussions about time have positioned its political
role. The list could be quite extensive. Just to name a few: Fabian (1983),
Harvey (1985), Virilio (1986), Osborne (1995), Stiegler (1998), Davis (2008)
and Tomba (2015). Following those efforts, this chapter exposes reasons for
conceiving time as a political concept on at least three levels: (a) as philosophy
of history, (b) as dimension of governmentality in terms of biopolitics as
timepolitics and (c) as recognisable temporal politics in contemporary societies.
In order to see the particularities of ‘time as politics’, this chapter will
allocate several analytical resources that can be clustered firstly in a historic-
philosophical approach (Benjamin 1974); secondly in a socio-theoretical
approach, particularly focused in forms of governmentality (Fabian 1983;
Foucault 2003; Rose 2007); and thirdly, as socio-historical and political
analyses on temporal uses, specifically regarding democracy (Koselleck
2004; Rancière 2011; Rosa 2013). Although it is possible to trace a chrono-
logical line between these explanations and historical stages, they are in fact
interconnected. Following these steps, a linear sequence of explanations
emerges from early modernity until today, yet this is the result of a strong
relationship between historical processes and their explanations. However, the
main goal of this procedure is simply to mention how time is a political factor
and, linked to that, which are some conceptual and analytical perspectives in
order to do so. The chronological exposition is just a way to better grasp the
ties amid politics and temporality.
Considering the chapter’s aforementioned structure, it will be organised
keeping in mind a historical succession. From the beginning of the 18th cen-
tury the claims for a society ordered by rational grounds instead of other
non-rational claims, such as prejudices, customs or religious beliefs, gradually
solidified the relevance of human agency on the fate of history. Subsequently,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180876-3
48 Temporal politics

steady attempts for organising society ridded the stances on the best way to
do so, resulting in turn in different manners of shaping and controlling the
course of societies and their populations. In the first historic-philosophical
approach, time is conceived under the light of historical process related
to notions of ‘progress’ and ‘secularisation’, as well as ‘utopian’ ideals in
which time is stressed by expectations towards the future. In particular, the
historic-philosophical approach deals with questions about the meaning of
history, when ‘meaning’ indicates a telos that history would have, as well as
its own structure. Utopia and progress can be considered as examples of this
immanent telos, in order to improve societies over time. Both of them create
conditions for a futurisation of history but in very different ways: while pro-
gress homogenises history in one linear and rational direction, utopia opens
up innovative, risky and indeterminate ways about what is to come at indi-
vidual and collective levels. In this sense, on the one hand, time is a matter of
experience between individual life and its time, and, on the other hand, time is
a worldwide process with undefined structures.1 Utopia(s), progress and secu-
larisation deal with individual and social levels from religious, artistic and
scientific frames, but always crossed by political and economic perspectives
inside of them. In this sense, as it will become clear, a philosophy of history
involves a ‘politics of time’ that transforms ideas about temporal structures in
an unnatural way, that is to say, as a political issue. In other words, all these
phenomena are also result of a claim for a rationalisation process that, in the
end, promotes accurate ways of planning and organising societies and what
is, in turn, far from being politically harmless.
The second part of this chapter seeks to consider time phenomena as life
phenomena in a very material fashion. As I will explain, following ideas from
Nikolas Rose (2007), life today is a matter of production and reproduction
in which humans, but also animals, cells, forests or seas, are political facts
enveloping temporal stances. Similarly, Johannes Fabian (1983) highlights
that time has been turned into a mechanism of stratification of life par-
ticularly comparing societies in terms of stages of life development such as
advanced vs primitive, forefront vs belated groups, communities or societies.
In this sense, the ‘first’ or ‘developed’ world, ‘advanced’ in opposite of soci-
eties ‘on the road to’ are different formulas by which time acquires political
status. This also sparks questions about the symmetry or equality among
societies that live in ‘different times’ and, related to this, questions on chances
for worldwide politics between societies in desynchronised times.
The third and final part of this chapter is dedicated to analysing conditions
and consequences for the space in-between tendencies to homogeneous tem-
poral experience as well as counter-trends towards temporal diversifications
nurtured by democratic, cosmopolitan or pluralistic political discourses. As
it has been described in the last few decades in the influential works of Paul
Virilio (1986) and Hartmut Rosa (2013), contemporary societies envelop
increasing patterns of acceleration, which are understood as a consequence
 Temporal politics 49

of diverse factors that include conceptions about future, technical develop-

ment and global market tendencies. Following particular readings of Reinhart
Koselleck (2004) and Hartmut Rosa’s writings, I do expect to relate current
high-speed motivations to a homogeneous political temporal regime tending
to drown out other temporalities. This also means that, considered in prac-
tical consequences, temporal perspectives are not neutral by giving voice to
competing modes of time and therefore plural experiences. From the concrete
way in which temporal regimes structure life by setting periods for work, sleep
or leisure, ordering time is also ordering vital practices.

A material time
Is it possible to identify temporal stances on practices? How are practices and
concepts involved in specific ideas about time? Or, more concrete, how do
temporal perspectives condition life practices in political ways? The manner
in which temporal notions are also political ones can be revealed through
analysing temporal presuppositions that are behind every systematisation
of practices and their expectations. This implies the consideration of what
sort of temporal emphases are involved in practices2 and what expectations
they have. In several aspects, contemporary societies evolve patterns of time
that are related to temporal practices. For instance, taking nights as an exten-
sion of day, promoted by artificial light and demands from global markets,
produces significant changes in labour regime, particularly from previous
industrial stages. This new flexibility in conditions for worktime, but also for
leisure, mealtime and entertainment goals, presupposes the power of admin-
istration of time as well as ideological perceptions about the proper manner
in which time can be fixed. As Hassan and Purser put it,

[t]his colonization of the night by industry is, of course, as old as the

introduction of shift-working. What is different today, however, is that
networked globalization pulls millions of people into the orbit of the ‘24/
7’ life, where what the clock on the wall says becomes secondary to the
demands of ‘flexible accumulation’.
(2007: 2)

This example can illustrate one of the main purposes of this chapter: to express
the material character of temporalities via politicisation of time. According to
the use and practices of time, it is possible to identify perspectives and reasons
for conceiving time in more than one direction but always interconnected
with some dominant temporal perspective. When time is a matter of distri-
bution and regulations, it is also inside of political frameworks. A ‘politics of
time’ implies a temporal regime in which time is put as a matter of rational-
isation and administration of life. This conception of time tends to create a
homogenised temporal regime by which time is measurable, distributed and
50 Temporal politics

calculable. In other words, in the same way as it has been defined by Opitz and
Tellmann, “[w]ith ‘politics of time’ we mean the contingent and contestable
making of the various temporal patterns and rhythms that define social order”
(2015: 108). This is also what Peter Osborne indicates when he mentions that
the ‘politics of time’ draws attention to the politics “which takes the temporal
structures of social practices as the specific objects of its transformative (or
preservative) intent” (1995: xii). I argue here that all of these descriptions
about the ‘politics of time’ presuppose a material time in which it is possible
to maintain or modify as well as to regulate and to manage diverse rhythms,
paces and speeds of social life with specific consequences.
Now, how does a material conception of time arise? Or, more precisely,
what are the conditions for a politicisation of time? These are the questions
that guide the following pages. Starting with its conceptual and historical
conditions, continuing with its consequences over life and concluding with
some remarks about the configuration of this historical process as temporal
regime, this chapter offers a macro-theoretical explanation of the temporal
materiality as well as a basic overview on few empirical examples.

Temporalisation of history as politics of futurisation

According to Karl Löwith,

[t]he term ‘philosophy of history’ was invented by Voltaire, who used

it for the first time in its modern sense, as distinct from the theological
interpretation of history. In Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des
nations the leading principle was no longer the will of God and divine
providence but the will of man and human reason.
(1949: 1)

When human efforts are considered a crucial dimension for setting up history,
time acquires a new status. What happens with present and future, but also
the manner in which the past is conceived, is a matter of historical conditions.
For that, what is happening in societies is not the result of supra-mundane
forces, or at least, not resulting without human agency, which means that the
past, present and future are subjects of interpretation. And those renderings
are confronted projects. This situation supposes a ‘Copernican turn’ in his-
tory, switching the meaning of the whole historical process. History is
temporalised since there is no predefined goals to achieve nor immutable laws
defining it. Thus, opposed projects establish a field of struggles for getting
major influence on the course of history. This occurs partly because religious
conceptions and explanations about history lose their general influx, and sub-
sequently politics gain more relevance since interpretations of history and
its course depend on the way in which societies can be organised and led.
According to Hartmut Rosa,
 Temporal politics 51

that society is a political project to be shaped within historical time,

constitutes one of the cultural roots of modernity in general. Indeed,
this is actually one of its conceptual underpinnings: following the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, a qualitatively different
“new time” (Neue Zeit) is no longer conceived as and expected to be the
irruption of a transcendent sacred time at the end of earthly, historical
time (in Christian belief, after the second coming of Christ and the end
of the world).
(2013: 255; italics in original)

From the very moment in which time can be directed by human endeavours,
historical times turn into a sufficient condition for a politicisation one:

[t]he interest in the reliability of the celestial data confronts man with the
novel fact that time is not only the dimension in which reality extends -
just as destinies run in time- but under whose conditions possibilities are
formed: orientation in a greater and perhaps the greatest whole requires
the pure flow of time as the basis of assured and comparable experience.
(Blumenberg 1986: 100 italics in original)3

By comparing different moments in a historical series, the ‘time’ referred

here acquires new relevance. Consequently, ‘historical times’ means the
appearance of historical categories that organise and classify time into strata,
epochs or periods, in order to, on the one hand, explain and understand
relationships between linked facts and, on the other hand, identify periods in a
temporal series that reach present day. In Georg Simmel’s words, “[a] content
of reality is […] historical, when we know it is inserted in [a] determined place
within the framework of our temporal system (where this determinability can
have multiple degrees of accuracy)” (2001:121). This, in turn, can be under-
stood as radical as the possibility of history itself: it is only when it is pos-
sible to identify specific processes in time, with a certain coherence and which,
moreover, succeed and interconnect without an external intervention (for
example, a divine will) that the very possibility of history arises. In Lucian
Hölscher’s words, “[h]istorical time can be described as the basic structure of
history or as the medium in which the historical sense develops” (1997: 322).4
Since the 18th century, world time is essentially a stable reality. With the emer-
gence of the historical consciousness during the 18th and 19th centuries, time
is conceived as the place of change, the variant, and the event: stability is
abnormal, change is normal. This permanence of change would be mainly
supported by the periodic advances of technique and would also be explained
by the philosopher Karl Marx, who came to the conclusion that ‘the solid
melts into air’ from, primarily, the specificities of the modes of production
expressed in technical progress (Torres 2016: 437). Consequently, in a Marxist
tone this means that
52 Temporal politics

[t]he social totality’s dynamic expressed by historical time is a constituted

and constituting process of social development and transformation that
is directional and whose flow, ultimately rooted in the duality of social
relations mediated by labour, is a function of social practice.
(Postone 1993: 294)

The most relevant aspect of this new approach to history is that “[t]ime not
only remains the form in which all stories take place, it itself acquires a histor-
ical quality. It is no longer in time, but through time that history takes place.
Time is dynamised into a historical force itself ” (Koselleck 1977: 279; my
italics).5 Through this historicity, time acquires certain characteristics among
which we have found in a privileged way the systematic procrastination of
objectives towards an indeterminate future, linking these purposes to specific
forms of society. Analysts interested in the configurations and transform-
ations of perceptions of time and the experience of time in modernity often
overlook the centrality of this historisation. This is partly due to a positivist
view of the processes of time perception in modern societies, as well as to the
excessive rush with which certain studies of historical acceleration are passed
on without considering antecedents outside of the technological or scientific
explanation that result in the advances of modern technology. Then, precisely
because ‘we’ can go beyond our own state of things, ‘we’ should take action to
improve the conditions of our own lives. This means that ‘we’ can potentially
reach another ‘time’. In other words, as Blumenberg stated, when the lifetime
is not congruent with the time of the world there is a demand for action that
makes possible to reach other states of development in progressive terms. In
Blumenberg’s own words,

[t]he idea of progress not only definitely separates life time and world
time from each other, but does this so sensitively that their incongruence
had to prepare the disposition for certain views of history, which thereby
strengthened the ability to act.
(1986: 163)6

The temporal variable in the gap between lifetime and world time supposes
an increasing demand for including more experiences and possibilities into
the individual life: “In the tension created by the dissociation of lifetime
and world time, it can amount to drawing more and perhaps everything
into or forcing it into the life expectancy of the concrete and frail subject”
(Blumenberg 1986: 239). And the only solution to re-synchronise the lifetime
with the world time is to increase the life pace in order to reach the historical
process. By speeding it up, a promise of new congruence of the two tem-
poral spheres was consistent with the diagnosis of the two levels. The consti-
tution of an historical time produces a new understanding of the collective
 Temporal politics 53

singular within history, “[w]hich in turn results in acceleration: something like

the compromise between world time and lifetime by creating the illusion of
renewed convergence” (Blumenberg 1986: 241). More details about acceler-
ation will be addressed in Chapter 4.
There will be different renderings that would lead society in diverse
directions, denaturalising, in turn, the senses of history. As Reinhart Koselleck
argues,

[s]ince the second half of the eighteenth century on, there has been a
growing frequency of indices denoting the concept neue Zeit [new time]
in a full sense. Time is no longer simply the medium in which all histories
take place; it gains a historical quality.
(2004: 236)

And next to that: a political one. For Koselleck, history no longer occurs
in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own
right, and this emerging energy of history forces it to reconsider interpret-
ations about its sense, meaning and orientation (Koselleck 2004). Following
this, the entire comprehension of the status of history becomes ‘new’ tem-
poral process with political intentions in one direction or another, which
brings about a consequence that “[t]his transformation of the experience of
history lies at the root of the reconceptualization of the role and status of the
political in modernity” (Rosa 2013: 257). The latter implies that modernity is
from the very beginning a political project. With modernity – and from then
onwards – history acquires an undefined character that turns the discussion
upon future into differentiated stances inside a public sphere – mostly all of
them equally valid (Habermas 1962; 1989).
This is something that can be noticed not just in the European context
but on a wider global scale with diverse intensity scales. Regarding the Latin
and Anglo-American case during their process of independence from the
Portuguese and Spanish as well as from the French and British Crowns, time
acquires a political status when different social demands claim for ‘democ-
ratisation’, ‘liberalisation’ and ‘autonomy’ (Torres 2020). These Enlightened
European ideas that had enjoyed profitable reception in intellectual and lib-
eral spheres of the colonies promote a new perspective on time through pol-
itical concepts that shape expectations about the future of the colonies but
also reinterpreting the past. In other words, this means that the new con-
ception of time brought about by the revolution had its semantic correlative
in the dislocation of the frameworks of social intelligibility and the internal
temporalisation of concepts (Fernández Sebastián 2011). These processes
constituted two of the clearest manifestations of the profound politicisa-
tion of time and the temporalisation of politics which characterise the last
200 years. And this temporalisation and politicisation of concepts and history
54 Temporal politics

acquires particularly evident consequences for the relationship between time

and social change. Quoting extendedly, according to G. Wallis

[a] developing consciousness of a relationship between time and social

change led to a view of politics as a form of applied social physics, to
a hope that the basic themes of society were discoverable. This view,
developed in Vico’s Scienza Nuova, increased the sense of control of
human destiny that had been obscured, if not lost, by the emphasis
placed by the ‘scholastics’ on the Platonic ‘eternal verities’. Vico
suggested that there are no fixed laws of society to be understood and
that society is not the product of a conscious endeavour, as rationalists
had assumed. His view that societies were human creations and not
the mere epiphenomena of a set of static ‘ideals’ suggested that the
principles of this human phenomenon could be found within the
modifications of the human mind and its capacity to understand its
own creations. If societies could continually rebuild themselves, recre-
ating laws within the context of their own cultures and timely needs…
then a basis existed for men to feel conscious of their power to control
their own futures. Vico’s version of ‘humanity creating itself ’ was a
significant product of a changed view toward change which developed
out of a shift in the perception of the relationship between society and
past and future time.
(1970: 103)

This last quote remarks the passage from a world view that explains history
in sacred terms to a paradigm focused on an open future to be discovered,
pointing that out as the mark of the new era. Since then, the direction and
goal of the perceived movement of history thereby becomes constitutively
tied to the idea of political movement: “society becomes a task of political
organization within time in accordance with the principles of social devel-
opment” (Wallis 1970: 103). This implies a new status for criticism to the
extent that the past must be severely judged to overcome their prejudices.
With this in mind, Koselleck is likely referring to Goethe’s thoughts on Neue
Zeit, writing

“[t]hat world history has to be rewritten from time to time is no longer

doubted by anyone these days”, as Goethe soon afterward summed up
this change in viewpoint. He explained this compulsion to continually
write history anew not by referring to the discovery of new sources, which
might have approached a kind of research strategy, but by tracing it to the
historical conception of time, “because the contemporary of an advan-
cing time is led into positions from which the past can be surveyed and
judged in a new fashion”.
(Goethe 1955: 93; Koselleck 2004: 240)
 Temporal politics 55

The impulse to rewrite history ‘from time to time’ is also issue of per-
manent criticism. One paradigmatic example of this is when, already in
the 20th century, Walter Benjamin proposes a reinterpretative approach to
the past in his thesis about the concept of history featured in the Angel of
History (1974: 697–698). With it, he provides not just a metaphor to inter-
connect past success with consequences for the present and future but a pol-
itical manner to treat the past. Contrary to conceiving history as a matter of
big events highlighting successful milestones, process or cultures, Benjamin’s
stance spotlights those defeated or, more precisely, forgotten knowledges and
populations by dominant forces. And then, it is quite clear that past times
turns into a political issue in order to resituate the losers of history. When
time is not just and mainly a categorical condition for the understanding
(Kant), but a matter of dissonance and the polemical in the polemos sense
highly emphasised by Chantal Mouffe (1993) (following Carl Schmitt 1927
[1963]), time conceptions are also the subject of struggles. In this sense, we can
read Benjamin’s concept of history as an attempt to politicise history through
a new conception of time, and doing so, the concept of progress becomes cru-
cial. In the above mentioned text, progress is very related to a notion that is
allocated into the future, closely linked to the emergence of historical materi-
alism, which in turn is focused on what is to come and not just the pitiless
past.7 This is the case when Benjamin adds that

[…] a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it
is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. This storm drives
him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile
of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress, is this
storm.
(2006: 392)

This sentence posits progress as a disruptive event that turns the temporal
perspective from the past into the future. Of course, Benjamin has not been the
first nor the only one to describe progress as not only a force oriented towards
the future but also as a useful example of how this can be understood as polit-
ical matter, in the sense that temporal emphasis into the future, or what has not
yet happened, is also an opportunity for another kind of history(ies). Taking
progress as focus, Benjamin promotes a historical perspective into what is ‘to
come’, changing the temporal emphasis. This is not just an epistemological
milestone but also a political demand, and both cannot be separated. Firstly,
because Benjamin’s perspective belongs to a materialist and critical theory,
and therefore, it is not unrealistic to think Benjamin’s genealogy of knowledge
as a political claim. Secondly, however, and more deeply, there is a possible
reading by which a Benjaminean analysis of history is crossed with a notion
of time that plays a major politico-epistemological role for his methodology
and theory (historical materialism). In this case, if time were conceived as
56 Temporal politics

circular or fundamentally as variations of the past, the chance of another his-

tory would be closed. In order to foster another history(s), Benjamin needs a
time with an open future. Alex Callinicos renders the revolution in Benjamin
terms as actually looking backwards rather than forwards:

one of Benjamin’s darkest sayings in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of

History’, namely that revolution is ‘a tiger’s leap into the past’. This is
perhaps the most extreme of a number of formulations which present
revolution as based on tradition, having an orientation to the past rather
than the future.
(2004: 239)

This is partially true: Callinicos is right highlighting not just the future
but also the past as precondition towards collective action. Without a firm
past conception on continuous injustice until today, there is no future for
mobilisation. However, without an open historic future, there is no expect-
ation on change: the experience of an open historical expectation triggers
effective mobilisation for transformation. The accumulated wealth of a pol-
itical tradition is a condition for effective individual socialisation within a
collective action that precedes and surpasses it, but it is insufficient for real
action without the expectation of effective influence on the destinies of time.
And this is precisely the trajectory that allows to politicise and temporalise
history: just because another history is possible in a particular temporal
condition – the future – it becomes necessary to reconsider the role of time
and politicise it. Furthermore, Benjamin is clearly not the only one in doing
so. During the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, attempting to place human beings
in charge of history was another such an effort. Very different historical
successes, such as the French Revolution and Marxism, can be considered in
the same path. Nevertheless, all of them are crossed by notions of progress
and utopia. To consider this is fundamental because

[t]he category of social and political progress, as the “first genuinely his-
torical category of time”, constitutes the key concept for this expect-
ation of goal-directed historical development. It acquires its cultural
impetus not least from the modern temporalization of utopias: political
conceptions of an alternative, better society are no longer projected into
an imaginary utopian space, but into the future, and hence pulled into the
space of history and politics.
(Rosa 2013: 257–258)

This means that history and human activity acquires a close relation-
ship. Temporalising history supposes that there is no extra-historical telos or
goal to achieve, but something that needs to be created with human agency.
This is one of the main yields in concepts such as progress or utopia in early
 Temporal politics 57

modernity: they contribute to the stabilisation of the relevance of societal

organisation as a critical point for destinies in history. At the same time, this
new relevance of social conditions emphasises efforts in order to control
and administrate human activity but also its environment and resources for
living. This leads to a further step in the analysis of the politicisation of time.
Meanwhile a conceptual revolution takes place during early modernity with
a philosophy of history that temporalises concepts, politicisation by itself it
would not be complete without the speeches, dispositives and regimes that
organise society and conduct human life in a precise form. In the following,
I will define the manner by which a temporalised and consequently politicised
philosophy of history is translated into mechanisms of control and admin-
istration over human life and nature, according to precise time orientation
and organisations. Before starting the next section, it is crucial to stress this
point: a temporal politicisation of history and its consequential focus in the
shape of social spheres is the central condition for further efforts in control-
ling the social life. Without an impetus that justifies the rational organisation
of society, it would be unfeasible to have sufficient conditions for accepting
rational interventions towards an improved historical term. At this point, I am
not evaluating whether those attempts were actually improvements, rather
simply understanding the conditions of emergence that made them possible.
This could also be connected, in turn, with waves of secularisation that make
the telos of history a non-divine project, rather the outcome of a new histor-
ical subject. Blumenberg, interpreting theologian Ernst Benz, stresses the tie
between acceleration and secularisation:

Ernst Benz has elevated the notion of the acceleration capacity of a his-
tory determined according to its course to the paradigm of a process of
secularization … Benz is permeated by the notion that all modern the-
ories of change and revolution, of subversion and terror are ultimately a
secularized variant of the originally Christian idea of acceleration (Benz
1977: 51) … Precisely the determination of its speed, according to Benz’s
thesis, should be the central secularization, more precise than the replace-
ment of the end of the world by world perfection.
(1986: 243–244)

The process of acceleration would be the heiress of secularisation since the

idea of a world that could be perfectible demands other timing for the his-
torical subject. I will now address the locus of this temporal politicisation of
history in more detail.

Projecting history
One of the social spaces where the general perspectives of a society are trad-
itionally appreciated is their institutions. In this sense, it is possible to internally
58 Temporal politics

observe certain practices, understandings and directions on which a society

operates. With regard to an analysis of historical time and the consequent
transition to an acceleration of social processes, it is important to consider an
institutional dimension in order to analyse how the idea of a future-oriented
historical time is stabilised and, consequently, the phenomenon of acceler-
ation. In an essay titled “Temps”, specifically in the section “Orientation vers
l’avenir et dilatation du temps” [Orientation towards the future and time dila-
tion] appearing in L’Ordre du temps (1984) Krzysztof Pomian puts forward
the following idea: “[t]he entire social organisation […] changes its temporal
orientation as institutions appear, which gradually replaces the invocation of
the beyond and the past with the invocation of the future, henceforth much
more effective” (1990: 324). Pomian’s argument describes how institutions
influence projective temporal experience. What Pomian omits is that the
institutions he refers to are not ‘institutions’ in the abstract,8 but a specific
institutional type that was born during the era of industrialisation, coinciding
with the beginning of the so-called Modern Age and the creation of admin-
istrative apparatuses, as well as sources of technification. Pomian himself
seems to recompose this omission when he later adds: “[i]n the twentieth cen-
tury, the States express their concern for the future by trying, from the seven-
teenth century onwards, to practise an economic policy, to direct investments
in the direction that is supposed to make their forces grow” (1990: 324). He
even points out, more specifically and in relation to the institution of compul-
sory schooling, that:

All children … learn the long quantitative time, the time of history
as it is practiced and taught in modern times, highlighting dates and
recovering anniversaries, and opening up to the future. In this way, the
school extends the temporal perspective of individuals, superimposes
the memories of the elderly, which makes up the family memory trans-
mitted orally, a national memory fixed in writing, and at the time
counted by generations superimposing a time that is measured in years
and centuries.
(Pomian 1990: 324–325)

Along with the importance of stressing the role of institutions in shaping

the experience of time, he highlights the way in which it is possible to consti-
tute the form, in Pomian’s own view, that characterises modernity, namely, a
particular way of relating to the future. More precisely, the characteristic is
that in a moment of history, the understanding of time will have an eminent
projection towards the future to the detriment of the observation of the past
and present,9 and in the emerging massive industrial institutions would have a
determining place. This would be illustrated paradigmatically in the figure of
progress, the secular equivalent of eschatology in a Christian key. As indirect
 Temporal politics 59

consequence of the time-oriented history, temporal realm gain preponder-

ance over space:

The lengthening of tradition attributed to the universe and the shift

towards the future of the centre of gravity of time, these two innovations
that were introduced during the 18th century in temporal architecture,
are accompanied by a change in the very status of time, which acquires
pre-eminence in relation to space.
(Pomian 1990: 329)

Thus, it is no longer the space, the place or, even more precisely, the ter-
ritorial roots, what mark the destinies of history, rather the time that
encompasses them. Historical emphasis is no longer allocated on spatial
conditions as the dominant explanation. It is not the particular region, city,
village or tribe but the time, period or moment what predominates for the his-
torical understanding. And this transference from the preponderance of the
space to time also is translatable as a distinction between the past and the new
status of the future housed in the possibility that arises from the hand of the
modern science development; that is to say, an exploration of options about
the future and how it can be predicted, projected and planned. Only because
it is feasible to anticipate the facts through prediction does it become plaus-
ible to project the courses of society towards the future and, with it, to extend
the time of the present. A new scrutiny over projects of society emerged since

[t]his promotion of history in all its forms translates not only to the tilt of
time towards the future, but also to the increasingly widespread convic-
tion that it is, in principle, foreseeable, that it is possible, from the study of
the past and the present, to extract its broad outlines, even small details.
(Pomian 1990: 331)

With regard to this last point, relating to the projection of time, it would
be necessary to ask whether this is only thinkable through a retrospective
gaze as proposed by Pomian. Reinhart Koselleck proposes a different view
on which the modern world is a tilting historical moment (Koselleck speaks
of prognosis) which, however, is not related to past history as a satisfactory
source of consultation, but rather to a rupture towards all kinds of discourse
that may suppose the past as a unique legitimate source of explanation
(Koselleck 2003). The present history would be marked by its break with the
Historia magistrae vitae in search of the limits and opportunities of the pre-
sent in the image of the future. Furthermore, the condition of historical time
in the framework of expansion is that the future towards which the present
is projected is, necessarily, the construction of the future that is articulated in
the present itself. In this sense, it is not a question of the future prospects as
60 Temporal politics

a structural condition of time, but about the way in which the present casts
its realisation by tilting or dilating towards a future, the limits and obstacles
to overcome in the present. Therefore, the historical time creates a division,
a passive distinction between past–present and future privileging the import-
ance acquired by the consummation of possibilities by an active past. This
occurs in the form of open present discussions on how to arrive at the future.
And one can consider them, perhaps paradigmatically, in a political fashion:

[a]fter the French revolution, all this problem of the relations between
the past, the present and the future takes on an explicitly political signifi-
cance. From now on, the belief that a better future can be achieved – to
the point, according to some, of breaking with it – thanks to a conscious,
collective and organized effort oriented in accordance with a foresight
that is based on scientific knowledge of history, is beginning to spread.
(Pomian 1990: 332)

In relation to how this phenomenon is shown in political terms, it is observed

that historical consciousness promotes concrete ways in the different political
strands. This is how the remission to the future again becomes itself a para-
digm of the discourses on history and its future, as well as alternatives to each
case (as it happens in science according to Pomian). Along with science as a
source of prediction, historical time would thus position politics as a prepon-
derant place with respect to questions about the future in the present or, more
specifically, the manner of relating expectations that fall upon the current state
of things as well as the paths and opportunities of making the improvements
projected to the future from the present. Of course, the forms that politics
takes do not have a single face. But beyond the specificities, all forms would
commonly find themselves under an acceleration of the conditions that would
make better futures possible, which must be constructed from the present,
either as an actualisation of tradition (in conservative positions) or rupture
with the past (in progressive versions):

ideologies fulfil a model of belief that has no precedent, neither in their

progressive variants, for which the future, superior to the past and the
present, will introduce a radical discontinuity into history, nor in its reac-
tionary variants, which advocate a future that returns to the past and,
in that sense, that operates a rupture with the present. Of course they
differ from the utopias of the pre-revolutionary epoch, since they involve
a program of collective action that is supposed to lead to a transform-
ation of society.
(Pomian 1990: 333)

Having had a quick look at the place of institutions and politics, it remains
to be mentioned and stressed that the emergence of historical time in Pomian’s
 Temporal politics 61

approach is what gives life to a projective way of understanding of the acceler-

ation that contemporary societies face. Through the consolation in the image
of a better future, one obtains, on the other hand, a systematic concern for
the destinies of society and, hand in hand with it, a strong desire for what the
future may encompass. The present projected towards the future is a way of
giving to what it does not yet appear an explanatory presence for the society
statute, and with it, indefinitely promising its future actuality. Then,

the interest shown over the last fifty years in policies that are supposed to
break the cycle of the economy, in planning in extremely variable forms,
in ‘nationalisations’ … both of the economy as a whole and of certain
branches only, in forecasts whose horizon is becoming increasingly dis-
tant, in scripts, simulations and projects. In all these and many other
ways the future today exerts its influence on the present, to a degree never
before achieved in history. It is no longer the dead what overwhelms the
living. It is what has-not- yet-been-born.
(Pomian 1990: 334; my italics)

The latter has important links with a teleological conception of history.

However, to reduce the tilting phenomenon described by Pomian to a teleo-
logical pretension would not say that much, since the specificity of the projec-
tion towards the future that emerges with acceleration is not highlighted. It is,
therefore, necessary to observe in more detail the particularity of dilatating
time in relation to historical times and their exertion over the everyday
lived time.

Politics over life as timepolitics

When Marx, referring to materialism in a critical way, wrote that this “has
been to conceive the object, reality, sensuousness, only in the form of an
object of contemplation” and not as “sensuous-human activity, praxis, not
subjectively” (1953: 339), he was criticising not just a naïve materialism but
also questioning and providing a new epistemology. Following this, human
activity is always a mode of production that results in precise societies and
their organisations, their justice standards and good distributions. In doing
so, time emerges as material fact in convergence with human activity because
the regime of production by work is also a temporal regime (Thompson
1967: 56–97). This means that temporal understandings are particular results
of the in-between praxis over nature, namely, that their ideas are the product
of historical materiality, not independent from a concrete production mode
and distribution of existence(s). Hence, life itself is ordered according to pro-
duction in temporal clusters for controlling and processing nature and com-
modities, to classify educational or health systems according to age, future
options or upgraded technologies, also modelling individual and collective
62 Temporal politics

expectations or memory. These politics over life and time are not usually self-
appointed perspectives. They are also connected with other aspects of the
current state of history as neoliberal, global and/or Western backgrounds.
Due to stances over life and time, politics normally keep a secondary and
marginal role: it seems to be necessary to start challenging this gap in order to
make more explicit the connection between precise conceptions and temporal
uses with the social order that they promote. As analytical tools, I draw upon
specific examples on biopolitics, particularly on Michel Foucault and Nikolas
Rose’s writings, on the one hand, and Johannes Fabian in anthropology of
time, on the other in order to provide a general framework for considering
politics influence over the lifespan as timepolitics. This offers an overview of
the governing over the organisation of life itself, contributing to the temporal
structuration of life as a core part of it.
In 1975, Michel Foucault defined biopolitics as the government of the bio-
logical life of a population where the state holds the right to life and death in
terms of the power to “making live and letting die” (Foucault 2003: 247). By
doing so, the bureaucracy of nation-states often plays a crucial role, particu-
larly in early modernity and the first half of the 20th century. They were the
mechanism through which populations were reproduced according to educa-
tional systems, repressive apparatus and a monopoly of violence, and some-
times also over health care or housing insurance. In Foucault’s words,

then you have a whole series of mechanisms which are, by contrast, regu-
latory mechanisms, which apply to the population as such and which
allow, which encourage patterns of saving related to housing, to the
renting of accommodation and, in some cases, their purchase. Health-
insurance systems, old-age pensions; rules on hygiene that guarantee the
optimal longevity of the population; the pressures that the very organ-
ization of the town brings to bear on sexuality and therefore procreation;
child care, education, etcetera, so you have disciplinary measures and
regulatory mechanisms.
(2003: 251)

All these powers settle the lifespan into well-defined ages. Each life stage is
associated with institutions specialised in the indoctrination, treatment and
utility of each member towards specific objectives. Then, those powers work
over a lifetime by distributing and administrating the time of living. Even
though “[i]nstitutions are based precisely on the fact that lifetime is not the
measure of all things, but rather that dispositions must be made beyond their
limits, traditions must be set aside and accepted beyond them” (Blumenberg
1986: 83). In fact, institutions operate today over the lifetime. They survive
individual lives by living through them. Operating between birth and death,
biopolitics takes the biological time as matter of distribution in order to pre-
serve and promote life purposes of power. To be sure, Foucault does not
 Temporal politics 63

identify biopolitics with a power over time, at least not directly (Lilja 2018).
However, beyond, or maybe going deeper into Foucault’s analysis itself, there
are several aspects of governmentality10 over life that are directly related to
temporal conditions. Biopower has its stronger influx in normalising ways
of life, and the main focus for Foucault is how such a process occurs. Since
populations are managed and distributed by dwelling, health system or work
patterns – and all these crossed by time for payments, age or hours spent
labouring – biopolitics is also a matter of timepolitics. Therefore, I would
argue that temporal issues are material aspects for politics, not just a back-
ground but a necessary dimension that must be dominated and regulated by
periods, journeys or schedules. Life occurs through different times that are
classified in order to organise populations around them by ageing, worktime
or divertimento activities that provide, in turn, conditions for moments,
periods or personal-collective life courses. All these biopowers require time as
a substrate for managing aspects of life on at least two main levels. On the one
hand, they set up temporal patterns according to precise quantified and meas-
urable periods of life such as younghood, adulthood, childhood or old ages,
in order to define biopolitics over populations in particular stages of their life-
time. This means that people are conceived by others as part of their practices
and interests according to particular life periods, organising clusters for social
systems of education (according to age), health care (age and also rates of
natality/mortality), pension systems (considering lifespan) and the industry
(defining merchandising and advertisement for particular population groups
by age, gender and/or social class). On the other hand, temporal structures
are material basis through which an organisation of populations is defined.
In this sense, time is not just the framework for different sorts of practices
but the matter in which several aspects of life are settled. From the course
of time manifested in bodily footprint (muscle tension, agility, wrinkles)
until its manipulation for accelerating or delaying the course of life (anti-
ageing industry, biomedicine), its timing is turned into a material dimension
for biopolitics. This is the time that childcare demands from institutions and
family members, investments in learning useful skills for work or social life
(like languages, playing musical instruments), time spent using transport or
being available to stay aware as long as necessary for competitive work (often
with stimulants for better performances), time becomes a central material
aspect for social life and self-care. Then, regarding this, temporal mainstays
are not aspects of ‘conscience’ or ‘inner lifecycle’ for individuals but courses in
which individual and collective lives are organised and practised.
In an influential work called Politics of Life Itself (2007), Nikolas Rose
exposes how politics deals with life considering the boom of biomedicine
for production and reproduction of sociobiological technologies over last
30 years. From the beginning of the modern era, questions about life and
its conditions have turned up as a main goal for science and politics. It is
important to point out here that when I am referring to ‘modern era’, I have
64 Temporal politics

in mind the definition provided by Peter Osborne (1992) whereby ‘mod-

ernity’ is not a chronological distinction, but rather a qualitative category
characterised by secularisation, individualisation, diversification and indus-
trialisation layers. According to this, different steps were succeeded until
reaching the current political focus on life. In early modernity, questions
about lifecare (i.e., hygienic measures) and the improvement of her standards
were prioritised in this emerging first step towards ‘politics of life’ increasing
attention to health care and hygienic preventive custom conditions. In this
first step, which we can identify as ‘caring of life’,

the vital politics (of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) were a pol-
itics of health – of rates of birth and death, of diseases and epidemics, of
the policing of water, sewage, foodstuff, graveyards, and of the vitality of
those agglomerated in towns and cities.
(Rose 2007: 3)

Scientific efforts were put into knowing more about food and its relation-
ship with disease as well as discovering diets and corporal habits (i.e., posture)
in searching for more healthy and productive performances. Then,

[a]cross the first half of the twentieth century this concern with the
health of the population and its quality became infused with a particular
understanding of the inheritance of a biological constitution and the
consequences of differential reproduction of different subpopulations;
this seemed to oblige politicians in so many countries to try to manage
the quality of the population, often coercively and sometimes murder-
ously, in the name of the future of the race.
(Rose 2007: 3)

In this second step which is feasible to call the ‘administration of life’, a time
of living is distributed in waves of efficiency, bureaucracy and rationalisation
of life phenomenon. Populations were able to be measured and allocated in
politics of mass and, related to this, the main feature of this industrial stage
was the time spent in agricultural spaces to plant food in extensive amounts
as well as planning for harvest considering climate, crossing distances or
the final reach in an increasing international market. Nowadays, this role is
shared with a great deal of technology in a neoliberal context of autonomy,
self-made decisions and non-state intervention. Thus, in the final stage, life as
a whole turns out to be among the main issues of our current societies, not
just in terms of care and management but in production and reproduction:

[t]he vital politics of our own century looks rather different. It is neither
delimited by the poles of illness and health, nor focused on eliminating
 Temporal politics 65

pathology to protect the destiny of the nation. Rather, it is concerned

with our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer, reshape, and
modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living creatures. It
is, I suggest, a politics of ‘life itself’.
(Rose 2007: 3).

In this third step, life is a matter of rationalities and technologies used indis-
tinct from states, markets and autonomous individuals. At this point, there
is no politics linked only to bureaucracy of the state but to the private and
public spheres as a whole. There is no substantial difference, no matter what
the administrative powers are involved – whether a company, small entrepre-
neurship or the state. Under each one rules almost the same governmentality.
This third movement can be described properly in terms of ‘biopolitics’. One
concrete case on this is the allocation of time for sleeping: a cultural level
(habits) tied to natural conditions (light and darkness) is the traditional con-
dition for sleeping time in addition to personal situations (lactation, adoles-
cence, old age or disorders); but all of this is conditioned by a more general
dimension that configures working time, time for studying or care as well as
the opportunity to have an environment for sleeping well (such as absence of
noise pollution, adequate infrastructure for temperature and comfort) or, in
the case of sleep disturbances, to have access to health systems for treatment.
Both the configuration of working hours in jobs and the educational system
schedules and the ensured access to housing with adequate locations – and also
incomes that allow comfortable sleeping equipment such as beds, mattresses,
pillows – are connected with temporal politics on everyday life domains. They
operate over the biological, geographical and cultural conditions sometimes
making use of them and other times forcing them to adopt a rationalised
form. In any case, they are production oriented.
Now, considering which were the most important and most appropriate
objectives for legitimate action in order to hold up and to govern populations,
life itself is structured in temporal political decisions. Then, the use of the term
‘biopolitics’ refers to specific strategies over how human vitality and mortality
are considered over defined levels of desirability, as well as mechanisms of
intervention (when required) inside frameworks of temporal regimes. The
report The Limits of Growth (1972) already linked life production process to
the production of populations and their conditions in temporal regimes:

[t]he rate at which food production increases in the 1970’s, for example,
will have some effect on the size of the population in the 1980’s, which
will in turn determine the rate at which food production must increase for
many years thereafter. Similarly, the rate of resource consumption in the
next few years will influence both the size of the capital base that must be
maintained and the amount of resources left in the earth. Existing capital
66 Temporal politics

and available resources will then interact to determine future resource

supply and demand.
(Meadows et al. 1972: 89)

The period that it takes to obtain enough food and the number of years
expected for the population growth are examples of time variables for
interacting with possible futures, while at the same time thinking of what to do
in the present. Regarding ‘politics as time’ in Rose and Foucault’s biopolitics,
temporal dynamics are fields of determinations for precise ways-of-doing
society in a strong manner. Thus, we need to go further and to analyse tem-
poral schemes as a matter of interpretation in conflict about conceptions of
life, not just in the production of society but in its factual and symbolic tem-
poral distribution inside of it and comparing them among different societies –
for instance, according to their so-called stage of development.
In Time and the Other (1983), the anthropologist Johannes Fabian
postulates that time operates as dispositive of symbolical distinction resulting
in a conception of time as a field of struggles. This would indicate that the
articulation among diverse temporalities is far away from being harmless, and
it would operate rather as friction camp. For Fabian, time is a resource over
which frictions exist defining several forms of temporal compositions that
pinpoint hierarchies as a result of particular values about certain dichotomies.
Among those dichotomies can be mentioned ‘developed versus undeveloped’,
as well as ‘advanced versus backward’ and ‘modern versus primitive’ groups,
communities and societies. Therefore, the form in which such temporalities
are linked is a permanent task of opposing positions that produces spaces
of domination and hegemonies. Inasmuch as temporal differences exist,
they enter into antagonisms or complements that give place to hegemonise
frameworks once they are configured within the same temporal stream, which
means that above having continuity between different temporal regimes,
frictions decant into explicit divisions and dominations between different
spots on time. Therefore, temporal categories work as ideological ones.
Thus, time is not a neutral or innocuous category. Each case of temporal
uses for describing groups, cultures or areas into the world is associated with
specific tempos that are considered as inherent aspects of coordination and
social regulation. This is the case in the timing of religious practices showed
by Emile Durkheim (1995). Precise ‘times’ define the proper ‘when’ for rit-
uals, practices according to age or accepted/prohibited duration for actions.
Indeed, these uses of temporal structures are not an exclusive political matter
but a transversal dimension for the entire relational life (Elias 1984). However,
time is a critical aspect for ordering and to classifying social life inside a par-
ticular social group but also between simultaneous societies such as those in
‘different’ historical moments. This particular manner of time distribution for
making such distinctions demonstrates a specific way to use temporal order
 Temporal politics 67

mechanisms inside society which are feasible and distributed, in turn, by ideo-
logical means. As Fabian indicates,

[w]hat we take the fable to illustrate is an ideology of relations, a game

that defines its own rules. A crucial strategy in this game is to place the
players on a temporal slope … An evolutionary view of relations between
Us and the Other is the point of departure, not the result of anthro-
pology. A taxonomic approach inserts itself effortlessly into that perspec-
tive. Its ostensibly achronic stance turns out to be a flagrant example of
allochronic discourse.
(1983: 104)

In this regard, categories such as ‘modern vs pre-modern’, ‘north vs south’,

‘western vs east’, but also ‘youth vs old age’, ‘male vs female’, ‘upper vs lower
class’, ‘artistic vs scientific’ and so on, envelop temporal distinctions between
communities of ‘us’ in difference to ‘others’ (Gell 1996). To put it differently,
all lives belong to specific sets that are characterised by different time-living
in terms of synchronies, durations or expectations (Peters 1999; Pécaut 2000;
Phoenix et al. 2007; Järvinen and Signe 2015). Spaces, places and bodies con-
figuring everyday life are subjected to precise temporalities. To this respect,
an intersectional analysis of multiple temporal hinges becomes necessary. It is
not possible to think just in terms of homogeneous groups but facing plurality
without losing the social structures behind them. Conversely, a connection
between them is still possible because all these multiplicities tend to be put
under a homogeneous temporal regime due to a dominant perception of
time as matter of calculus, measure and efficiency: a current hegemonic cul-
tural flow which standardises time through economic, political and epistemo-
logical orientations in order to create a global village for transnational flows
and their operations. This stabilises life according to one global mechanical
and segmented clock-time which constitutes a temporal regime in tune with
increasing rates of accelerated processes to almost every societal group.

Time of politics: democracy, acceleration, (de)

synchrony
At this point, I have shown temporal correlations between biopolitical aspects
simultaneously involving one standardised neutral-abstract notion of time-
making which is able to settle life in a clustered and diversified level, such
as social class, gender or age. This also means that different conditions of
life produce diverse understandings of time as well as effects in perspectives
upon politics. In the last few decades, several scholars have insisted on for-
ging a relationship between particular notions about time and their political
backgrounds (Fabian 1983; Adam 1990; 2003; Osborne 1995), highlighting
68 Temporal politics

how different conceptions on time reach diverse political consequences.

According to this, uses and practices of time involve ethical questions and
normative claims to save or spend time in one way or another. Preferences
and tendencies that lead to actions and practices are usually firmly connected
with outlays in terms of effort, energy and cost of time. This is the case when
governments decide to promote investments in specific areas of the economy
or society. Their choices are made not simply in terms of financial costs or
administrative-bureaucratic availabilities but also in terms of analysis of dur-
ation and deadlines, terms and periods, considering the time in which the
determined project or policy could be done in respect of days, weeks, months
or years. This is not just a matter of efficiency or efficacy but crucial questions
on the mechanisms and processes involved in the decision-making. Questions
about democratic and technical process, such as how many citizens can be
consulted or how many specialists need to be hired, are critical points in terms
of the timing that must be considered. This means that political stances are
crossed by multiple temporal conditions that take complementary, as well as
contradictory, directions. This explains how different political perspectives
also have diverse temporal priorities or emphases which can be described as
delays, accelerations or maintenances depending on the case. According to
Hartmut Rosa,

the temporal scope of the consequences of political decisions plays a

central role for the functional capacity and legitimation of democratic
systems of the Western type: if political decisions have serious, long-
term, irreversible consequences, then, to the extent that the legitimacy of
decisions in the eyes of a minority disappears, the general basis for demo-
cratic decisions seems to become questionable.
(2013: 253)

Even though Rosa’s approach seems to put an excessive emphasis on liberal

democracy as a politico-temporal approach – which is probably the case for
most of the Western world, but not necessarily applicable to other places – the
temporal background for political decisions that are behind other political
discourses is still relevant. Remaining in front of a reactionary, democratic
or revolutionary political perspective is not the main issue, as all of them
would be situated respectively in a temporal specificity, “[t]hus progres-
sive and conservative often designate different speeds rather than genuinely
different directions: according to its own self-understanding, progressive pol-
itics strives toward an acceleration of the expected development of history,
conservative politics toward its deceleration or temporary suspension” (Rosa
2013: 258). Although progressive politics are usually oriented towards change
and, because of that, more directly related to acceleration, the political char-
acter of current acceleration is not as straightforward as it seems on the sur-
face. The economical free market and political tendencies in late capitalism
 Temporal politics 69

that support a neoliberal economy can be strongly related to accelerations

but not necessarily in a progressive-leftist manner. Consolidating innovations
does not necessarily mean a true change in economic structures or societal
stratifications. In fact, the economy speed and the political standstill coexist
today. Rosa himself speaks about the ‘frenetic standstill’11 [rasender Stillstand]
as constitutive diagnosis of the epoch:

Frenetic standstill therefore means that nothing remains the way it is while
at the same time nothing essential changes. Furthermore, this paradoxical
dualism of late modernity may help explain a peculiar phenomenon in
the debate about globalization. The defenders of the cultural homogen-
ization or convergence diagnosis seem to have arguments that are just as
plausible as those of the partisans of the pluralization thesis: whether
globalized societies are experienced as converging or diverging depends
on whether one adopts a structure- or a content-oriented perspective.
(2013: 283)

As a result of processes such as rationalisation and secularisation

(Weber), individualisation (Simmel), differentiation (Durkheim) and
instrumentalisation (Marx), modernity is marked by the problematic inter-
connection of three types of acceleration: technological, economic and the
rhythm of life; while at the structural level these processes gave rise to what
Rosa calls ‘dynamic stabilisation’: the condition that the modern social order
can only be maintained through the logic of incessant growth and escalation.
They also result in the alienating experience of a ‘frenetic standstill’: the
feeling that collective processes must continue advancing and striving harder,
at an ever-faster rate, without implying that those efforts are really conducting
social improvements. The modern conjunction between acceleration and
alienation is not, however, a dead-end condition. In line with the tradition of
the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Rosa is dedicated not only to diag-
nosing the problems of our time but also to identifying their emancipatory
potentials (Montero and Torres 2020). The idea of the frenetic standstill, not
coined by Rosa but by Paul Virilio in Polar Inertia (2000), was also mentioned
in another way by Moishe Postone in the following terms:

[o]n the one hand, as I have pointed out, capitalism involves an ongoing
transformation of social life – of the nature, structure and interrelations
of social classes and other groupings, as well as the nature of production,
transportation, circulation, patterns of living, the form of the family, and
so on. On the other hand, the unfolding of capital involves the ongoing
reconstitution of its own fundamental condition as an unchanging fea-
ture of social life – namely, that social mediation ultimately is effected by
labor.
(1993: 300)
70 Temporal politics

In this sense, change and repetition appear to be intimately connected

through the equation culture-work: at the cultural level, everything potentially
changes on the basis that the essential is not touched (the working relations).
According to Postone, the condition of incessant movement alongside fre-
netic stagnation was already pointed out by Marx. In his words,

[t]he Marxian concept of capital, examined on this very fundamental

level, is an attempt to grasp the nature and development of modern cap-
italist society in terms of both temporal moments, to analyze capitalism
as a dynamic society that is in constant flux and, yet, retains its under-
lying identity. An apparent paradox of capitalism, within this framework,
is that, unlike other social formations, it possesses an immanent historical
dynamic; this dynamic, however, is characterized by the constant transla-
tion of historical time into the framework of the present, thereby reinfor-
cing that present.
(Postone 1993: 300)

In short, this means that “[i]t reveals capitalism to be a society marked

by a temporal duality – an ongoing, accelerating flow of history, on the one
hand, and an ongoing conversion of this movement of time into a constant
present, on the other” (Postone 1993: 300). Yet, this duality is not always
contradictory since the historical acceleration does not imply necessarily
transformations: it is possible to speed up the very same path without chan-
ging the course. In addition, as stated by Rosa again, the paradox for politics
is that, on the one hand, there is a shortening of time horizon which turns in
scarcity of time resources and, on the other hand, there exists a widening of
time horizon that increases the need for time. This means that socio-political
decision-making demands fast solutions, and in parallel, they need enough
time for considering, processing and developing the best choices. This can be
described also in terms of paradoxical regimes that tend to homogenise or
heterogenise the time experience.
Meanwhile Rosa’s approach relates to shortening time horizons with accel-
eration and widening of time with deceleration (2013: 262), I propose another
description in which dominant perspectives on increasing speed are also ten-
dencies that homogenise political time in order to achieve goals in a shorter time
providing measures, calculations and controls of time. The process of accel-
eration that Rosa describes extensively is understood here in a complemen-
tary way as a temporal regime that homogenises practices and expectations.
Usually, in this hegemonic pace, there is no room for doubts or delays. This
cultural dominance stabilises a regime of high speed that puts other rhythms
under pressure in order to keep up with it. Notwithstanding, it does not mean
that it can absorb the whole diversity of rhythms: it creates conditions for the
rest of the paces to emulate its temporal regime instead. On the other hand,
politics requires a time to encompass a diversified pace or rhythm. On a basic
 Temporal politics 71

level, this can be seen as the necessity to manage different human, natural,
technological or territorial resources that shall be synchronised before, and in
view of it, a political decision but also, time in order to coordinate perspectives,
to evaluate viabilities and hazards that suppose multiple temporalities involved
in political commitments. This is probably even more evident in democratic
processes as dimensions of appearance of people or citizenship. As Jacques
Rancière thinks, time of democracy, identified with the time of politics, is an
open time in which no homogeneous perspectives can one-dimensionalise
all alternatives. Precisely, against one homogeneous tendency to accelerate
economy, technology or process inside of the state, democracy rises in place
“of the ongoing effort to create forms of the common different from the ones
on offer from the state, the democratic consensus, and so on. […] there are
events that punctuate the flow, that open up temporalities” (Rancière 2011: 80).
Regarding this, utopic and heterotopic potentials open politics, breaking down
stable and prefigured notions about past, present and future. Homogenisation
of the present is also standardisation of futures. This is because

[e]very description of a ‘state of things’ gives priority to time. There is a

simple reason for this. A ‘state of things’ presents itself as an objective
given precluding the possibility of other states of things. And time is the
best medium for exclusion … It is time that does not wait, and time’s
impatience transforms everyday experience into the experience of a hier-
archy of positions.
(Rancière 2013)12

This hierarchy of positions can be translated into a temporal regime by

which acceleration as ‘frenetic standstill’ produces those positions. To those
who have the opportunity to go faster stands at the very top and, conversely,
decreasing levels for keeping up speed coincide with the lowest levels in social
hierarchy. Most desirable positions are related to availability for reaching
faster ways of living. This does not mean that higher positions are living
necessarily ‘faster’ than their lower counterparts, but their opportunity
to act more briskly than others, namely in transport (reaching swift flight-
connections, trains, paid highways), technology (access to faster laptops, cars,
cooking appliances) or information (advanced cultural vanguards, privileged
information, news, networks, forecasts), implies a distinctive status in social
organisation makes them appear in advanced positions. Interestingly, time
in its variable forms is not ‘neutral’ continuity or duration but a condi-
tion for options and/or opportunities. As Rosa, following Virilio, states
“[c]hronopolitics is thus a central component of any form of domination,
and in the historical process, as, above all … domination is as a rule the dom-
ination of the faster” (2013: 12).
Then, as Rancière (2013) points out “[t]he empirical idea of time as
a succession of moments has been substituted by an idea of time as a set
72 Temporal politics

of possibilities”. This homogeneous form of time stands as an ungovern-

able aspect of current societies and, for this reason, usually appears as an
unchangeable fact. As sort of naturalisation of the social process as a whole,
inequalities are seen as obvious principles of differentiation inside particular
groups (i.e., as access to faster technology by social class) or between one or
more societies (i.e., as distinctions of ‘advanced vs primitive’ societies). In
Rancière’s (2013) words,

[t]his homogeneous time is also a principle of inner differentiation, for

it is a time that makes those who live in it unable to master it; unable
to understand what it makes possible or impossible. Both accounts
construct a global one-way time as well as an inner differentiation of
that time that renders the individuals who live in it unable to under-
stand how it proceeds and where it leads, for they are always moving
too quickly or too slowly to find themselves contemporaneous with its
intelligibility.

There are counter-movements to temporal homogeneity, such as slow food,

bio-market or instances inside democracy outside formal politics (including
social movements and non-governmental organisations [NGOs]), demanding
different objectives or direction in order to improve velocities for consump-
tion within global demands, which are still formulas within the limit of a
counter-culture. With or without individual wills, being more or less aware
of the effect of contemporary times, subjects are involved in fluxes of time
that appear to them as colossal, comporting enormous challenge in order to
be followed. Some examples of the hard way which supposes for individuals
‘being contemporaneous with the times’ include being up to date with the
most recent social media upgrade, being informed of principal news every
day or improving knowledge of a feature or skill necessary for employment.
This is the case for those who cannot eventually follow such fashions, since
the scenario is even harsher for peripheral areas of the world where access to
technology is precarious, configuring a contemporary mechanism of social
exclusion restraining synchronisations within the rest of social process. In
this sense,

the account that makes time both a homogeneous principle of possibility

and impossibility, and a principle of division of times and capabilities.
The opposition between the champions of historical necessity and the
prophets of the impending disaster rests, in the final analysis, on the very
conjunction between the plot of homogeneous, one-way time, and the
inner splitting that renders it impossible for individuals to be contempor-
aneous with the time of this process and with the knowledge of what it
makes possible.
(Rancière 2013)
 Temporal politics 73

A non-contemporaneity within the social turns substantial the temporal

scope because

the problem of time, especially its agental aptitude, validates Jacques

Rancière’s observation that judgments like charges of anachronism reflect
a misrecognition because the question of historical time is a philosophic
one and cannot be resolved as if it were reducible to the methodology or
epistemology of history.
(Harootunian 2014: 22)

Temporal overlaps and their historical role shall be reconsidered neither as

anomaly or exception. Consequently, as I stated in another place,

not only does anachrony acquire another status for the historical discip-
line …, but the transposition of times can no longer be dismissed out of
hand. There is no ‘pure’ homogeneity of times, so that the present is not
only what happens on the plane of the present, but the constant transpos-
ition of real and possible futures and pasts.
(Torres 2018: 567)

Rancière’s criticism of acceleration seems to be linked not to denial the

high speed in itself, but rather with its motor. Acceleration would be today
the consequence of faster processes of capitalist production and globally
increasing demands for consumption. Progressive expectations about accel-
eration looking for another possible future have been left behind. And the
particular and great capacity of current capitalism has been coordinated, or
converged, between subjectivities oriented to autonomies on a global scale
and the homogeneous process of present system of production and its pace.
Thus, both subjectivities and societies are coupled in a regime of high speed
because

[t]hey construct this in the simplest terms as a common identity between

the time of capitalist production and that of individual consumption.
That identity is presented as the reign of an absolute present in which
everything – production, consumption, information, production of
images, etc. – proceeds at the same accelerated pace. I would like to
counter these analyses of the reign of the present from a completely
different perspective: that of a time that is not framed by the sole speed of
the development of capital. This perspective is framed in relation to the
institutions that make temporal coincidence and non-coincidence their
main affair. Our world does not function according to a homogeneous
process of presentification and acceleration. It functions according to the
regulation of the convergence and divergence of times.
(Rancière 2013)
74 Temporal politics

Rancière’s convergence or divergence is understood by Rosa as synchrony

and desynchrony in late capitalism. Following Rosa, it is possible to argue
that problems of synchrony are related to divergence between velocities of
change and adaptations. This means that political dimensions are stressed by
fast decision-making, seeking improvements in citizenship life in a capital-
istic framework, and they are not available to provide times that can turn fast
solutions in a slowed-down motion. This situation could make democratic
processes more difficult. In Rosa’s words

the expectations that the future will be different from the past, that societal
development in this future is subject to our understanding and is supposed
to be steered or shaped in a democratic political fashion, and that the nor-
mative criteria or objectives that will guide this shaping activity are either
already available or at least can be established by means of collective pol-
itical agreement, even if this is open to revision.
(2013: 252)

Seeing a concrete example, an election period is a political time in tune

with the time of the state. To synchronise this institutional necessity with
global demands, such as natural and human catastrophes with local neces-
sities, is not an easy task since elections are often a distribution of power
inside mainstream politics. In this sense, the main point of elections is the
way in which they construct the visibility of a time for the political that, at
the end, is reduced to two periods: a pre-electoral and a post-electoral time.
In this way, the time of the political coincides entirely with the time of the
state (Rancière 2013). However, this sort of synchrony seems too short for
stable convergences beyond the institutional level. In addition, this possibility
of synchrony has different results depending on what political perspective
dominates. Considered as temporal structure, ‘tradition’ is mainly a mode
of past that takes place in the present and produces conditions for that pre-
sent as well as its possible future(s). Properly speaking, there should be no
open future for tradition, but formulas in the past that shape and lead what is
coming. Conservative positions defend such an approach. For them, the past
contains all necessary clues for interpreting the present. The past is source of
knowledge and in several cases a model for present and future. A nostalgic
mood looking backwards for better times is highly reactive to innovations
and usually bids to close options for a radical novelty.
On the contrary, political approaches that tend to intensify what future(s)
can offer put expectations on what is coming as a principal temporal focus.
Liberal ideas behind the French Revolution or the Latin American independ-
ence, as well as utopian movements and Marxists tendencies, can be inscribed
into this progressive stance. The rupture with the past and expectations about
the future provide fruitful dispositions for new schemes as well as few obstacles
to unbridle change. Revolutionaries and reformists could be understood as
different paces inside the very same path towards the future: while
 Temporal politics 75

Time perspectives over mainstream political framework

Political approach Standpoint Temporal focus

To hold or preserve
Conservative Past
previous times

Middle-third Mixture between tradition

Present
way and projections

Progressive Change and open history Future

Figure 2.1 Time perspectives over mainstream political framework.

revolutionaries aspire to radical changes ‘now’, reformists pursue gradual

modifications ‘through time’.
A third option is provided for central or middle stances that, depending
on conditions and circumstances, modulate the conservative with progres-
sive tendencies. The interesting point here is the temporal approach which
predominates under some circumstances. As Niklas Luhmann indicates, “if
we have an almost infinite historical past, structured and limited only by our
actual interests, and if we have an open future, the present becomes the turning
point which switches the process of time from past into future” (1976: 133).
The circumscription of time is usually in the present based on assumed ‘real-
istic’ or ‘pragmatic’ discourses.
Outlining the three political stances mentioned above and its temporal
focus, we can observe the general trends as shown in Figure 2.1.
All these perspectives are presented in liberal democratic scenarios. Other
contexts suppose big challenges for each of them, depending on circumstances.
It is still feasible to consult with Rancière whether there is any political regime
outside of democracy (Rancière 2001: 5).13 Time of politics is located and
often intentionally assimilated with a political system in itself. This narrow
perspective avoids to problematise politics with its diverse and contradictory
times. The political time that we have observed until here is a complex mixture
of diversities, synchronies and heterochronies that nonetheless share the same
background: a temporal regime and its political role.

Towards a temporal regime of politics

Up to this point, I have shown how temporal stances are connected with pol-
itical matters as (i) philosophy of history, (ii) governmentality over life and
(iii) socio-political structure in contemporary so-called democratic societies. A
question remains open for some dominance in this political temporal regime: Is
76 Temporal politics

there one preponderant temporal tendency in politics today? What are the
dominant characteristics of the current politics of time? In order to respond to
these questions, it is necessary to remember the presence of one-dimensional
and homogeneous temporal character that reduces its political potential for
thinking, not just possible worlds but the very present state of things. Time as
presented in this chapter is not a continuity or duration of process and facts,
similar to a scientific, neutral, objective-Newtonian perspective, but instead
regarded as a ‘state of things’ that can describe how an extended portion of
life phenomena is currently conceived. Thus, time is a political fact that can
paradoxically contribute to creating or to avoiding chances for current and
possible societies. To make it clearer: it can open up opportunities, but it is also
able to shut them down in terms of power and control domains. The chance to
have a temporal concept for the ‘multiple’ is mandatory in order to provide not
just changes for improvements but also to describe properly current times. As
Jacques Rancière says, “emancipation is in fact a way of putting several times
into the same time; it is a way of living as equals in the world of inequality”
(2001: 5). This is the same direction that indicates the notion of heterochrony
as redistribution of times that invents new capacities for framing presents
(Foucault 1984; 1997: 330–357). Because ‘Network Society’ has implied a
revolution in temporal dynamics of both personal and societal lives as a whole
(Hassan and Purser 2007), this evidence fills for the social demanding new
kinds of alertness and reflexion. These new alertness and reflexion demand a
concept that reflects the current state of temporal logics as well as heteroge-
neous times and their options. Precisely because of that,

[i]t has to call into question the thesis of the homogeneity of time. There
is no global process subjecting all the rhythms of individual and col-
lective time to its rule. There are several times in one time. There is a
dominant form of temporality, for sure, a “normal” time that is the time
of domination. Domination gives it its divisions and its rhythms, its
agendas and its schedules in the short and long run: time of work, leisure,
and unemployment; electoral campaigns, degree courses, etc. It tends to
homogenize all forms of temporality under its control, defining thereby
what the present of our world consists of, which futures are possible, and
which definitely belong to the past – thereby indicating the impossible.
This is what consensus means: the monopoly of the forms of describing
the perceptible, the thinkable, and the doable.
(Rancière 2013)

Summing up, the current patterns in the political temporal regime described
are constituted by at least three main cores. As we have seen, there is a phil-
osophy of history by which a particular temporal historical meaning is settled
up. The last sentence indicates new conditions for human conception and its
relation with nature and life phenomena, which is linked to speeches about the
meaning and organisation of life in history from different political perspectives.
 Temporal politics 77

In a first step, this was accompanied by a temporal orientation towards the

future during early modernity, until 20th century, and with the organisation of
life itself according to measurable and manageable principles. The result was
the use of time as a medullar measure for governmentality within societies.
Distributing people by age, stabilising natality or mortality ‘policies’ for years,
periods or cycles, but also designation of resources in social systems (educa-
tion, pensions or household) according to lifetime expectancy and product-
ivity, politics of life involve individual and societal organisation according
to precise politics of time(s). This also allows us to distinguish between tem-
poral regimes that lead social process today with several ethical and norma-
tive outcomes. As one of the principal current temporal regimes, acceleration
of socio-historical processes is probably the main source of questions about
the opportunities that can be open or closed. Supported by a measurable and
economic conception of time, but also by a precise philosophy of history as
progress and improvements in natural and social development, societies are
crossed by high-speed standards that tend to dominate and homogenise forms
of living. Involving and systematising time perspectives to consider lifetime, as
well as social structures and dynamics as political human agency, time itself
must be considered a manageable factor. For this, and regarding the three
aspects of ‘politics of time’ described, it is possible to distinguish a broader
material underpinning within temporal regimes when we realise that time sets
and coordinates collective and personal life experiences. When politics are
dominated by high-speed trends, there is also a praxis where diversity of times
bursts out or, on the contrary, gets swallowed up.

Notes
1 Possibilities of creating a ‘personal’ way of living until choices into a global market
are both examples of the split between personal behaviour and world structures
that separates the individual time with the time of the world. From feelings of
success when opportunities can be actually reached until experiences of depres-
sion or exclusion when this is not possible, it is feasible to identify consequences
of this process of difference between lifetime and world time as well. All these are
part of the diagnosis made by Hans Blumenberg who has identified this scission
between lifetime and world time. See Blumenberg, “Entschärfungen: Abkopplung
der Lebenszeit – Zurückholung der Weltzeit” (1986).
2 I use the concept of practice following Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ regarding
the way wherein social beings make and transform the world which they live-in
with diverse motifs and intentions. It is a dialectic game between social structure
and agency working back and forth in a never-ending mutual influence (Bourdieu
1977). Also, in an interpretative way, see De Certeau (1984), especially the ‘General
Introduction’.
3 Original in German:
Das Interesse an der Verläßlichkeit der Himmelsdaten stellt der Menschen vor
die neuartige Gegebenheit, daß die Zeit nicht nur die Dimension ist, in der
Wirklichkeit sich erstreckt -so wie Schicksale in der Zeit verlaufen-, sondern
78 Temporal politics

unter deren Bedingung sich Möglichkeiten bilden: Orientierung in einem

größeren und vielleicht größten Ganzen erfordert das pure Verfließen von Zeit
als Basis gesicherter und vergleichbarer Erfahrung.
4 Koselleck goes in the same direction in “Wozu noch Historie?” (1971: 1–18).
5 Original in German:
Die Zeit bleibt nicht nur die Form, in der sich alle Geschichten abspielen, sie
gewinnt selber eine geschichtliche Qualität. Nicht mehr in der Zeit, sondern
durch die Zeit vollzieht sich dann die Geschichte. Die Zeit wird dynamisiert zu
einer Kraft der Geschichte selber.
6 “Der Fortschrittsgedanke trennt Lebenszeit und Weltzeit nicht nur endgültig
voneinander, sondern auch so empfindlich, daß deren Inkongruenz die Disposition
für bestimmtere und dadurch in der Handlungsfähigkeit bestärkende Ansichten
von der Geschichte vorbereiten mußte”. For a more detailed analysis on the kernel
role of progress for temporalization, see Chapter 4.
7 At least in the ninth thesis on History. In another thesis (eighth), Benjamin
criticises the idea of progress in the following way: “The concept of mankind’s
historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through
a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must
underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself ” (2006: 394–395).
8 If this were the case, the argument would simply lose its meaning because
institutions are surely as old as society.
9 For a different reading that privileges a rather presentist description of contem-
porary history, see Hartog (2015).
10 Ultimately, this is about power and control over people’s everyday life.
11
The two diagnoses of the time that appear so contradictory, social acceler-
ation and societal rigidity, are only at first glance contrary to one another. In
the memorable metaphor of a ‘frenetic standstill’ (rasender Stillstand), which
we owe to an inspired translation of Paul Virilio’s inertie polaire, they are
synthesized into a posthistoire diagnosis in which the rush of historical events
only provides scant cover for (and ultimately, in effect, produces) a standstill in
the development of ideas and deep social structures.
(Rosa 2013: 15)
12 Rancière, J. “In What Time Do We Live?”. Inaugural lecture given on June 1,
2011, at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, opening the con-
ference ‘The State of Things’, commissioned by the Office for Contemporary Art
Norway. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0004.001/--in-what-time-do-
we-live?rgn=main;view=fulltext Accessed on January 4, 2018.
13 Thesis 4:
Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture in the logic of
arche -that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it- democracy is
the regime of politics in the form of a relationship defining a specific subject.
(My emphasis)
 Temporal politics 79

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Chapter 3

Temporal technologies
and technologies of time

‘Tempo ex machina’ 1
This chapter seeks to show the internal tie between technology and temporal
dynamics. In order to do that, I will address how technology shapes, and is
shaped in turn by temporal regimes. Such links can be seen in at least two main
clusters: the technologies of time and the technologies over time. On the one
hand, technologies of time deal with direct forms to shape time by measuring it
and indicating the proper ‘when’. This is the case with the creation of devices
such as the pocket watch and calendars. On the other hand, there are tech-
nologies over time which do not have a direct temporal background, although
a temporal perspective and its consequences can be identified. In this regard,
we can count TV, telephones, but also information and communications
technology (ICT) in general. Through them, specific temporal experiences
of ‘immediacy’ and ‘synchrony’ are settled up. When sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman stated that “[i]n a sense, solids cancel time; for liquids, on the con-
trary, it is mostly time that matters” (2000: 2), he provided not only a statement
in favour of time as an analytical tool for the study of culture but also an invi-
tation to identify what sort of ‘objects’ shall be considered for research. Since
we are facing several types of ‘objects’ with a composition that makes difficult
to consider them even as ‘objects’ at all (namely, ‘static’ and ‘fixed’ facts), we
have to grasp them in the particular ways in which they influence and shape
culture. In other words, technology is not just composed by ‘solid’ objects
but virtual dimensions affecting temporal dynamics. From the instantaneity
of connections to simultaneous interactions, technology shapes the temporal
experience. Thus, technology arises as a major factor for grasping temporal
regimes nowadays, enveloping them in paradigmatic forms.

Technology relevance for time studies

There is an increasing number of studies exploring technology and its
consequences on the link between time and space. Early social theorists
exploring this trend include sociologists such as Georg Simmel (1972) and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180876-4
 Temporal technologies 83

Norbert Elias (1992), and more recently, the list includes cultural theorists
Bernard Stiegler (1998; 2008; 2010), Paul Virilio (1986; 1999) and Judy
Wajcman (2015). At the beginning of the 20th century, Simmel was particu-
larly taken by how the invention of the pocket watch was crucial to struc-
turing time within newly industrialised cities, how the pocket watch had
allowed time to be quantified in a far more precise way than previous tech-
nology and how this had ramifications for the emerging industrial economy.
In his famous essay titled The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel writes,

[i]f all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different
ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of
the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition, an apparently
mere external factor: long distances, would make all waiting and broken
appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique
of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integra-
tion of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal
time schedule.
(1972: 328)

Therefore, the metropolis, and every urban space more generally, is a spe-
cific form to organise, to produce and to distribute the technical-natural
life through artefacts that unfold themselves over time. The ‘pocket watch’
for Simmel is, in a sense, a paradigmatic technique by which urban life is
organised, since a crucial point for its existence is to coordinate social life in
a rational way. In turn, this rational way has a kernel material motive for the
industrial society, highly tied to the maximisation of production: to do more
in the shortest time possible. Hand-in-hand with this purpose were the pro-
ductive forces developed for the benefit of capital, but also the governing of
individual dispositions, especially over work time and, by extension, to other
aspects of life such as family and leisure. This results in rules over behav-
iour and emotions that were then ingrained in order to control ‘irrational’
conducts, such as impulses and instincts, in a manner which permeates a life-
span. Thus, a sort of governing of bodies and feelings was established via the
use of time. This is one of the first points of interest for our analysis: placing
time at the service of rationalisation techniques leads to its distribution in
parcels, periodising the lived time by the assignation of working days as well
as moments for mealtime, rest or leisure. This organisation of the lifespan
implies a rationalisation over behaviour repressing ‘irrational’ expressions
manifested at the wrong time, such as sleeping on the job, resting within pre-
cise moments and restraining excessive mood expressions during productive
times (joy, sadness, euphoria). However, an allocated time for regulating social
life as such was not established during the industrial era: it has been part
of magical and religious rituality or the distribution of roles for social hier-
archies at least since the pre-modern introduction of calendars (Durkheim
84 Temporal technologies

1995; Birth 2012). What is relevant for the technology development analysis
here is that many temporal distributions took place thanks to the increasingly
widespread introduction of technical devices such as the clock in the metro-
politan life and, more broadly, to industrial society as a whole. Hence, the
assimilation of time with a coordinating role was the next step in its ruling
position. This is how new values like ‘exactness’ and ‘punctuality’ arose along
with the use of highly precise techniques:

[p]unctuality, calculability, and exactness, which are required by the

complications and extensiveness of metropolitan life are not only most
intimately connected with its capitalistic and intellectualistic character
but also color the content of life and are conducive to the exclusion of
those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impulses which
originally seek to determine the form of life from within instead of
receiving it from the outside in a general, schematically precise form.
(Simmel 1972: 328–329)

The use of impersonal measurements was seen as a conquest over irrational

and useless impulses that cannot promote urban life and industrial produc-
tion (Wunderlich 2013). Also, no longer relying on the subjective aspects of
reading natural signals (e.g., position of the sun, weather, moon) or personal
aptitudes and intuitions, a technical device objectified the perception of time.
Thus, the technical artefact replaced the interpretation of signs of nature,
which is why “[w]hatever calendar one uses to think about time, the tendency
seems to be for most people to refer to the calendar rather than to directly
observe the skies” (Birth 2012: 21).
Thus, using calendars as a technique of time, it is possible to see a strong
correlation between the use of techniques and the use of time. From concrete
machines that cover areas in everyday life to abstract algorithms that calculate
industrial productions, the technical dimension influences vast aspects of life
and is still spreading through it. Gaining time, but also making an accurate use
of it in terms of effectiveness and precision, envelops new claims for product-
ivity and utility. With the example of the pocket watch, we have a milestone case
that demonstrates the correlation between a technical device and its influence
over time, but also how time is objectivised and standardised. The latter is not
just valid for time but for the general process of instrumentalisation in early
capitalism, which has been described and criticised by several authors and
traditions. Instrumentalisation would result in a growing impersonalisation
of relations, which in a worst-case scenario becomes a homogenised, one-
dimensional rationality. These arguments are important since they contribute
to the standardisation of time. This understanding led to the creation of
global temporal measurements such as the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
and the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) afterwards, which are part of
 Temporal technologies 85

a wave for homogenising a global temporal standard during the industrial

era. Nowadays, how does this time instrumentalisation work? What are the
outcomes of this homogenisation process? These are some questions that lead
the next part. Before describing the general characteristics of the whole pro-
cess, it is necessary to include the temporal factor to a global history scale.

Instrumentalisation, homogenisation, one-

dimensionalisation: critical thoughts on technology
There are several works in which technology have been defined (Ihde 1998;
Stiegler 1998; Bradley 2011). For the purposes of this chapter, Gilbert
Simondon’s work becomes of interest. Simondon defines techniques as
involving a practical ability in some given field or practice, often as opposed
to creativity or imaginative skills, when at the same time supposes a method of
achieving or carrying something out that specifically requires a skill or know-
ledge to organise an internal and external docking (Simondon 2017). In other
words, techniques are characterised by being a controlled process as well as
a creative one. More than a tool or utility, Simondon highlights the cultural
role that techniques play in the production of human reality. Far more than a
mere instrumental artefact, the way in which techniques are developed shapes
the world in which interactions happen. Technology will be understood here
as the rationale articulating technics while technics will be a broader concept
derived from tékhnē: the general condition of making or doing.
For social and cultural studies, modern technics have been intrinsically tied
to the emergence of the industrial era and the current digital process. Ranging
from the commodities production to the conservation and prolongation of
animal and human life, technical devices that modify nature, food, matter and
genetics are visible technical outcomes in social reality. In other words, since
the industrial era is a highly developed technical epoch, the use of technics
is also linked to industry production and the current financialised economy.
According to a global institution, there are four stages in the Industrial
Revolution which are, in turn, strongly tied to the consolidation of a techno-
logical development today: automation and digitalisation. More precisely,

[t]he First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mech-
anize production. The Second used electric power to create mass produc-
tion. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate
production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third,
the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last
century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the
lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
(World Economic Forum 2016)
86 Temporal technologies

As mentioned above, every stage of the industrial process was conditioned

by technical development and the use of natural resources, as well as the influ-
ence over the human condition through medical and biological technologies.
In this case, technical development as a prevailing condition encompasses
virtually every aspect of instrumentalisation in the industrial age. Precisely,
the latter leads to some critical approaches to the technical process and its
‘instrumentalisation’ of life. Referring to the main task on his diagnosis on
late-capitalist societies, Herbert Marcuse already indicated at the very begin-
ning of his book titled One Dimensional Man that his:

analysis is focused on advanced industrial society, in which the technical

apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of
automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which
can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a
system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as
the operations of servicing and extending it.
(2006: xv)

Marcuse points out twofold gravitating technological outcomes: he

already foresaw with lucidity the automation growth (Lacity and Willcocks
2018; Benanav 2020), while he stands suspicious with an apolitical techno-
logical sight (anticipating a debate that has taken place widely in Science and
Technology Studies [STS] in recent decades: Winner 1980; Edge and Williams
1996; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999; Åsberg and Lykke 2010). According
to him,

the traditional notion of the ‘neutrality’ of technology can no longer be

maintained. Technology as such cannot be isolated from the use to which
it is designed; the technological society is a system of domination which
operates already in the concept and construction of techniques.
(Marcuse 2006: xvi)

However, Marcuse is not an objector of the technical process as such, yet a

critic of the current Western rational-oriented use of techniques. In the same
work, a few pages later, he emphasises the emancipatory role of the tech-
nical progress, a concept that was already present in Marx.2 According to
Marcuse, advanced industrial society approaches the stage where continued
technical progress demands the radical subversion of the prevailing direction
and organisation of progress. This is also similar to Gilbert Simondon’s per-
spective on machines: in his work, machines are living beings that represent
higher human development. This stage will be reached when material pro-
duction (including the necessary services) becomes automated to the extent
that all vital needs can be satisfied while the necessary labour time is reduced
to a marginal position. From then on, technical progress would transcend
 Temporal technologies 87

the realm of necessity, where it serves as an instrument of domination and

exploitation, which thereby limits its rationality; technology would become
subject to the free play of faculties in the struggle for the pacification of
nature and society (Marcuse 2006: 18).
Furthermore, a critical perspective of the key role of techniques is
emphasised by Karl Polanyi; according to him,

[n]othing could seem more inept than the attempt to reduce a civilization,
its substance and ethos, to a hard- and -fast number of institutions; to
select one of them as fundamental and proceed to argue the inevitable
self-destruction of civilization on account of some technical quality of
its economic organization.
(2001: 4)

For Polanyi, the ‘great transformation’ that took place during the 19th and
20th centuries is a fundamental turn in priorities of Western civilisation. The
substance of social life became standardised as a form of technical check and
balance, turning calculability and measurement into a productive paradig-
matic cannon. This process also reaches another level of the economy. It also
sparks a strong tie between the measure of time and money, for instance. In
Ute Tellmann’s words, “[t]he importance of the temporal dimension is closely
related to a question of measurement. Money is not only about time but also
about the measurement of time” (2017: 150). In this respect, money may be
also another technique for grasping time through its measurement.
Marcuse exposes the consequence of one-dimensional techniques for the
use of time as a matter of calculability and instrumentalisation, turning dif-
ficult to recognise not just other temporal but rather any societal form of
life (Torres F. 2020). The potential of manifesting multiple temporalities is,
paradoxically, highly feasible since technological improvement narrows the
horizon of connections. This is argued by sociologist Georges Gurvitch
(Hassard 1990). According to him,

never has the intellectual atmosphere been as favorable to the awareness

of the multiple manifestations of time as that of the 20th century. Never
before have the different manifestations of social-time confronted
each other as obviously as today. With the impressive development of
communications technique, we pass in a twinkling through different
manifestations and scales of time characteristic of various nations, types
of societies and groups. Both philosophy and the sciences reveal now that
the asserted unity of time was a mirage.
(Gurvitch 1964: 37)

The question of multiple times is not whether there are different rhythms
and possible paces: metropolitan and rural life certainly suppose different
88 Temporal technologies

experiences of time, as well as to be young or elderly, or the divergent pace

staying in holidays instead of facing deadlines at work. The crucial point is to
consider the notion of multiple times based on their simultaneity and, more
importantly, synchronicity. When referencing multiple times, the co-existence
or potential co-presence of temporalities into the very same social space is
emphasised along with their articulation. Then, multiplicity does not refer
just to contradictory times (one of the former traditional dogmas in social
temporal studies was the monolithic modern ‘scientific’ conception: there is
just one objectifiable time), but rather to simultaneous temporalities coexisting
and being synchronised or desynchronised.
The velocity of technological development seems to show that it does
not encourage a multiple temporal horizon in which the pace of life can be
synchronised with the rhythms of economics and social change. To put it
differently, it synchronises society in a way that makes difficult to integrate
other temporalities. Sacred times, mystical or non-rational conceptions are in
general fully assimilated. Thus, there are multiple times that are compressed
into a one-directional perception, which highlights its calculative, linear and
scientific measurement. This leads us to a process of standardisation of time
that reduces spatial references such as geographical locations demanding a
more abstract and impersonal form of time.
The technological improvements and development of a bureaucratical
apparatus can be understood under the light of the rationalisation process
described by Max Weber (Weber 1968; Löwith 1993). The rule of efficiency
and control over nature and social phenomena achieving the maximum results
with a minimum amount of effort preludes high-speed development. To
organise huge amounts of data under bureaucratic schemes or to rationalise
the production series are strong cases to get results in less time. Then, thanks
to the introduction of rational thinking to settle temporal phenomena such as
measurable and calculable clock-time and, hand in hand with that, reducing
the time through rationalised transport and systems of communication, the
resulting coordination promoted also an increasing speed. By standardising
the social spheres via rational squeezes, an accelerated process was facilitated
and promoted. And the current automation process is the ‘brand new’ of this
development (Frey 2019; Benanav 2020).
In doing so, a process of rationalisation turns feasible an abstraction,
standardisation and universalisation course of action. In the next section of
this chapter, I will expose some of the main characteristics and consequences
of this process of despatialisation.

The deterritorialisation of time: abstraction,

standardisation, universalisation
Gilbert Simondon (2017) indicated that the machine, as an element of the
technical ensemble, became what increases the quantity of information,
 Temporal technologies 89

increases the negentropy and opposes the degradation of energy: the machine,
being a work of organisation and information, is, like life itself, opposed to
disorder, to the levelling of all things tending to deprive the universe of the
power of change (Simondon 2017: 18). Then, as a matter of human activity,
the machine use results in a particular effort to have more influence on life.
This influence over life is exerted since the machine is also a product of the life
in itself, in a sort of materialisation of times. In other words, the techniques
that bring the machine to life are themselves a materialised time since every
technique is the result of knowledge and traditions passed down through
time, and each machinal product is the result of a condensation of practices
in temporal structures as well.
The machine’s neutral aspect is circumscribed to its use and development
whenever the minimum conditions for which it was designed can be founded.
This potential abstraction of the place in which it is designed, or the place
where it is located, is part of the standard machinery power. The unleashed
condition of technics over place is manifested in its impersonal quality since
it can be potentially operated by anybody who has the ‘know-how’. Then,
“time is a cultural construction, but in its current form … it has been strongly
shaped by the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the key components of
that construction are embedded in material objects” (Birth 2012: 10). This
implies that objects are not just embedded with time, considering that they
somehow encapsulate it (by memories, traditions, knowledge series) but also
because they produce temporal forms. This is the obvious case with devices
such as clocks and calendars, as pointed out at the beginning of this chapter.
Less explicit are the cases of image and sound technologies: they also encom-
pass temporal potentialities of simultaneity and repetition. From every
actualisation, the records evolve what have been encapsulated in other times.
By creating a sequence of events that did not occur at the same time, the
technologies of image rearticulate temporal overlaps. By changing the film
speed, also a perception of the passing time is altered through modifying the
exposure of images and sounds. This brings possible new temporal schemas
representation.
The technology abstraction must not be considered fully separated from
spatial conditions though. In the same way that it occurs with other aspects
of social life, such as money, the “abstraction is here not to be understood
as a form of dematerialization; instead, it rests on a specific organization
of materiality, temporality, and space that furnishes protection from the
dangers of embodiment” (Tellmann 2017: 152). Inasmuch as a process of
abstraction occurs, the uncertainty of the same process decays. Thereby a
standardisation of time is also a matter of making time safer, not relying
on local renderings but on certain conditions that guarantee wider use.
This common new measure facilitates the circulation of goods and people
by coordinating very concrete practices such as arrivals and departures at
airports and harbours. The use of abstract, deterritorialised and despatialised
90 Temporal technologies

temporal measurements encompasses a reliable circulation of goods and

populations turning valuable abstraction and impersonality above concrete,
local and/or individual aspects. In other words, the impersonal temporal
form is favoured over the spatial contents. Since this process of abstrac-
tion is not a dematerialised one, a better understanding is provided by the
notion of deterritorialisation. This deterritorialisation, and more generally
despatialisation, facilitates the temporalisation of social phenomena. Since
space becomes increasingly tied to the concrete and local, time becomes
steadily related to the abstract and universal. This process furnishes the
‘law of movement’ described by Bauman – instead of rigidity. This is also
the case in Reinhart Koselleck’s work, especially regarding his thesis on the
temporalisation of history. According to Koselleck, during the Sattelzeit,3 sev-
eral concepts began to emphasise a temporal orientation that turns the spa-
tial, territorial and local perspectives in support of historical viewpoints. The
possibility of classifying people and places according to historical stages is
the process of historisation that provides a new status to the time. By pointing
out an epoch, a set of practices, beliefs and technical arrangements can be
suddenly pinpointed beyond spatial conditions. Hence, by noticing a defined
time, let’s say the Middle Ages, a group of characteristics can be described
within relative independence from the precise location, from beliefs to lan-
guage to attire. The same can be said for early modernity or pre-Columbian
times. According to Koselleck,

[e]very historical space constitutes itself through the force of time in

which it can be measured, thereby becoming controllable politically or
economically. Questions of time and space always remain intertwined,
even if the metaphorical power of all-time images originates initially
from spatial views.
(2000: 9)

In addition, the emergence of socio-political concepts with temporal

references upon the rhythm and direction of history also contributed to the
temporalisation of history already mentioned in Chapter 2. This is the case
of concepts such as progress and acceleration, but particularly with utopia
since the concept evolves from a spatial reference (u-topoi: literally no-place)
to a completely temporal motif, the not-yet or not-now (Koselleck 2002: 84–
99) (more details about this in Chapter 4). Further on, the new temporal
significance became in a deterritorialisation and disembodiment of time that
was once allocated in natural signals and renderings of nature, as well as
embodied skills (e.g., audition, vision, even smell). The pre-technical grasp of
time, “which is found in many cultures, is a model of time that stands in rela-
tionship to local cultural models, such as the Nuer relating the position of the
Sun to the cycle of activities involved in caring for cattle” (Evans-Pritchard
1940: 101).
 Temporal technologies 91

Considering how the contemporary technical prominence influences the

temporal experience or how time is involved and created by the current tech-
nical process, we should take a step forward in analysing the ‘utility’ of time.
In this regard, as starting point, it is possible to point out the ‘coordinator
role’ that technics play over time regarding devices, extending their influence
on behaviours and control over bodies and dispositions (I already explored
this in more detail on Chapter 2), as Simmel wrote at the beginning of the
20th century. This role of coordination allows us to conceive ‘technical’ time
as an artefact that facilitates synchronisations by using an accurate form of
time. In Rosa’s words,

[s]uch technical, but, as it were, pretechnological accelerations of trans-

port and communication already signal a transformation of the con-
sciousness of space and time that is primarily expressed in the advancing
disentanglement of spatial perception from location and temporal per-
ception from space.
(2013: 98)

Furthermore, “closely linked to this is the disentanglement of time from

space, which was chiefly made possible by the invention and diffusion of the
mechanical clock” (Rosa 2013: 98).
In order to do this, an empty, vacuous time is a precondition for a man-
ageable temporal pattern. Birth conceives “homogeneous empty time as a
necessary step in governmental appropriation of time” (2012: 93). This sort
of ‘rigid’ condition is associated with an epistemological time frame whereby
is perceived as neutral, abstract and linear, being also understood in terms of
calculus and measurements. Technological time is strongly related to a scien-
tific paradigm by which the world is a matter of calculus and management.
Meanwhile, the time organisation is closely related to the mechanism that
schematises life in order to produce and reproduce vital conditions in natural
resources and humans. As Birth indicates,

[t]he homogeneous empty time that … as an important component in

the emergence of the imagination of community among contemporaries
within a nation, and which has been identified as a characteristic of secu-
larism … has a consequence of pushing out of consciousness the poten-
tial of significance drawn from the interaction of multiple temporalities.
(2012: 72)

This process of increasing abstraction of time has its milestone with the
UTC. One of the most relevant aspects of this ‘potential of significance’
is the creation of a temporal technique that can produce an impersonal
measure. Thereby forming, as the quote above suggests, the useful conse-
quence of a national feeling of unity. A homogeneous time still marks current
92 Temporal technologies

conceptions of unity through temporal patterns in some countries. In fact,

Barcelona and Madrid should have two different time zones according to
the UTC, since their locations are situated in different geographical ‘time
zones’. However, in 1940, the whole Spanish territory adopted a unified time
zone as Franco’s dictatorship was interested in sharing a common time zone
with Berlin. The result is that by using one time, it is possible to reinforce
an imaginary community as well as maintain a fluid connection with
another political power. On the other hand, there are examples by which
some countries decide to have different time zones within their territories
either for reasons of population health or uses of sunlight for productive
purposes. This is the case for Russia and Chile for instance. In the Latin
American country, there are three different time zones: one for Rapa Nui
(Easter Island), another for the region of Magallanes and Tierra del Fuego
(Fireland/Feuerland) and another for the rest of the continental country. In
the Rapa Nui case, the decision was made considering its geographical loca-
tion in Polynesia, around 3,749 kilometres (2,330 miles) west of Santiago
de Chile, the capital. Magallanes, instead, is located at the extreme south
of the continent and has a different time zone from the rest of the country
for political reasons (Magallanes has UTC-3 while the rest of the country
UTC-4). In 2016, a political debate was marked by positions defending
economic reasons for keeping Magallanes under the same time zone as the
capital Santiago and, on the other hand, those who benefited from having
more sunlight during winter, which meant adopting a time zone other than
Santiago. In the end, in 2017, the decision established a new time zone for
Magallanes (La Prensa Austral 2016), highlighting the rewards that more
daylight provides for the population and incidentally by showing the poten-
tial political dimension of decision-making regarding temporal concerns.
With these examples, we realised the way in which temporal decisions are
based on technical as well as political points of view.
Despite the cases mentioned above, the general process towards a homoge-
neous time, beyond its supposed abstraction, is oriented in a contrary direc-
tion, specifically encompassing a separation of the nation from a geographical
unity. Into this major process of deterritorialisation of time, it is necessary
to emphasise the project of a universal standard time. In other words, by
establishing a standard global time separate from national scrutiny, a new
temporal regime was composed on a global scale:

[i]n 1884 an international conference on time standards held in

Washington, D.C., divided the world into twenty-four time zones,
established Greenwich as the zero meridian, and set the exact length of a
day. In 1913 the first regulating time signal transmitted around the world
was sent from the Eiffel Tower. As Stephen Kern points out, ‘The inde-
pendence of local times began to collapse once the framework of a global
electronic network was established’ (Kern 1983: 14). The sheer speed of
 Temporal technologies 93

transportation and communication worked to annihilate the uniqueness

and isolation of the local.
(Doane 2002: 5)

The requirements for scheduling railroads directly necessitated the insti-

tution of a World Standard Time (Kern 1983: 2). The measurement of time
was important in early modern Europe in a way it is not today, because it
was assumed to be a highly reliable technology of time. In order to coord-
inate different spaces and to stabilise a successful trade route, the need for a
unique measurement of time was configured. Thus, a proto-global time was
developed, splitting local paces and rhythms in favour of a more abstract
and impersonal form of time. This was also supported by an epistemological
conception of time as homogeneous. Neither Newton nor Kant systematic-
ally questioned this homogeneity of time. Quite the opposite. The paradig-
matic assumption in this regard was coined by Isaac Newton himself, who in
1687 defined time as “absolute, true, and mathematical … and from its own
nature, flows equally without relation to anything external” (Kern 1983: 11).
For Newton, time is a reality in itself, without any ‘external’ influence. This
is the main core of the scientific-physical temporal regime: to separate time
from any other aspect of social life. In other words, time is an objective reality
that has nothing to do with any social or historical conditions. This concep-
tualisation received strong support centuries afterwards thanks to the produc-
tion and wide-scale accessibility to clocks and watches. With these devices, the
standardisation of time was increased, acquiring its current status as objective
and external ‘universal time’. To this respect, the most momentous develop-
ment in the history of uniformity and public time since the invention of the
mechanical clock in the 14th century was the introduction of standard time
at the end of the 19th century (Kern 1983: 11). Subsequently, access to homo-
geneous time that facilitates the coordination between different spaces was
readily available. Hence, the idea of homogeneous time was far from having
the very same time in every place, but the very same manner to grasping and
measuring it. With this new ‘technique’ of time, many economic, political
and legal troubles may be solved. Without this standardisation, the plurality
of time would lead to countless issues, such as the delimitation of trades and
their duration, the unification of territories into the nation-state time terri-
tory or the coordination between ships for travel, which “only the adoption
of a coordinated world network could prevent” (Kern 1983: 12).
This is why the Scottish Canadian engineer, Sandford Fleming, respon-
sible for establishing ‘time zones’, referred to the necessity of developing a
homogenised time. Ranging from a personal experience, Fleming was inspired
to create a standard time system after he missed the train in Ireland due to a
confusion over the departure time. Also, as a Scottish migrant in Canada, he
was concerned about trades between his former home and the colony. Thus, he
promoted worldwide standard time zones, a zero meridian and the use of the
94 Temporal technologies

24-hour clock as key elements for communicating accurate time, all of which
influenced the creation of the UTC. Modified, Fleming’s system is still in use
today. It established first Greenwich in England (at zero-degree longitude) as
the standard time and divides the world into 24 time zones, each with a fixed
time from the mean time. The choice of Greenwich as the zero degree was
not without controversy: France rejected the proposal in favour of Paris and
held out for another 25 years (Creet 1990: 66). Time setting was also a field
for discord. However, the general impulse to standardise a temporal measure
was a matter of consensus. The benefits of having a continuous temporality
undisrupted by local renderings took precedence over their differences. But
how did this transcultural continuity work to shape local cultural models and
conform seemingly global standards despite their specific environmental cycles
of daylight and biological rhythms? (Birth 2012: 5–6). Clocks and calendars are
examples of this as we do not need to know the mathematics and astronomy
that went into our current standards of time measurement in order to know
the time; instead, all we need to be able to do is properly interpret the output of
these artefacts (Birth 2012: 8). In this regard, Norbert Elias wrote, “knowledge
of calendar time … is taken for granted to the point where it escapes reflec-
tion” (1992: 6), and such a lack of reflection easily leads to the unquestioned
acceptance of a calendar’s logic. Calendars reflect choices about the reckoning
of time, and these choices are inscribed in the artefact itself (Birth 2012: 73).
The redistribution of the world in terms of time zones and its computa-
tional current form “are logistical media for mobilization and its admin-
istration, technologies that consolidate territory into logistical fields and
enable a Modern governance based on the abstracted calculation over omni-
directional spaces and surfaces, from open oceans to shared spreadsheets”
(Virilio 1986: 8). Thus, a control milieu leads to claims for a global time. This
is also connected to a global history in which the desire to colonise other
spaces introduced a necessity to coordinate the different spaces as well. In
fact, according to Bauman, modernity is the very historical step in which time
defeats the space primacy,

[i]n the modern struggle between time and space, space was the solid and
stolid, unwieldy and inert side, capable of waging only a defensive, trench
war – being an obstacle to the resilient advances of time. Time was the
active and dynamic side in the battle, the side always on the offensive: the
invading, conquering and colonizing force.
(2000: 9)

Rosa, following Paul Virilio, has a similar reading on the use of temporal
domination:

[t]he question who determines the rhythm, duration, sequencing, and syn-
chronization of activities and events forms a central arena for conflicts of
 Temporal technologies 95

interest and power struggles. Chronopolitics is thus a central component

of any form of domination, and in the historical process, as, above all,
Paul Virilio never tires of postulating and elucidating, domination is as a
rule the domination of the faster.
(2013: 11–12)

Actually, for Virilio (1977; 1986), war time is one of the most fundamental
conflicts in human history. Bauman does not go that far, but certainly believes
in the current centrality of temporal domination: “[v]elocity of movement
and access to faster means of mobility steadily rose in modern times to the
position of the principal tool of power and domination” (2000: 9).
As a branch of the foregoing, an industry of war was developed, strongly
differentiating the paces of life. The speed in which industrial armament was
developed supposed an advantage on the circulation of influence and goods.
In order to do so, a network of resources need to be willing to proceed in
a way that can guarantee a faster impact over the adversary’s interest. As
Paul Virilio summed this up, “history progresses at the speed of its weapons
systems” (1986: 68). With this sentence, Virilio explains the relationship
between technical development (namely weapons) and the velocity that leads
the course of history. Although Virilio may be exaggerating the centrality of
weapons, it is plausible to see a correlation between investigation and dis-
coveries in the industry of war and some improvements to technical devices
and connection systems as well. However, weapons should not be understood
in a narrow sense. For instance, referring to the use of political weapons,
Virilio points out that “ ‘[p]ropaganda must be made directly by words and
images, not by writing’, states Goebbels, who was himself a great promoter of
audiovisuals in Germany. Reading implies time for reflection, a slowing down
that destroys the mass’ dynamic efficiency” (1986: 31). This shocking power
must be like a lightning bolt that stuns with its message. The velocity with
which the message reaches public opinion more or less guaranties success. In
other words, “[w]ar is always waged under the illusion that this is the only form
of political action in which waiting for time distances plays little or no role”
(Blumenberg 1986: 81). Now, abstract time will be maximised in the digital
era; when freed from spatiality, temporal logics would become unfolded in
its instantaneousness. As we will see in the following part, ICT, particularly
regarding social media, envelops a temporality of instantaneousness by which
the flux of data is delivered immediately, skipping spatial barriers. Thus, news,
messages, music, images and videos are exchanged instantaneously. To listen
to a playlist using a music service and to watch a film or a series via streaming
services are all a matter of which ‘now’ takes place. Potentially, the playlist
and the film can be played at any time. Neither the organization of a con-
cert nor a musical, a micro component nor a cinema or television is neces-
sary. Instead, other mobile devices are required, such as mobile phones or
laptops, which are characterised by their fluidity and mobility. Does this new
96 Temporal technologies

condition of fluidity emphasise the availability of staying connected at all

times? According to Rosa, regarding the ‘technical acceleration’ (2013, Ch 2)

what is decisive for the character of interpersonal communication is less

the quantity of data that machines can make available worldwide at the
speed of light than the fact that both asynchronous (i.e., through e-mail
or answering machine) and synchronous communicative interactions are
possible at any time independent of the respective location of the conver-
sation partners.
(2013: 73)

In the next section, I will limit the analysis of the relationship among time
and technique to one of its most extended forms, that is, the emergence of
mass media and the digital era.

Digital temporality: virtuality and instantaneity

In the current context of increasing digitalisation, technology acquires a key
position. By using digital means to connect across geographic spaces and his-
torical moments, networking with other users (human and not humans) or
searching through our history of interactions logging online databases, we
connect across time and space, drawing new possible links between them at
the same time (Barker 2012: 67). More concretely, digitalisation encompasses
contact between people that skips geographical barriers. This contact could
be ephemeral or more permanent, making it possible to contact multiple
people simultaneously in different places. In Marc Augé’s words,

[t]oday it is possible to say that the no-place is the context of every pos-
sible place. We are in the world with references that are totally artificial,
even in our own place, the most personal space: sit in front of the TV,
watching the mobile phone, the tablet, with headphones … We are in a
permanent no-place; these devices are putting us in a no-place. We carry
the no-place over us, with us.
(2019)4

This situation can be a result of at least two successive processes in the

history of technology. First, distances were narrowed by the emergence of
transport and communication technologies, covering vast areas in a com-
pletely new fashion. Since this first step was marked by the emergence of
the locomotive and airplanes, as well as the mass production of radio, daily
newspapers, telephones and televisions, it can be labelled as an analogue
moment. Conversely, hand-in-hand with the development of the commu-
nication and information industry, a progressive wave of technical devices
facilitates interaction virtually at the same time. Social media, the internet and
ICTs, in general, envelop an instantaneity of interactions. This is what I target
 Temporal technologies 97

as the digital moment. In the next part, I will develop the characteristics of
both the analogue and digital stages.

Analogue moment: shrinking space– time barriers

Thus far, I have exposed some reasons for conceiving time as linked with a
deterritorial or despatialisation process. This proceeding cannot be under-
stood in its radicality without the influx of mass media and the mass produc-
tion of transport and communication. Since the invention and use of mass
devices of communication (such as television and radio) and transportation
(such as airplanes and locomotives), the interactivity between different spaces
and temporalities has been steadily growing. As Hartmut Rosa indicates,
machines and their uses allow humans to gain time, increasing the quality
of their free time experiences, while, on the other hand, increases the contra-
dictory perception of quantitative no-time since there still having so many
things to do (Rosa 2013). Hence, the development of technological devices
does not necessarily guarantee more time. Machines by themselves cannot
solve the time constraints. Thus, machines are not in themselves temporally
determinant (Wajcman 2015). They are not closed entities without interaction
within their environment. Their production is in mutual co-determinacy with
the world that surrounds them. This is the aspect that Gilbert Simondon
emphasises as decisive for the machine: since they are cultural products and
cultural actors at the same time, they rarely can be considered as ended or
hermetic entities (2017: 14). Precise technics enable different forms of setting
up time. Bernard Stiegler states that temporal technics

reflection can only acquire meaning when certain effects of technical

development are carefully examined: namely, those that in computing one
calls ‘real time’ and in the media ‘live’ – effects that distort profoundly, if
not radically, what could be called ‘eventization’ [événementialisation] as
such, that is to say, the taking place of time as much as the taking place
of space. And if it is true that genetic manipulations constitute the pos-
sibility of a radical acceleration of the differentiation of life forms, but
also and especially the threat of undifferentiation, then we meet again the
question of speed.
(1998: 16)

Thus, from the invention of the locomotive and airplanes to the mass
production of automobiles, spatio-temporal barriers were modified (Kern
1983: 113). Distances were narrowed and the pace of life accelerated.
According to Bauman,

[o]nce the distance passed in a unit of time came to be dependent on tech-

nology, on artificial means of transportation, all extant, inherited limits
to the speed of movement could be in principle transgressed. Only the
98 Temporal technologies

sky (or, as it transpired later, the speed of light) was now the limit, and
modernity was one continuous, unstoppable and fast accelerating effort
to reach it.
(2000: 9)

The daily newspaper, radio and television came to intensify and to com-
plete these situations. The technology of communication, in which trans-
port is one of them, sparked a dromology in Virilio’s sense, by conditioning
an experience of time that is encapsulated as (military) competition. This
is why, for Virilio, the history of technical development is also a history
of the conflict for dominating spaces, that is, by being faster than poten-
tial opponents, one increases their own power over others. This power over
others is also a force over nature. The interest in biology and its techno-
logical enforcement can be understood under this light: this is the case when
technology has direct effects on the lifespan. According to Nikolas Rose,
“[a]lmost any capacity of the human body or soul – strength, endurance,
attention, intelligence and the lifespan itself – seems potentially open to
improvement by technological intervention” (2007: 20). This is one of the
most visible causalities that the use of technology produces in the lifetime.
By improving the quality of life, they can also extend its time. A trans-
plantation, for instance, is a means of extended lifespan when an organ is
the limiting factor for the duration of life. Discovering solutions and more
accurate technical elements for medical surgery also increases life expect-
ancy. Technology exerts its influence over time by extension. This is not a
matter of living forever, but how technology trigger a longer time possible
and which cannot occur without the very technology support. Better tech-
nical conditions in the environment affect the lifetime as well as interventions
into the body for extending lifespan. In a nutshell, it is viable to name it here
as a ‘life extension technology’ as such.
This lifespan ‘enlargement’ involves also ideological stances since the ‘war-
against-aging’ is nothing that can be assumed without precautions. In this
sense, it is possible to interrogate stances against the ‘old’ alongside every-
thing what is targeted as outdated or uncoupled. In other words, technology
improvements towards slowing down the natural ageing process have several
assumptions, some of them highly arguable, about the passing of time, being
older and, consequently, the value of life and death. Being elderly is a matter
of disregard, since mainstream values encourage a youthful culture, especially
in Western societies (Torres S. 2018). Then, technology to

the anti-aging enterprise is complicitous with prejudicial social attitudes

toward aging and the elderly, and would feed discrimination against those
who do age normally. On this view, an anti-aging ideology within medi-
cine could be just as pernicious as medical racism and sexism.
(Juengst 2004: 323)
 Temporal technologies 99

Further on, an additional sense for the reconstruction of the elderly and tech-
nology is the almost instant correlation between younghood and a technological
life, or the condition of being young supposes more advantages considering
the use of technology, which, in turns, produces more autonomy. That is why
“in order to remain autonomous, older people will need to use technological
applications and digital devices” (Russell 2011: 105). This quest for ageless
bodies can incorporate a whole range of technologies designed to increase the
healthy human lifespan (Rose 2007: 78). Put in other words, it is not the return to
the natural process of ageing without any intervention that the criticism of anti-
ageing technology aims to address but to contest an unquestioned regime that
claims for more time as such. A regime of lifetime extension: an encompassing
claim for more future. And this future is tied to the anti-ageing technology use
and its access (Binstock and Post 2004). Distribution of technology is not equal
since it is also connected with income (Rotman 2014), but even when the tech-
nology is available, not everyone is willing to properly use it. This means that
basic qualifications in its use are necessary for using it to its maximal potential.
Technology use now also entails exclusion and inclusion forms.
Another involved domain implies the amount of energy that the everyday
use of technology demands. Considering this, one evident aspect is the neces-
sary processed resources, such as electricity or mechanical support, but
there is also an unavoidable amount of human energy demanded for the
permanent flow of innovation. Besides the mandatory physical resources,
there is a human energy that cannot be substituted in order to guarantee the
course of permanent novelties that the technological industry envelops. This
is quite clear in the frequency of updates with which the technological evolu-
tion works. Without a huge amount of human energy for updating the latest
laptop, software or cell phone, it would be impossible to maintain the pace of
innovations. Regarding this, it is not casual that the younghood would be the
period of life in which people are most involved with technological develop-
ment, more so than at other lifetime stages, since their energy is coincidentally
higher. In this sense, it is quite consistent that a temporal regime in terms of
life extension against ageing also claims and promotes youth, since the energy
that is demanded by the steady technological innovations is difficult to be
maintained by elderly people.
Thus, both life extension and old age are interconnected with the increasing
overlap of technology in everyday life.

Digital moment: shaping instantaneity

The difference between analogue and digital moments can be summed up in
Paul Virilio’s (1995) words:

To see at a distance, to hear at a distance: that was the essence of the

audio-visual perspective of old. But to reach at a distance, to feel at a
100 Temporal technologies

distance, that amounts to shifting the perspective towards a domain it did

not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: tele-contact.

Meanwhile, in the first step, technics surpass the spatial barriers; in the
second, they go a step forward: along with narrowing distances the digital
moment makes interactions more fluid, involving several variable ways for
connecting people. In this sense, a process of communication that embeds
interactions in real time starts with the telephone, making a sort of feasible
interaction that involves almost the same characteristics than the real one.
Even the results of technical development have produced a precise form of
technology that is not a mere artificial product or at least their results cannot
be considered just as artificial ones. Technology has transformed itself into
a companion: “Technologies are artificial, but … artificiality is natural to
human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life
but on the contrary enhances it” (Ong 2002: 81). Nowadays, a virtual dimen-
sion that encompasses several spaces at the same time has overtaken space; the
users are localised and reterritorialised by the technology (Barker 2012: 29)
in a temporal frame of simultaneity. Meanwhile, the expansion of the net-
work transforms temporality, as a condensed flow, into an ever-expanding
network and a unity of connected yet geographically dispersed movements in
the present (Barker 2012: 29–30). Also, electronic communication has made it
possible for simultaneous experiences. This has awakened not only economic
interest in products and the sale of mass technologies but also consciousness
of its potential political power. Following the same spirit that encourages my
own research, in this section, I will address the following question in order to
explore the temporal experiences and concepts generated by the interaction
with digital technology: ‘How is a digital temporal structure produced?’
The ‘time in movement’ via images offers to viewers the opportunity to
immerse themselves in other spaces and times, with the assurance of a safe
return to ‘their’ own time. What the new visual technology allows is the ability
to see a record of time, which can be visited from a safe place. The journey
is offered and enabled by the machine (e.g., a TV screen, cinema projection).
The past is ontologically preserved in time as virtual, which means that poten-
tially every past that has been archived can be carried out in any given present.
Thus, the virtual should be understood not as a past in relation to a present
but rather as contemporary with the present, intertwined and internal to the
present. There are multiple levels of temporality, multiple images of the past,
gathered in the present as each clip is played simultaneously with other tem-
porally disparate information. While the past exists as a non-transcendental
plane of events, known to us only through a process of recollection, the future
appears as virtual, able to be effectuated by problem-solving activities in the
present. Thus, the virtual is the accumulation of the past, as virtuality in the
present and also the potentiality of the future, which provides information for
the realisation of the present. In other words, virtuality is the imaginary field
 Temporal technologies 101

in which no space is taking place, and the relevance of time is performed through
simultaneity and instantaneity. That is, “[t]he virtual … is not tied up with
notions of the ‘virtual space’ of the Internet. It is more in line with the vir-
tual that Marcel Proust speaks of, as ‘real without being actual, ideal without
being abstract’ ” (Barker 2012: 58). Then, temporal virtuality is to be in a pos-
ition of actuality that is crossed by a ‘reality’ that is not actualised but already
‘there’. Taking the internet as an example, the data can be actualised or not,
but all possible information is already there in a sort of parallel dimension,
turning into a relevant question in what ‘now’ the actualisation takes place.
The form in which time is involved in image-related technology exposed
by the way in which it is sequenced. In a brief documentary with Harley
Parker called Picnic in Space5 (1963), Marshall McLuhan travels to different
spaces and times. As a sort of psychedelic time machine, but also ‘space-
machine’, the 28-minute sketch enhances the understanding of travelling to
several places in a short period. Coming and going from one place to another,
talking about the Greeks while some related images are presented and then
referring to hypermodernity through images of the Twin Towers, all of them
represent a small sample of the possibilities of image and sound in today’s
media. With a sort of collage of information, McLuhan demonstrates a series
of possible situations between different contexts and stories, without coher-
ence. Precisely, it seems that there are no rules that cannot be crossed by the
devices of images: Middle Ages or pre-Columbian times, as well as forecasts
and fictional futures, can all be enacted in a short interval of time. This tem-
poral barrier was already proceeded by books or, more generally, literature,
which is an inscription of time in a precise moment. Because of that, it can be
also considered as technical source of memory.
Another temporal structure involved in images is simultaneity, by which the
very same content can be experienced at the same time in different spaces. The
filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski (1994) synthetises this in the following way:

Different people in different parts of the world can be thinking the same
thoughts at the same time. It’s an obsession of mine: that different people
in different places are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.
I try to make films which connect people.

The simultaneity of the vision in a film produces a sort of virtual and ephem-
eral community. As Kieślowski’s stance shows, simultaneity fundamentally
appears in ‘thoughts’ when different spectators are watching the very same
projection in distant places at the same time. If the ‘analog moment’ shrank
space through reducing distances, the ‘digital’ is bypassing it at the instant.
Films respond to the dilemma of representation of time as the indexicality
of cinematography, appearing to guarantee its status as a record of tempor-
ality outside itself – pure time or duration that would not be that of its own
functioning. This is what imbues cinematic timing with historicity; it seems
102 Temporal technologies

to function first and foremost as a record of whatever happens in front of the

camera. Thus, cinema emerges from and contributes to the archival impulse
of the 19th century. This archival artefact becomes strangely immaterial;
existing nowhere, yet by screening for a spectator in the present, it becomes an
experience of the present (Doane 2002: 23). This ‘sometimes-entangled’ tem-
poral relationship shows that the cinema as technique plays a preponderant
role in the organisation of temporal framing:

The cinema was also used to record events and even to shape the course
of history. Hugo Münsterberg commented on the unique ability of the
cinema to create a direct vision of the past. While in the theater we must
recall past events to give present action its full force, in the motion picture
we can be shown the past. With the cinema we experience an ‘objectivation
of our memory function’.
(Kern 1983: 39)

As I have already exposed in Chapter 2, dedicated to the political

implications of temporal patterns (and vice versa), power is also a work
over time. What happens with the influence of people from the past? Who
administrates the power of people who have passed away? Today they exert
influence through their image. In past times, they also exerted influence when
an aura of celebrity surrounded them, for instance, through access to their
books or portraits. For a long time, they were the most recurrent ways to
pass on to posterity, but today, via records of images and sounds, it is also
possible to watch and hear them. What sort of memory is that? There are
temporal politics in the use of those technical conditions. Those who are not
present in the ‘real’ world any longer are still present in the virtual world: it
is possible to play an interview of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño from
the year 2000 and to study every sentence, alongside their respective gestures
and voice tones with great detail; also to turn on a dialogue of French phil-
osopher Georges Bataille recorded in 1958, as well as lived images about
the Cuban Revolution when it happened. This may have occurred decades
ago and now even a century before the spectator was born. Within these
new kinds of availabilities, it is not exaggerated to say that the observer can
be part of the historical moment that is being perceived. He or she is not
just reading the writings of the author; now, she can interpret the tonal-
ities of their voice or the emphasis of their posture. The record brings more
details to real time, more common aspects of real life, making the experience
with them closer and more truthful. It is difficult to name this astonishing
quality of the technological temporal regime. It might say that it is a tem-
poral regime of permanence by which new ‘modes of presence’ are deployed.
In another vein, time embedded social networks since they are concerned
with instantaneity.6 They increase the speed of connections, but at the same
 Temporal technologies 103

time, they increase uncertainty since there is no possible control over all of the
interactions. In a time of increasing information and rates of change, there is
more speed involved, leading to growing instability. Thus, the ‘digital moment’
is characterised not just by narrowing distances making them almost irrele-
vant but also by building up a virtual sphere that is available to be actualised
at any given time.
In this context, the technological influence of social media is a bedrock
since it assumes a particular form to deal with time. The practical instant-
aneity provided by the internet and social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter,
Telegram, WhatsApp) entails a crucial aspect of the current associative cap-
acity. This associativity that is not usually durable, is developed in a ‘space’
that is not a physical or geographic space, but rather a ‘virtual’ space. This
virtuality of the ‘non-space’ in social media (but also in the reproduction of
technology in general) shifts the focus away from the space where it ‘takes
place’ to the space that it skips, overcoming the barriers for simultaneities.
This has created a new time relevance: technology focuses on the necessary
amounts of time for producing (that is quite clear for blue-collar robotics)
as well as coordinating people in a situation that would otherwise be very
difficult to do so (i.e., organising massive manifestations by social media).
The ‘politics of time’ (from the acceleration process to politics over life)
entails a technological dimension that cannot be detached. The social
media (i.e., instant messaging) expresses a technology of communication
that reduces the time it takes to share messages for thousands of people if
not millions. In other words, the instantaneity of listening music, or finding
information about a subject at the World Wide Web, or in watching a tele-
vision series, is characteristic of the technological contemporary temporal
dynamics. There is potentially infinite data that can be actualised. This is
the virtual feature of the Internet of Things (IoT). This is also valid for
books and literature demand in general. The increasing availability of
platforms with free access to a limitless amount of literature turns signifi-
cant the question for which ‘now’ a text can be read it. A new scenario for
spreading knowledge is developed with the digital technologies, and a matter
of question is still in which manner this will affect other socio-temporal
structures. One not impossible scenario could be an even increasing number
of change rates, since more information availability may spark more vari-
ation within the social spectre. A current issue on the latter is the struggle
for the ‘5G’ technology. This new cell phone internet access guarantees sev-
eral improvements such as broader signal access, more data per time unit,
which in turn would result in higher connection speeds (Singh 2018; Sega
2019). In fact, according to some experts, this leading technology will be
one of the main issues behind the HUAWEI case, one of the grounding
reasons for the ‘economic war’ between China and the US (The Economics
Times 2019; Zhen 2019).
104 Temporal technologies

Technological temporal regime

Thus far, we have seen three characteristics for material temporality and tech-
nology. From the industrialisation to the digital moment, temporal logics are
heavily interlinked. As I expect I have demonstrated in this section, technology
tampers with the temporal experience: sometimes by accelerating processes,
sometimes by a virtual instantaneity. All in all, technology encompasses pre-
cise temporal logics shaping social relations.
From this perspective, technology connects temporality, materiality and its
reckonings to the specific heuristic principle for delineating those attributes
of relations or undertakings. Technology is defined as a temporal process
resulting from despatialisation and standardisation. With technology, the
making of temporality is at stake – that is, the constitution of temporal
dynamics and measures of time. These are inextricable from the materiality to
which the current temporality belongs. This means that the measurement and
standard form of time are not far from being a remarkable result of human
association. As stated by Blumenberg,

[t]hen one may find that measurability is the most important or the most
beautiful or the most useful quality of what is understood in such a way;
only vice versa will one remain unclear, even if one has been trained to
measure time and to use clocks of every kind. No clock teaches what time
is, even if it alone allows such questions to be answered, how late it is or
how long it has lasted.
(1986: 88–89)

Within a growing leverage of automation, the exert of technology will not

cease to increase. The presence of everyday life technology in the Western
world becomes unavoidable in order to grasp the ways in which technology
also shapes the temporal regimes.
Finally, some questions regarding other potential renderings of the issue
have arisen. On the one hand, there is a question on the link between homo-
geneous and heterogeneous potential of technologies. By using technological
support that has been standardised and concentrated on two or three big
corporations, in the case of social networks and the development of their
hardware, it is not difficult to assert a homogeneous trend. In a temporal
forecast, this may end in one continuous process of acceleration and instant-
aneity. Also, technological studies reveal that people develop homogeneity
with regard to the notion of ‘virtual community’ demonstrating a sense of
membership by video games, music or film affinity. All that facilitated by an
in-network connection.
At the same time, the technological dimension might facilitate multiple
and heterogeneous movements. The technology set multi-temporal rhythms.
It can be visible spotted when a photography exposition shows pictures from
 Temporal technologies 105

the past, bringing notions of other times to the present. The artificial deter-
mination of time does not represent a coherent, consistent cultural system,
but instead represents the sediments of generations of solutions for different
temporal horizons. This is the case for diverse ways of measuring time, some

derived from our current attraction to increments of ten (decades, cen-

turies, millennia), some derived from extreme desires for accuracy (atomic
clocks), some derived from church politics mixing with astronomy (the
Gregorian calendar), and some that are anachronistic survivals of long-
past societies such as the choice of dividing days into 24 segments from
the ancient Egyptians, and hours and minutes into 60 segments from
ancient Babylonians.
(Birth 2012: 2–3)

This leads us to the question of whether technology can enhance homoge-

neous tendencies instead of heterogeneous ones or whether it is the reverse.
They most likely encompass both: on the one hand, promoting temporal
homogeneous processes of acceleration7 as they are increasing the rates
of innovations, while, on the other hand, the chance to articulate different
social groups, with diverse backgrounds and interests (as in the case of social
media), promotes heterogeneous interactions. In the latter, temporal experi-
ence can be eclipsed by other claims when a Western-capitalist pace of life is
the hegemonic basis for the temporal technology of society(ies).

Notes
1 The usual phrase Deus ex machina refers to an unexpected power or event saving
a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a story or
novel. I do play on words to highlight the heavily temporal factor coming into
technology.
2 Marcuse himself refers to Marx’s former reading of technical development linked
with the pacification of existence.
The term ‘pacification of existence’ seems better suited to designate the his-
torical alternative of a world which – through an international conflict which
transforms and suspends the contradictions within the established societies –
advances on the brink of a global war. ‘Pacification of existence’ means the
development of man’s struggle with man and with nature, under conditions
where the competing needs, desires, and aspirations are no longer organized by
vested interests in domination and scarcity – an organization which perpetuates
the destructive forms of this struggle.
(2006: 18)
3 Sattelzeit, literally “saddle time”, is the notion coined by Koselleck to refer a
moment by which two (or more) temporalities (here the socio-political and his-
torical contexts) are interwoven. Usually, this is associated in moments of crisis or
106 Temporal technologies

clearly represented by the well-known sentence according to which “the new is not
just born, and the old does not just die” (Gramsci 1996: 33).
4 Augé, Marc. Interview “Marc Augé: Con la tecnología llevamos ya el ‘no lugar’
encima, con nosotros”. Available online: https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/01/
31/ actualidad/ 1548961654_ 584973.html?fbclid=IwAR28_ Iex1cAFSzozv0T-
gEfEzc7JJQ-0pEd7y8l8g9o-eQ3D7HuG7M3GzvM. Accessed February 1, 2019.
Spanish original version:
hoy se puede decir que el no lugar es el contexto de todo lugar posible. Estamos
en el mundo con referencias que son totalmente artificiales, incluso en nuestra
casa, el espacio más personal posible: sentados ante la tele, mirando a la vez el
móvil, la tableta, con los auriculares … Estamos en un no lugar permanente;
esos aparatos nos están colocando permanentemente en un no lugar. Llevamos
el no lugar encima, con nosotros.
5 Picnic in Space. Available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSfxX93dGnM.
Accessed February 21, 2019.
6 There is a different way to understand this phenomenon as ‘proximity’ instead of
‘instantaneity’ that is coming from ‘spatial studies’:
In fact, it is not that space is ‘disappearing’, but rather that the organization
of proximity is fundamentally different when a letter takes weeks to get from
Europe to the USA or an e-mail is conveyed in seconds. And although the
development that allows for information to be transferred in progressively
shorter time spans is not new, it now seems to be penetrating deeper into
ourconsciousness thanks to newest technological achievements.
(Löw 2016: 2)
7 Rosa distinguishes three acceleration motors from which the technical motto is one
of them – the cultural and economic complete the list (2013: Part 2, Ch 3).

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Chapter 4

Conceptualising future(s)
Progress, utopia, acceleration

Setting the sight ahead

Now, I will thematise the tie between acceleration, progress and utopia. By
observing some of their main features, as well as their differences, this chapter
offers an outline of what crosses the three notions. Through a conceptual ana-
lysis of their socio-political implications, it is possible to affirm that the rela-
tionship among them is not accidental, but structural on several levels with
diverse intensities: progress, utopia and acceleration share a temporal under-
pinning. In turn, this temporalisation constitutes itself a temporal regime that
entails renderings upon the whole project of modern times as rupture with
the past. Finally, this chapter thematises this rupture in connection with a
temporal regime towards the future. This means that in spite of ‘presentist’
trends, what has constituted the modern project until current times is a tem-
poral structure towards the future.
But is there a relationship between progress, utopia and acceleration? More
precisely, how are they connected with the future? Is there a tie between them
and the future? How can we characterise modern notions of progress and
utopia in connection with a social theory of acceleration? In order to respond
these questions, we should see what commonalities they share. My hypothesis
is that a temporal regime is the key background that makes their connection
possible. In fact, with some specificities in every case, they are linked by a
conception of the future. Through this chapter, I expect not just to establish
the connection among these three concepts but also to provide a conceptual
inquiry into temporal regimes as such. Thus, the purpose is double: firstly, to
grasp the modern notions of progress, utopia and acceleration and, secondly,
to illustrate how a temporal regime is constituted.
For these purposes, I will use some analytical tools from conceptual his-
tory as well as social and cultural studies. As is well known, the Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe is a project particularly focused on identifying the fundamental
concepts of modernity. Three of these key concepts analysed by Reinhart
Koselleck are progress, utopia and acceleration. Briefly, these concepts are
crucial on at least three levels: (a) the political, because they support the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180876-5
 Conceptualising future(s) 111

emergence of ideas about the shape of history and society(ies); (b) the his-
torical, in terms of approaches that are more oriented towards the history to
come and not necessarily oriented to the past as model (such as in the Historia
magistra vitae); and (c) the temporal, because all this leads to an increasing
awareness of the speed of social processes in order to reach world conditions
according to progressive or utopic features, which contributes to what several
scholars have described as a process of increasing acceleration (Rosa 2003;
2013; Tomlinson 2007; Hassan 2009; Glezos 2012; Vostal 2014).
Related to this, I will highlight how these concepts are intrinsically
connected in those political, historical and temporal levels: (a) political
because of their consequences for social organisation regarding possible
forms of the future, (b) historical in terms of a particular reading of history
as place for ‘improvements’ and (c) temporal because they contain concerns
and expectations about the future and the necessary time involved to achieve
those expectations. In turn, according to Koselleck, these interlinked levels
trigger a progressive increment in the frequency of change. In this sense, the
futurisation of social process is a structural condition of modern history, and
its consequences have been well received up today in terms of acceleration.
Following this impulse, it is possible to locate a group of several writings
in which Reinhart Koselleck (2002; 2006a; 2012; 2018) defines the main
characteristics of each of these crucial concepts of modernity. He describes
progress as a linear history in which each moment is perceived as superior
to the previous one; utopia as an uncertain projection of ‘new’ and ‘better’
society(ies) in the future; and acceleration as a recurrent increase of change
frequencies, with all of them resulting in a temporalisation of history, particu-
larly its futurisation. At this point, the first level of convergence between them
emerges: progress, utopia and acceleration are forms of the temporalisation of
history, concluding particularly in expectations about what is to come.
However, Koselleck’s approach does not have its main focus on the possible
mutual implications of these three concepts. At least, the relationship among
them was not attended as principal issue. Following a couple of emblematic
texts (Hölscher 1999; Koselleck 2006a), I propose to explore the relationship
between the emergence of a utopian conception of history as well as an idea
of progress and the acceleration of different social and cultural processes. All
of these set the conditions for claims on better society(ies) into the future.
Having as horizon an open future that can be reached by precise efforts upon
forms of organisation, utopia promotes a fruitful environment for an accel-
eration of socio-historical processes. In addition, I also propose to observe
this relationship within a major framework that I have termed temporal
regime. Related to this, acceleration, progress and utopia are crucial temporal
dynamics in modern history that entails its futurisation.
In synthesis, the basic structure which I will work with is the following: (1)
there is no acceleration process possible without notions of utopia and progress,
which have serious consequences not only for theories about the compression
112 Conceptualising future(s)

of history but also for political implications such as the temporalisation of

promises for better societies (utopia), improvements within a linear concep-
tion of history (progress) and materialising the improving as soon as possible
(in terms of acceleration): (2) all facilitated and connected with a necessary
notion of future(s). Finally, (3) this notion of future also constitutes a defined
temporal regime in current political, historical and technological dimensions
that are characterised by an openness, with different intensities, to uncertain
histories.
In the following, I will expose some descriptions about each notion in order
to show their specificities, but with the purpose of grasping the aspects they
share at a general level as well.

Progress
According to Peter Wagner (2016), the belief in linear progress and constant
improvements or evolutionism are not the leading current perspectives on his-
tory, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of neoliberalism
and the undesired consequences of the very idea of linear idea of progress
itself. In Wagner’s words, “[w]e may call this aspect the end of progress. On
the face of it, Lyotard suggested that progress was not –or no longer– pos-
sible, whereas Fukuyama and Rorty claimed that all significant progress had
already been achieved” (2016: 24). From scepticism of the idea in itself to a
lack of confidence in the development of the most relevant improvements of
history, the argument goes like this: there is no longer a meaningful use of
the concept of progress. According to this thesis, the idea of progress is not
a fruitful analytical category, given the current stage of capitalism, biotech-
nology and the Anthropocene, since it cannot explain the ultimate risks that
an original, linear conception of progress make possible over nature, showing
its dark consequences during the last decades. However, this argument is not
totally convincing when we observe some structural processes of current his-
tory such as social acceleration (Rosa 2013). It is necessary to investigate how
different concepts are in fact connected. My hypothesis is that it is not pos-
sible to avoid the impact of theories on progress within acceleration processes.
Certainly, the impact of the idea of progress has decreased in academic and
public debates during the second-half of the 20th century. Several criticisms
related to unified ideas of reason, planification and technical development
have contributed to furnish the idea of progress as an old-fashioned concept.
From the Frankfurt School to post-structuralism, and today post-colonial
theory and cultural studies, strong useful critiques of the ‘Enlightenment’
and its heritage have been developed in concepts such as reason, dominance,
nature and progress itself, either because of their inner limitations or because
of marked Eurocentrism. Beyond evaluating the efficacy and limits of the
use of the notion of progress, even from naïve party perspectives (such as
 Conceptualising future(s) 113

Johnson 2018: 367), my purpose here is to see how a notion of progress is

linked with processes of futurisation of history. With a strong influence at the
beginning of modernity and losing its leverage in past decades, but still being
implicit in some social phenomena, progress becomes both directly and indir-
ectly tied to several socio-political issues. In other words, my purpose is not to
evaluate the topicality of the notion of progress, its advantages or problems,
but how it works for the temporalisation of history towards future, and also
sharing commonalities with other concepts such as utopia and acceleration.
Then, the next question is: what is progress about? There are different
definitions of the concept. For T.W. Adorno,

[p]rogress means: to step out of the magic spell, even out of the spell of
progress, which is itself nature, in that humanity becomes aware of its
own inbred nature and brings to a halt the domination it exacts upon
nature and through which domination by nature continues. In this way it
could be said that progress occurs where it ends.
(2005: 150)

That is to say: the nature of humanity is that via collective action (non-
natural becoming), they can develop their living conditions. In a certain way,
that means that human reality has a ‘nature’ that surpasses every determin-
ation whether biological, technical or moral. This historical movement is
represented by the notion of progress. “If progress … may be as mythical as
the notion of the course the command of fate prescribes to the constellations,
then the idea of progress is just as much inherently anti-mythological,
exploding the circulation to which it belongs” (Adorno 2005: 150). For
Adorno, progress is contrary to the mythological aspect of every historical
fate. Paradoxically, the myth of progress is that history has not defined fate at
the same time that there is telos. Nonetheless, history is destined to improve.
To put it differently, there is no one mythical, foundational fate (which is the
case in eschatology) but a linear inner connection of every historical stage
according to accumulation and ameliorations. Notwithstanding, Adorno
(2005) quite rightly puts some suspicious on the notion: When can a social
process be described as progress as such? What is the measure? Is progress
general or is it parcellated in specific spheres?
Some mistakes with the term rely on the fact that intellectuals

have equated this particular progress in skills and knowledge, in other

words, progress in technology in broadest sense, or, as Horkheimer and I
have called it, progress in the domination of nature, with progress itself.
Whereas the truth is that particular advances in the techniques of domin-
ation contain the potential for the very opposite of the progress.
(Adorno 2006: 145–146)
114 Conceptualising future(s)

Quite interestingly, Adorno not only doubts about the extrapolation to the
totality from a partial advance in a specific area, such as the ‘domination over
nature’, but also about what is considered progress at all. In his Dialectic of
Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer, they address how the Enlightenment
with all its emancipatory potential through reason as a measure of action
(which can be considered as an historical progress) has in turn ultimately
become totalitarianism (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [1944], Especially
‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ and ‘Excursus I-II’).1
In this regard, the past could be interpreted from one historical stage to
another, even when they are the result of violent moments such as rebellions
or revolutions. In fact, according to Karl Löwith, there are no possible
modern revolutions without a concept of progress that can foster them. To
some extent, the philosophy of history in terms of progress deploys an epis-
temological ground for the radical change: to attain scientific developments
and to discover other forms of political organisation were also justified in a
perspective on history by which every new achievement was legitimised. In
Löwith’s words,

[o]nly with the modern political revolutions could the idea of progress
acquire sufficient firmness, distinctness, and generality to serve a scien-
tific purpose. To classical antiquity the course of history appeared not
at all as a ‘course’ but as a cyclic succession of identical phases, never
experiencing a new transformation directed toward a definite goal in the
future. Thus every idea of progress was inaccessible to the philosophers
of antiquity. Even the most sagacious of them rather shared the popular
belief that the contemporary state of things was far inferior to that of
former times.
(1978: 73)

There is a huge difference between a religious perspective on history and

the temporal patterns that suppose progress. That is the case for enlightened
people in early modernity, since another history was also possible thanks to
an emerging thought rid from religious mindsets. That is to say, quite on the
contrary to conceiving the world as a perfect creation just the way it is, history
would show that every moment could be surpassed in ethical, scientific or aes-
thetic terms by the next one: “[t]o the typical rationalists of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, progress is an indefinite advance toward more and
more reasonableness, more and more freedom, more and more happiness,
because the time is not yet fulfilled” (Löwith 1978: 60). However, according to
this concept, it would have been impossible without a Christian background.
For Löwith, a secular point of view on history is, paradoxically, a result of
Christian impulses as well: “[t]he eschatological interpretation of secular his-
tory in terms of judgment and salvation never entered the minds of ancient
 Conceptualising future(s) 115

historians. It is the remote and yet intense result of Christian hope and Jewish
expectation” (1978: 60). According to Hans Blumenberg,

[t]here is one test, at a minimum, that must be met by whatever we call a

rudimentary form of the idea of progress: it must contain a coordinative
relation between the quantum of time and the quality of achievement.
Progress as the form of the course of history requires an assumption of
identity, since it excludes a form of that course in which the process of
experience and thought starts afresh with every individual and every gen-
eration makes a break with the one before.
(1974: 6)

Achievements and the time required to achieve them are now in a central
position. This means that the responsibility to improve living conditions is
on the shoulders of previous generations and is passed along to every new
generation in order to continue the historical progress. Thus, “[t]he idea
of progress consists, rather, in the assertion of a universal or epochal link
between theoretical, practical, or technological actions, a link that lies in
the continuum of time and rests on the basis of time” (Blumenberg 1974: 6).
And to complete Blumenberg’s sentence, I should add a political one: pro-
gress consequently ties several dimensions into one temporal scheme that
includes the historical achievements in a succession. The succession is a
kernel aspect since progress seeks an escalatory movement. The past and
its traditions are kept due to their potential use for the next step in history.
It is about taking care of tradition by building on it. Meaning that must be
decided which aspects of tradition shall be kept and which ones will not;
even which traditions deserve to remain and which do not. For Blumenberg,
“In [progress] a historical structural fact is discovered, withdrawn from any
individual disposition and arbitrariness, from which the necessity to ‘pass
on’ and to ‘guard’ tradition can be taken directly” (1986: 100). Then, pro-
gress is not necessarily revolution since it does not break ties to the past, but
instead appears as its threshold. Progress is thus tied by a temporal pattern
that works as the connection between different moments in continuity, also
permitting an identification since a process shares a precise past (tradition)
and a projected future (expectation):

This includes the creation of a certain historical identity, because any fac-
tual form of development had to be excluded in time, which would have
started the process of experience and thought anew with each individual
and would have caused a break with the previous generation with each
generation. Therefore, the comparison between the life course of the indi-
vidual and the course of history is one of the early means of depicting
progress, but at the same time one of the inadequate ones, because the
116 Conceptualising future(s)

rationality of the structure is superimposed by the biological scheme of a

line which, after reaching maturity, falls again.
(Blumenberg 1986: 101)

Up to this point, it appears that all of the previous remarks on the

definitions of progress (Adorno, Löwith, Blumenberg) share at least three
crucial aspects: (a) a linear concept of history by which every moment is an
improved version of the previous one (or, at least, the prelude to a better
one); (b) a confidence in the rational organisation of society and advances
in knowledge that increase well-being; and (c) hand in hand with the belief
in rationality, arises the idea of domination over nature (and human beings)
through calculations and forecasts on possible current and future conditions.
By conceptualising, I refer to a precise feature through which the concepts
foster temporal forms. According to Hans Blumenberg,

[w]orld orientation has crossed the spatial horizon through the perform-
ance of the concept. It defines what is currently not perceived, but can be
visualized, which in anticipation of the fear of the unknown, of curiosity,
of vague expectation first postpones the periphery of consolidated envir-
onmental relations.
(1986: 99)

Concepts skip the precise space by encompassing a temporal yield that

brings what is not-yet or not-any-longer. Concepts constitute a temporal ‘leap’
through which past meanings and future understandings can be condensed in
the present. Beyond considering the temporal inner character of concepts,
in this chapter, I will follow the form in which the future was conceptualised
within the onset of modern times up to now.
These three characteristics affect the projection of possible situations
through planification, control and technology. The ability to anticipate
possible events as well as the availability to improve living conditions are
combined with a unified goal: a progressive gaze that shapes the future. In this
way, the desired future will shape present in several forms, turning the desired
future not neutral (Hölscher 1999). Such a future will be configured between
several procedures, among which we find planification, technological and
industrial development, as well as control over nature and populations. This
is how the notion of progress has been relevant for at least the last two cen-
turies. From liberal perspectives on politics and economics, to revolutionary
stances and the planned organisation of society, a linear concept of history,
in which future betterments were expectable, featured in almost the whole
Western tradition. This is why Koselleck named ‘progress’ as one of the main
concepts of modern times going so far as to say that: “[a] central expression
which, as is well known, has brought a genuine concept to modern times is
Progress” (2006a: 77; italics in original).
 Conceptualising future(s) 117

Progress was also crucial as it encouraged, and was accompanied by,

processes of secularisation that contributed to stabilising a perspective on
the agency of collective action instead of ‘natural’ or ‘sacred’ courses of his-
tory (Torres 2016). In this regard, Peter Wagner states that the “progress of
knowledge accelerated when politico-religious restrictions on the investiga-
tion into the laws of nature were removed” (2016: 58). Thus, “[i]n contrast to
the theological profectus, progressio and progressus in their neo-Latin, French
and English versions have now gained a new meaning: the open-mindedness
of the future, which at the same time is conceived as increasingly controllable”
(Koselleck 2006a: 77). The open future, and, even more so, its capacity to be
controlled were crucial for the meaning of the secularised and modern version
of progressio. It is important to highlight this relation between an open
future and confidence in collective action as a control over human destiny.
Without a process by which sacred explanations about history lose their influ-
ence in favour of explanations that emphasise the role of reason, technical
mastery and societal control organisation, the idea of an open future would
have been hard to imagine (Blumenberg 1986). The timing by which tech-
nical improvements and the unfolding potentials of reason can be reached (as
processes of acceleration) and the imaginary future societies that can serve
as models for the present (as utopias) are consistent with a notion of pro-
gress that contributes to articulating a futurisation of the historical process.
Although it may be seen on a future horizon, it does not mean that progress
fulfils every consideration about what is to come:

[n]ot even the attitude of an obviously future-oriented expectation implies

fulfillment of this expectation in the mode of progress. We may grant
that no historical epoch can claim supreme and definitive quality for its
products, but this admission as such means no more than the open possi-
bility that their quality may be surpassed, now or in the future.
(Blumenberg 1974: 5–6)

Actually, according to Wagner,

[a] temporal dimension was added to the promise of the strong concept
of material progress that had emerged in the late eighteenth century: for
most people in the world, this progress would happen ‘not yet’ but in
some undefined future. This future, furthermore, was likely to remain on
the distant horizon were it not for the critique that pointed to the lack of
justification for the temporal inequality and for the organized protests
that were based on the critique.
(2016: 81)

Hence, progress envelops a trend towards future by claiming that historical

epochs are cumulative. By encouraging a linear concept of time, progress does
118 Conceptualising future(s)

not deny the relevance of the past. Quite the opposite, since it is the precon-
dition for what will come thereafter. However, its main temporal orientation
is based on the present state of things towards their possible improvements
into the future, hand in hand with the rationalisation and planning of human
conditions. Now, in order to observe the futurisation of modern times more
closely, I will continue by observing some characteristics of the notion of
utopia. Utopia plays a relevant role since it elaborates on images of possible
societies which, even though they have ‘no real time’, serve as motors towards
the future.

Utopia: from ‘not- here’ to ‘not- yet’

Chronologically speaking, it is clear that utopia as a notion predates the
modern ideas of acceleration and progress. While Thomas More’s classic work
Utopia (2002 [1516]) appeared during the 16th century, progress and acceler-
ation as modern developed ideas only emerged strongly after the Industrial
Revolution. In an article titled “The Temporalization of Utopia” (Koselleck
2002: 84–99), Koselleck locates the concept as an example of a new perspec-
tive on time in which what is coming acquires more relevance than the past.
Although utopia is not the only term in which this could be seen, it is one of
the most relevant because it introduces simultaneously both new temporal
perspectives and the projection of different possible worlds.
Regarding this, Koselleck also observes as prognosis the option for
planning the future, creating sufficient conditions for emerging historical
processes that are shifted to a destiny defined under a precise representa-
tion of the world. In this sense, the temporalisation of history occurs when
the fixed land, the geographical limits of life, territory or place to live,
or, in other words, all that is conceived as space, are replaced as crucial
explanations of historical analyses by temporal categories. The age, period
or historical moment in which an event takes place becomes preponderant
(Le Goff 2015). In this respect, utopia emerges as critical temporal concept.
According to Koselleck, in order to describe conditions for the transition
from a word to a concept, it is imperative to consider the particular network
for one notion (a word as first step) within the socio-political conditions of
the very moment: “… a word becomes a concept only when the entirety of
meaning and experience within a socio-political context within which and
for which a word is used can be condensed into one word” (1985: 85). Inside
of the 18th century, the word ‘utopia’ acquires this globality. In fact, when
the concept is acquiring a major presence, utopia is mainly understood as
comprising

community of property, moral and rational planning of society, and

scientifically determined rules for organising everyday life in order to
exercise total rational control that, at the same time, should be accepted
 Conceptualising future(s) 119

freely; that is to say, constantly thematising the voluntariness of self-con-

trol as a result of shared moral pressures and rational premises.
(Koselleck 2006a: 254)

This new emphasis on society’s conditions is upon those that open a plaus-
ible chance to materialise utopia as a concept: ‘community of property’,
‘moral and rational planning of society’, ‘everyday organisation’ – each of
these are examples of the word’s socio-political impact that transit to its con-
figuration as concept. Utopia is more than a ‘place’, a specific space, a pre-
cise ‘where’ in which reality can be found. It is originally a realistic chance
in a non-present time but nevertheless reachable. With this possibility, its
reality is shifted or temporalised into the future: “If utopia was no longer to
be discovered or established on our present-day earth nor in the divine world
beyond, it had to be shifted into the future” (Koselleck 2002: 86). This new
status of the concept is the result of precise socio-historical conditions. The
material aspect of this temporalisation of utopia is related to the conditions
of the new world discovered and the political implications on the commerce.
According to Carolina Martinez, “The primacy of the temporal variable over
the spatial one is explained by two processes: the closure of the European
process of overseas expansion and the advent of a new way of understanding
history” (2019: 66).
At this point, the temporalisation of the concept occurs, and next to that,
crucially, its futurisation. As there is no specific place or space to refer to
in the past or present, making its immediate realisation impossible, there is
still a chance since its reality is not searched for in a determined location
or territory, but shifted to a different time, to a possibility-to-come that is
less determined by the past and extramundane forces and starts to rest in the
hands of history. For Koselleck, it is quite clear that

the structure of this sort of future utopia is new. All utopias conceived
spatially were potentially verifiable by experience. By principle, this
experience of a future utopia is not possible. No one can experience
the future in situ. Therefore, the future utopia is a pure product of the
spirit [Geistes] and nothing more. It is related to the author that has the
future vision. This aspect differentiates its structure, not its content,
from previous utopias. In a way, this utopia is transcendental because
the conditions of possibility of this future are consequences of the spirit
that creates that future. The utopia of the future is a specific result, which
is projected in a certain way so that the future can produce an effective
realisation of the utopia.
(2006a: 261)

In this way, there are two elements that deserve to be highlighted: on the one
hand, utopia is located in the ‘spirit’ [Geist] and, because of that, inside the
120 Conceptualising future(s)

imagination’s epochal dispositions; and, on the other hand, utopia is initially

the designation for those unrealisable expectations, but even more, for what is
almost thinkable and feasible in a future horizon. This last point is particu-
larly interesting because it characterises utopia in a different manner from
how it was conceived in the 16th and 17th centuries: utopia acquires force as
a concept because it is no longer simply the thought of an idealised future
world: on the contrary, it arises as a realisation of the world. Along with this
political idealism and temporal indeterminacy, the concept begins to acquire
the contemporary well-known meanings (such as belief in the improvement
of society, a sort of voluntarism for reformation-revolution) between which
the lack of reference to a concrete reality are found, as well as an absence of
observable judgements and their application in a proper speculative domain.
This is what opens up the chance for new possible means to configure the
future, through fantasy, imagination, reflection and all those faculties
associated with speculation in general. At the same time, utopia would not
have obtained sufficient strength to be established in the common imagination
without the support of technical developments that occurred from the 17th
century onwards. Koselleck describes thoroughly how numerous concrete and
perceptible factors, such as technical progress, the monarchies fall and scien-
tific discoveries, provided momentum and justifications to germinal utopian
arguments, also supporting the pursuit of other social projects through suffi-
cient and verifiable reasons and giving the new world’s pretensions a plausible
background. One particularly different factor is the verifiability of desires,
their effective materialisation and planning, to which Koselleck assigns the
notion of prognosis as I mentioned before. It is just in this idea that the future
obtains a precise path to its actualisation: via planning, the future common
life appears as a programmable domain and, with that, is feasible and improv-
able in terms of progress. That is what is distinct from the utopia’s concept.
Prognosis and progress are conceived as precise planning, “but with the utopia
of the future, it was different: the future cannot be observed or checked; as the
future, it cannot be captured by experience” (Koselleck 2002: 87).
More than a precise definition of a concrete future, the future as a horizon
of possibility is reached with utopia. With utopia emerges a question related
to the feasibility of thinking about history and the future: if variation and a
different horizon would not be possible, the future simply cannot appear. In
simpler words: Is there future when history has an immanent telos or where
there is just an eternal recurrence of the past? Even though the answer to
this question cannot be totally clear, it seems to be well founded that utopia
would suppose a formative movement to manners in which the future could
be shaped. Utopia can arise as a factor of change, but more deeply, it would
suppose that the future is not necessarily pre-written or, in any case, it can be
written in radically different ways.
This characterisation would be incomplete without a sufficient emphasis on
utopia as a speculative exercise, in which rests a large figure of ‘otherness’ in
 Conceptualising future(s) 121

the sense of something that differs from the present, but nevertheless emerges
repeatedly from it through semantics driving desires and repressions about
the social equilibrium, while at the same time resisting all of this. Since it
is not reduced or identified in the present moment, utopia differs not just
from the current times, but its own time has ‘no place’. As a consequence,
utopia’s existence incorporates its own possibility in something else that is
not part of one defined object or presence, but that resists presence, that is
to say, suggesting a possible horizon, an imaginary-representative source or,
more precisely, phantasmal. From the Ancient Greek φάντασμα (phántasma,
‘ghost’), a phantom appears in the sense that something is perceived, even
though without full presence, as imaginary or unreal. This is one meaning of
the word, according to which it describes something that has an imaginary
existence or that appears to exist, although it does not entirely (Cambridge
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus 2019).
Like a phantasmagoria, utopia is an image-composition that is looking for
a representation: an entity without an entire presence that has no direct refer-
ence, because its purpose is located in the middle of a game of contrasts that
brings about the absent as ‘present-absent’, in the same manner that happens
with ghosts. This ‘game of contrasts’ refers to the presence of an image that
at the same time is not clear or not fully there, “[s]o it would be necessary to
learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not. Even and espe-
cially if this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never
present as such” (Derrida 2006: xvii). Then, fantasy, ghosts and the products
of imagination are necessary to have a sketch on how the future could be and
then to promote conditions in order to pursue it. For a theory of acceleration
or, to put it differently, to develop the concept of how acceleration operates
within a phantasmagorical background, a utopian motto can be considered in
the ground. This does not mean that acceleration is always promoted by uto-
pian motifs, rather, for the modern process of acceleration, utopia represents
a structural condition since it mobilises historical forces.

Utopia and fantasy: towards acceleration

Up to this point, we have seen some central aspects of the concept of utopia
following mainly Reinhart Koselleck’s works. Now, I would like to go beyond
Koselleck in order to examine particular implications of history within
modern concepts, especially in connection with unreality and a social theory
of acceleration.
Overarching differences respecting utopia as an impossible place (Thomas
More), or a negation of reality (Mannheim 1979),2 or both (Bloch 1971; Ott
2013),3 most perspectives suggest that there is a minimal, basic and shared
structure within the concept: the configuration of a different reality. Regarding
this, the problem of whether utopia is a place (more related to space) or a
possible future (linked to time) may support an argument that the concept
122 Conceptualising future(s)

of utopia has multiple imbricated meanings. It is not crucial to understand

whether utopia’s definition in itself is homogeneous, unified or definitive. For
the purposes of this chapter, its historical emergence related to its socio-political
background is the most important aspect. The viability of thinking about and
projecting actions into the future by planning them is the result of conditions
that can be detected in precise concepts, as utopia, but also in processes that
persist in contemporary times, especially in the form of acceleration.
Within this frame, we can observe that the abovementioned ambiguity has
a clear relationship with questions about the reality of utopia, that is to say,
its condition of possibility or, from another sight, its fundamentally figura-
tive and fictional character, emphasising again its unreality. The latter allows
to consider fantasy as a crucial domain of the concept of utopia. In a certain
way, the no-place and not-now of utopia justifies its description in imaginary
terms, sometimes related with ingenuous or naïve ideas in a political sense.
Then, utopia and fantasy integrate, forming a structural relationship when
utopia supposes a permanent appeal to images that represent a possible world
in terms of speculation that has no reference to a precise destiny but is more
linked to the spectre or ghost of a moment-place. This structure has its most
immediate relationship with the lack of a presence in which it is situated.
There is no utopia now, in the present, just on the horizon of the possible, or,
more precisely, the impossible, depending on the intensity of socio-political
ideals. This could be one of the more peculiar ways to describe it: from this
point of view, utopia is available to be thought as a spectre of the possible/
impossible, a figure or representation without tangible reference. The rela-
tionship with something neither entirely known nor unknown is analogous
to what happens with ghosts – where the image is never fully concrete and,
in addition, is always feasible to doubt about it. Spectres of the future (or
past) indicating a utopian moment seek to materialise some figure that is not
entirely distinguishable nor deniable: “the spectre is a paradoxical incorp-
oration, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the
spirit. It becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither
soul nor body, and both one and the other” (Derrida 2006: 5)
Thus, the next step is that the utopic metaphor must work with fanta-
sies for creating world images which can subsequently become embodied or
materialised. In this creation, there is an open chance that something unfore-
seen appears. A permanent openness to possible histories acquires a posi-
tive character, because it involves not just an implicit negation of the current
‘state of things’ but an orientation to something different. It is particularly to
this case that Hans Blumenberg refers when he writes: “[w]hen, in the open
horizon of the non-impossible, the unexpected is always precisely expect-
able, the imagination turns into an organ of totally unexpected positivity”
(1960: 62). The phantasmagoric structure of futurisation which I have referred
to as expectation or idealisation is related to the manner in which it does not
have total presence in utopia’s pronouncement, but nevertheless it appears
 Conceptualising future(s) 123

in imaginary or phantasmal forms, in the same way that the phantasmal is

presence of the absent. In this sense, the ghost that is alluded to in utopia
is not the heritage of tradition in which the ghosts of the past make their
entrance, but rather to what has not appeared or is not yet: the spectres of
the future. And this permanent reference to the future is a tempo-structural
condition for modernity. The historian Krzysztof Pomian describes it in the
following way: “… the future exerts its influence in the present to a degree
not seen before. It is no longer the dead what surround the living. It is what
has not yet been born” (Pomian 1984: 302). According to Pomian, a crucial
characteristic of modern times is that what it is ‘not yet being’ exerts its influ-
ence in the present. This is complementary with Koselleck’s asseveration by
which history lost its capacity of instruction as Historia magistra vitae at the
same time that the horizon of expectation (time) was split off from the place
of experience (space). In other words, experience is no longer the main source
of understanding of history. The perspective has turned into the future. This
matter was thematised in a slightly different way by Hans Blumenberg as an
increasing gap between world time, identified as the time of the universe, and
lifetime which is unable to mimic it. According to Blumenberg,

[t]he appearance of contingency in the opening of the gap between world

time and life time inevitably raises the question of consent to this incon-
gruence; thus, it is implicit of the possibility of refusal, of the will to force
both back into congruence.
(1986: 87)

For Blumenberg, this incongruence is always present between world time

and lifetime. The question is under which conditions the ‘scissors of time’ are
more or less accentuated.
However, both share the sense by which the recurrence of the past offers
structures of comprehension, but at the same time daring speculations about
what is to come. In this way, ghosts from the past are not what remain, but
rather spectres from the future. Notwithstanding, there is still a question about
how it is possible to articulate the present and future, or, more precisely, the
prevailing and what is to come? What sort of conditions make this game pos-
sible? In other words, how are repetition and novelty (or newness) connected?
These raises a further question about how the modern utopian perspective
oriented to the future is structurally linked to the speed at which utopia can be
attained. In general, these questions have a common background related to the
chances or circumstances by which some utopian images arise: images showing
not just a world with precise characteristics but also touching upon the forces
of mobilisation in pursuit of their culmination. Going back to Koselleck,

[t]he burden of our historical thesis is that in Neuzeit the difference

between experience and expectation is increasingly enlarged; more
124 Conceptualising future(s)

precisely, that Neuzeit is conceived as neue Zeit only from the point at
which eager expectations diverge and remove themselves from all pre-
vious experience.
(1985: 270)

While this is related to progress, for the first time Koselleck locates this
difference in a particular manner: “there is an unmistakable indicator of the
way in which this difference persists only through its constant renewal: accel-
eration. Politico-social and scientific-technical progress change by virtue
of the acceleration of temporal rhythms and intervals in the environment”
(1985: 269). To this extent, the process of acceleration arises intrinsically
tied to other socio-political processes which in turn are connected to a
temporal horizon that exceeds the present. This is the case for utopia and
progress. Both concepts are oriented to the future: a future that is undeter-
mined, in the first case, and motivated by a linear perspective on history, in
the second.
Now, it is necessary to take a look at the third part of the temporal regime
that I thematise, namely, the acceleration process, in order to complete the
picture of the modern trend towards the future as inherent to the modern
project and still latent in contemporary times.

Acceleration: the ‘repetition of change’

Generally speaking, change and acceleration share structural components.
For Koselleck, acceleration is the result of rates of change that becomes per-
manent and increasing. This supposes a new validation of novelties, which is
itself a basic condition for promoting changes. That is to say, without a back-
ground that validates orientations towards the future, it is difficult to imagine
steady transformations within social structures. This is why the temporal
dimension opened by utopia is closely related to decisions about whether to
repeat the past or to innovate within the future. Where structures of repeti-
tion are dominant, the relationship with time would be more standardised,
i.e., expectations about the future would mean fewer variations from the past,
while an openness to novelty supposes a permanent differentiation from pre-
vious times, constituting temporal concepts such as paradigmatic models of
utopia and progress towards change. Then, discourses on progress and utopia
seem stronger when combined and interrelated, rather than isolated, when
it comes to challenging the time barriers between repetition and innovation.
This challenge is a ‘matter’ of time since the frequency with which change
occurs produces effects on the perception of the living pace. In other words,
“[o]ur mental model that urges us to combine repetition and innovation in
different ways allows us to introduce delays and accelerations, according to the
frequency with which repetition and singularity are coordinated” (Koselleck
2006b: 2). This shows the central role of rhythm with which change and
 Conceptualising future(s) 125

transformation are produced. When perspectives towards the future are pre-
dominant, the desired speed to reach the expected transformations becomes
decisive. Accelerations or delays are the timing by which transformations or
status quo are reached:

Therefore, the expanded dimension of the time available to Human

beings in the future did not result from the casualness of its exhaustion,
but rather from the urge and distress to not let it again depending on the
frighteningly long periods of the human increase. Acceleration under the
idea of ‘progress’ could and should not only mean securing its inner logic
and making it irreversible, but also bringing back an indefinitely open
future in life-time proportions. At least to give as much future as possible
to the measure of the individual’s lifetime as can always be achieved.
(Blumenberg 1986: 239)

The material aspect of temporality here relies on the availability of being

modified according to necessity. The rhythms and paces of life can be altered
depending on the given priorities. In other words,

[a]cceleration means that the time consumption appears as a controllable

variable. It is possible to have faster and slower progress, as you could
have had it before, but got it later or too late. Any such approach to an
inner logic of history restricts its ‘feasibility’ to the tempo … The idea of
acceleration is thus tied to the tormenting thought of the delay of reason;
but also, to that of the magnitudes of the consumption of time for its
historical achievement.
(Blumenberg 1986: 218–219)

To make the point clearer, Figure 4.1 sums up the tied between Enligh-
tenment, time and progress/acceleration.
There is an inner connection between the conscious of ‘lost time’ and
the necessity to making up time via acceleration. Time is no longer a neu-
tral dimension, but a source of advancements and regressions. It may be
synthetised in the following way: “Let’s make up for lost time! (Voltaire)
Therefore: acceleration of the procedure” (Blumenberg 1986: 218).
The modern era brings a new kind of responsibility over time, as it is also
a human task to be attentive and to read the signs of the times in order to
anticipate what is to come. In Blumenberg’s words,

[t]ime, until then only the medium for the appearance of events and
actors, for the growth of subliminal empirical quantities into measurable
values, becomes itself a power that can be trusted to do anything by its
mere quantity, as it will have fully emerged a century later.
(1986: 223)
126 Conceptualising future(s)

Reason/Enlightment

Make up time Gain time

Acceleration Progress

No repetition

Towards change

Figure 4.1 Scheme of the dialectics from Enlightenment to change.

Both acceleration and progress state that if everything is already achieved,

there is no room for a future better fulfilling conditions within history, since
every single state would already be in its best condition. Hence,

The latent threat was to have to transfer the expansion of time into
the future, which was perceived as confidence-raising for the past. This
would have made it inevitable to ask what such a margin for manoeuvre
in human reality would lead us to expect other than loss and decline,
when the present already seemed to fulfil the hopes of history. If this
dilemma were to be avoided, there would be only the repression of the
present in favour of the aspects of a future in which, perhaps, for each
step of further growth in civilisation, the arts and culture, the millennia
would have to be spent with the same generosity as had been conceded
for the past.
(Blumenberg 1986: 225)

The relinquishment on believing that the present constitutes the final per-
fection of human things arose by broadening the perspective of the future.
The new suspicion that the present is a phase that is not “the most perfect
of possible worlds” (Leibniz 1985)4 is a sine qua non for the new ‘future’
status. Precisely because the world is perfectible, past and present things are
of value to the extent that they precede the possibility of a better state. The
secularising process indisputably accompanies this new consciousness as it
 Conceptualising future(s) 127

breaks with the belief that this is the ‘best of worlds’ since it was designed
by the ‘will’ of a ‘Creator’. In the new spirit of history, the world can be
improved and implies human labour to achieve it. This is quite different from
an eschatological viewpoint that shares with progress the same path of linear
time towards future, but, considering that, there is an inner meaning of his-
tory from a divine perspective. On the other hand, there is also a criticism
whereby the orientation towards the future establishes the arrogance of an
intellectual belief in situating itself in the best of the possible worlds.
Moreover, how is a future possible when human beings have precise
incontestable conditions? How is a different world conceivable since there is
a ‘human nature’ that remains? There are people who think that there is a
human nature that makes it impossible to expect so much difference in the
future since the human condition is to repeat the past;5 on the other hand,
other authors believe the process of socialisation develops specific forms of
cultural patterns and values that constitute a sort of ‘second nature’ (simply
because of its temporal delay) that is more determinant for the social process
and also spells out the individual perspective in a determinant way. In fact,
the very notion of individual as such has been extensively tracked as a histor-
ical outcome in the Western European case (Morris 1987; van Dülmen 1997).
The ‘nature’ then might be modified within its historic materialism:

Kant was the first to draw the conclusion from his concept of history of
the execution of a hidden plan of nature in the Idee zu einer allgemeinen
Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht of 1784, then we could accelerate
the progress of history through reasonable events, bringing about the
attainment of its final intention of the perfect state constitution faster.
Thus, Lenin is still insisting on shortening the time consumption for the
historical procedure of Marx. Once this has been determined, it will
become available.
(Blumenberg 1986: 232–233)

The idea of human nature is also aligned with other static/repetitive stances
(such as the aforementioned ‘best of possible worlds’) that shall be overcome
by a temporal perspective upon future possibilities. Neither acceleration, pro-
gress nor utopia can be based on repetitive conditions but rather in the claim
for modifying them. In this regard, ‘human nature’ and ‘the best of the pos-
sible worlds’ are paralysing stances.
Now, what is the precise relation between ‘repetition of change’ and accel-
eration? Is acceleration a particular coordination amid iteration and nov-
elty? On the one hand, it is possible to describe a process of acceleration
if structures of repetition are iterated in shorter intervals. That is to say,
if repetitions of history are produced in a faster fashion, we face a series
of acceleration process consequently. However, there is another option by
128 Conceptualising future(s)

which acceleration is the result of an increased rate of change, and this is

more deeply concerned with contemporary history according to the theory
of acceleration here exposed. In this regard, what identifies modernity is pre-
cisely the difference between the present and the past and, related to that,
the impossibility of taking the past as a matter of experience for current
questions. In other words, it is not the iterance of the past, but recognition
of the difference with the past, including the most recent, what stimulates
greater change. The rupture with models from previous times becomes a cru-
cial factor for what is coming. Therefore, innovations are considered aspects
of what is to come, not the past, and precisely for that reason, acceleration
is desired: due to acceleration, differences are promoted and thus accel-
eration can be described, paradoxically, as repetition of changes. That co-
constitution between repetition and change is missed in Koselleck’s work.
According to him,

[w]e would have an acceleration when, in a comparative series, there have

been fewer and fewer repetitions, and instead, more and more innovations
appear that throw off the ancient previous structures. Delays would take
place when inherited repetitions become fixed or consolidated in such a
way that any change would be stopped or even become impossible.
(Koselleck 2006b: 2)

This quotation explains clearly the characteristic of acceleration.

Koselleck contraposes repetition and change, associating repetition with
delays and standstills, and change with mobility and acceleration. This is
why it is possible to state “that revolution becomes more and more that
which is due as a result of the acceleration of an already coherent and con-
sistent historical process” (Blumenberg 1986: 241–242). Revolution, in the
modern sense, is an acceleration branch. Notwithstanding, Koselleck’s
emphasis on the recurrence of innovation misses another crucial aspect
involved in the whole process: acceleration is not just the rise of change
but also its repetition, what modifies the temporal experience not just in
terms of speed but also as rupture with the past. This is the case with the
events that have rapidly succeeded each other in modern history – ranging
from the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, both World Wars
I and II, the demographic growth during the 20th century, along with the
evolution of technology, cultural struggles (religious, gender) and current
geopolitical scenarios (global warming). Then, to consider the increasing
amount of change in several dimensions is to extend the notion of accel-
eration also to embody ‘iteration of change’. In other words, there are not
only ‘repetitions of the past’ replaced by ‘more innovations’ in a process of
acceleration (Koselleck dixit) but also more repetition of innovations, more
recurrence of novelties or more iteration of transformations. The relevance of
iteration in this respect is marked by the recognition, on the one hand, that
 Conceptualising future(s) 129

innovations are not necessarily tied to the traditions they arise from and,
on the other hand, that it is not just their increase in number but also their
increase in repetition as a social pattern what is characteristic. To put it dif-
ferently, it is not the social structure of repetition of the past with respect to
traditions, costumes or beliefs that predominates, but rather the legitimacy
of novelties regularity, which characterises the historical structure in current
times. This has strong implications for the role of tradition, heritage and
previous cannons since novelties stabilise themselves in social patterns. This
sui generis relation with the new, and its recurrence, makes the notion of
acceleration a crucial feature for modern times. As is described by Hartmut
Rosa, acceleration is an intrinsic phenomenon of modern times, among
other traditional characterisations from social theory such as rationalisa-
tion, functional differentiation, secularisation, control and dominance (of
nature and society), with all of them strongly connected to the idea of pro-
gress as philosophy of history. However, Rosa does not expose this hidden tie
between iterance and novelty. In his approach, acceleration is the increasing
frequency of innovations (on cultural, technological and economic levels),
but not as repetition of changes. The main problem for acceleration does not
lie in the evidence of the new but in the inertia of the old. This is another way
to name Rosa’s ‘frenetic standstill’ mentioned in Chapter 2. To ‘renew’ is not
a problem in itself, only when it refers to the resistance exercised by what has
already been established. The natural tendency of what is already established
is, in turn, the permanence and repetition of what is given. Against this col-
ossal force, the acceleration envelops a ‘new’ logic for modern societies,
namely, by making changes in speed as a valuable disposition. When the new
and the future become ‘values’, acceleration, in turn, settles its permanence
and repetition.
In order to be complete, our analysis needs one last consideration.
Futurisation is not just the cause of aligned processes of acceleration, utopia
and progress, but it is also a particular manner of experiencing temporality.
This allows us to conceptualise the futurisation composed by utopia, pro-
gress and acceleration as an autonomous temporal regime. As mentioned in
Chapter 1, by ‘temporal regime’ I understand a multiply-structured configur-
ation with historical and socio-political overlaps that are characterised by a
distinctive form of temporalisation. In this case, the main character is marked
by futurisation, within which it is possible to find notions of utopia, progress
and acceleration (and even others such as revolution and reforms) as elements
through wherein this general regime operates in political, economic or reli-
gious fields. It is relevant to highlight that, properly speaking, these elements
do not create the future, but they introduce several temporal references into
the common language by making the expectations about what is to come a
factor with great impact on the course of the present: utopia, progress and
acceleration constitute a temporal regime that turns temporal experiences
into expectations (today, more likely concerns) about the future.
130 Conceptualising future(s)

Nonetheless, acceleration does not imply that history is consciously made

by human efforts:

[h]uman beings do not make history; they make the pace of history; and
this second sentence depends in its validity on the first. The driving of the
tempo presupposes the otherwise assured inevitability of the sequences.
Not an edifying result; but, recognizable by its fascinations, the most
comforting of all in view of the time dimension of the future.
(Blumenberg 1986: 242)

Another aspect is who the ‘subject of history’ is. There are several forces in
the historical process, and all of them promote different historical paces. The
subject of history is completely determined by its contribution to the accel-
erating impulse or, conversely, its retarding hindrance function. Even before
the secularising process, immense action in history was subordinate to tran-
scendent grounds. With a new time, an unknown possibility is opened up: the
identification of the course of history with a particular subject of history. In
this new scenario, the social actors of different nature can be understood to
be pursuing similar tasks, but fundamentally in relation to their promotion or
rejection, to the acceleration of the world. Within this descriptive framework,
subjects of history can be identified as the proletariat of Marxism who is
called to lead the revolution and the acceleration of history in view of eman-
cipation or the bourgeoisie who, depending on the period, delays or speeds up
the historical process. In addition, this situation also brings justification for
the application of the historical force violently.

It is about the explanation of a secondary consequence of the claimed

secularization: What presents itself in the original as the activity of the
world-end addicts and their tendency to let as many people as possible par-
ticipate in the expectation of the end, takes on the extreme value of terror
in the ‘secularized’ form of impatient impatience, because the expectation
of history has lost sight of the transcendent goal of salvation history, the
kingdom of heaven. Transcendence made gentle, immanence violent.
(Blumenberg 1986: 245)

To believe in the transcendence of the life and history would make the his-
torical subject meek and harmless. On the contrary, to make one take charge
of the history fate would make her strong and at the same time more vio-
lent: “It looks as if history, by virtue of its logic, has no other conditions
in nature than the exploitation of given potentials – perhaps with the mar-
ginal condition that has hardly been considered yet: acceleration costs
power” (Blumenberg 1986: 247–248). Then, an undisclosed aspect of accel-
eration is its necessity to be effective by force. Where does this force come
from? I hypothesise that it comes from the provocation of being responsible
 Conceptualising future(s) 131

for history and the times of life that individuals can make available to the
historical movement. Even though “the number of future years for which
we can infer the likely conditions of life decreases. Beyond these years, the
future can no longer be compared in its essential respects to our present
living conditions” (Lübbe 2009: 159), the temporal planification constitutes
a common practice in current politics. As shown in Chapter 2, politics over
lifetime deploys projections about the time to come, in order to anticipate
possible scenarios. In this sense, rather diverse politics over different subjects,
such as migration, educational systems or pensions, are based on the ability
to forecast each ongoing situation.

Utopia, progress, acceleration: a temporal regime

forwards
Up to this point, it is possible to indicate some general ideas about the bond
between acceleration, progress and utopia. As we have seen, there are strong
arguments for considering acceleration as the permanent introduction of
novelties, something that is precisely enhanced by the conceptual structures
of utopia and progress. With both, acceleration acquires its modern tem-
poral specificity. It is not just in terms of the future by which the concept
is temporalised but also with respect to the time that remains to reach the
utopia and to make progress real. In this association with innovations and
transformations in history, and the speed with which they can be reached,
time also turns itself into a political concept. Regarding the latter, it is pos-
sible to highlight some final considerations:

1. Utopia, progress and acceleration are concepts oriented to change or, at

least, they promote it: in utopia as the imagination of novelty, in progress
as linear improvements in history and in acceleration as the iteration
of change in shorter intervals. This does not mean that every change is
radical (transformations), rather that the innovations are frequent.
2. All of them have particular relations with repetition. Acceleration repeats
changes, while utopia breaks iterance from the past, and progress repeats
the belief in the expansion of history.
3. If acceleration is a prevalent concept today and utopia is inherent to
the acceleration concept, as I have exposed, it is possible to think that
there is more utopia present in the contemporary world than what it
would seem. This does not mean that acceleration has a precise utopian
motif, but rather that the emergence of utopian ideas with socio-political
consequences (as Koselleck demonstrated) promotes social processes in
which the velocity of events tends to be faster – as Virilio (1997) and Rosa
(2013) have exposed.
4. Though the three concepts share a ‘futuristic’ structure, only utopia and
acceleration could represent ‘openness’ to uncertainty. While acceleration
132 Conceptualising future(s)

and utopia share the indeterminacy of the future, progress tends towards
a controlled future that conceives itself as conditioned by the past. This
is the character of linear progression: it supposes that the future is an
improved form of the past, conceiving previous stages as preconditions
for current improvements, in the manner of evolutionism and teleological
courses of history. There is no radical rupture with the past, but rather
continuity.

Finally, the three concepts emerge with force when the gap between experi-
ence and expectation becomes self-evident. When a breakdown is produced
within traditional living forms and new expectations arise, this promotes
conditions in which a better hypothetical future becomes reachable (Jung
2014). This is also possible when two different times are bridged as a ‘saddle-
time’ (see note 3 in Chapter 3) where

the historical argument loses its power of conviction, because explanations

based on the past fit incorrectly with what happens in moments of his-
torical acceleration in which change is produced faster. Therefore, it is no
longer possible to apply past experiences immediately to these novelties,
and the future becomes more unpredictable.
(Koselleck 2006c: 8)

As history always extends beyond the specific possibilities of concepts, the

emergence of notions such as utopia, progress or acceleration do not imply
a futurisation of history by themselves. Precisely because there is history, a
concept such as utopia is possible and not vice versa. At any rate, it seems
advisable to highlight how utopia is a conceptual resource and acceleration a
conceptual but also a concrete practice that favour the installation (its recur-
rence and extension) of a specific idea of history for modern awareness. That is
to say, it stabilises structures of understanding that focus on creating an open
future, instead of necessarily maintaining repetitions of the past. In this sense,
it is remarkable how utopia contributes to formulating a historical conscious-
ness which recognises present life as unique, while, at the same time, necessarily
as a projection of the past, without believing in an unconditional immanent
telos of history. Through speculative reasoning and due to an imaginative
support of possibilities into the future, utopic impulses tended towards the for-
mation of a historical consciousness present up to today – probably without
knowing or searching for it. In this sense, acceleration and utopia contribute
to stabilising the expectation for a different future that can potentially be
achieved (Torres 2018) and planning and materialising the future definitively
through familiar concepts such as revolutions, reforms and progress.
One aspect that I did not indulge with a sufficient detail in this writing was
actually revolution. This concept should deserve more attention in subsequent
studies on temporal regimes since it constitutes a particular experience of
 Conceptualising future(s) 133

arguably all three concepts addressed here: acceleration, utopia and progress.
One could also say that the array of interest in the future is justified, since it is
easier to think about the future rather than the present. To some extent, doing
forecasts is a way of suspending the judgement upon the present and to sub-
limate its limits and atrocities into an imaginary future. As Marx stated, “the
social revolution … cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the
future” (1972: 12–13). Does that mean that the modern era is by definition ‘pro-
gressive’? To respond to this question, one needs to distinguish the ‘emerging’
moment from the current ‘state of things’. Quite likely, modern times intrinsic-
ally allocates an increasing interest towards the future since the scientific and
political revolutions promoted expectations on the undisclosed liabilities of his-
tory that previous times did not. This might be considered as a quite ‘progres-
sive’ moment. On the other hand, if we take a look at the current stage of late
capitalism and its neoliberal moment, results are difficult to conceive in a future
perspective, as was the case in early modernity. In that sense, today, there is a
more conservative moment instead of a progressive one, although modern time
lodges revolutionary forces in itself. Now, this could change again. I am writing
this at the very moment when Chile, one of the most neoliberal countries in the
world, is facing a socio-political crisis produced by the extreme privatisation of
social services such as health care, pension and education. The individual solu-
tion to social problems runs alongside one of the most extreme concentrations
of wealth: 58% of the GDP is concentrated within 10% of the population, and
from this 10%, the top 1% concentrates around 20% of the total country’s GDP
(OECD 2019). With different reasons and intensities, the protests in Hong
Kong, Ecuador, Colombia, Iran, US or France show similar discontent with
current social structures.
“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism …” [“Ein
Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus …”] (Marx
and Engels 1977: 461). With this famous sentence begins Marx and Engels’
Communist Manifesto of 1848. The celebrated meaning, beyond its decisive
political content, is revealing of the association that we portray here between
the future and a ghostly image, particularly with utopia. Furthermore, for
Marx, utopia has a clear pragmatic and programmatic content. However,
realising such results is impossible if we conceptualise utopia in an isolated
way, as we have usually witnessed so far. Perhaps today, when real communism
is not an extended promise, and nevertheless the need for a new horizon(s)
seems reinforced, the presence of a ghost is repeated, this time on a silent
world scale: Ein Gespenst geht um in der Welt – das Gespenst des Utopie.

Notes
1 Habermas has doubt about this suspicion on enlightened heritage not just on
Horkheimer and Adorno’s work (Habermas 1985) but also in Koselleck habilita-
tion thesis on Critique and Crisis (1989 [1959]) (Habermas 1992 [1962]).
134 Conceptualising future(s)

2 “A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within
which it occurs” (Mannheim 1979: 173).
3 Ernst Bloch’s (1971) proposal is located between messianism and Marxism of
utopia. According to Michael Ott, T.W. Adorno called “materialist metaphysic” to
Bloch’s utopia (Ott 2013: 5). This version of utopia, however, shares the negative
impulse of given reality as emancipation, with which we can keep a relationship
with Mannheim and Jameson’s stances.
4 In his Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l‘homme et l‘origine du
mal, Leibniz (1985) states that every moment is le meilleur des mondes possibles
[The best of all possible worlds].
5 This is the case in Fontanelle or, in far more contemporary discussions, Daniel
Chernilo’s (2017) anthropological and philosophical sociology project.

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Conclusions
Between homogeneity and heterogeneity –
simultaneous but non- synchronic times

General and particular: two faces of the same coin

Up to this point, this book has shown the main characteristics of temporal
regimes as well as provided some examples of them. From the starting point
of two theoretical frameworks that divide the temporal dynamics between
general-macro trends and multiple-micro descriptions, this inquiry has
developed an analytical tool in order to grasp both theoretical frames in a
comprehensive way.
Recapitulating, I exposed in the Introduction the initial problem, namely,
the two ways of approaching time logics within the social and cultural studies.
In Chapter 1, I proposed that this paradox can be overcome by the concept
of temporal regime through which it is possible to observe both the unity and
the multiplicity of temporal phenomena. After that, in Chapter 2, I explained
how temporal regimes are also political forms of organising life, constituting
modernity itself as a specific temporal project. In Chapter 3, I investigated
the ways in which technics and technology contribute to creating temporal
regimes from despatialisation and deterritorialisation in pursuit of standard
and abstract measures of time, which in turn gives way to the creation of
artefacts that make instantaneous communication possible. Finally, in
Chapter 4, I developed a conceptual historical analysis on socio-political
terms that has contributed to the formation of conditions for a futurisation
as paramount temporal regime in classical modernity. Now, the task is to
create a general balance and to outline the main analytical potentials of the
temporal regimes, as well as their limits and projections.
In the same way that the singular individual and singular universal in Manuel
DeLanda’s terms (DeLanda and Farías 2008), the forms of the temporal phe-
nomena share a coextensive specific and general configuration. As I have
shown, on the one hand, the temporal regimes are related to several specific
groups according to gender, rural or urban distinctions, as well as social class
or age (Chapter 2). These variables constitute a ‘singular individual’ since
the temporal structure is docked in individual terms in tune with every spe-
cific group. On the other hand, every ‘singular individual’ aspect is also tied

DOI: 10.4324/9781003180876-6
138 Conclusions

to a ‘singular universal’ dimension, namely, a specific contingent-historical

formation of general patterns beyond territorial boundaries or cultural
differences. That is to say, each specific formation is not isolated from general
trends (Chapters 3 and 4). This level of greater abstraction has the condition
of defining the general pace of social processes. In this frame, the current
acceleration on a global scale can be understood, especially for those from a
Western background, in order to grasp the specific logic of the contemporary
world. Therefore, I will now gather the general trends of temporal regimes
into two major clusters. In a sort of meta-theoretical approach to the theory
of temporal regimes developed up to this point, it is feasible to identify some
patterns inside and between the temporal regimes themselves. As I said at the
beginning of this book (Chapter 1), there are temporal uses that constitute a
strongly specified temporal regime excluding other possibilities of variation.
Moreover, there are multiple possibilities of temporal regularities that can be
actualised within certain conditions. For instance, a regime of industrial work
is impossible without a homogeneous abstract time unit. As Moishe Postone
(1993) has stated, the outcome of a measurable and extreme rationalised
temporal regime ensures the industrial production in a capitalistic fashion.1
The ‘concrete’ time that a worker needs for his or her task (human energy) is
abstracted into a measurable form that can be universalised (‘everyone can
do the same’) as well as goal oriented to the utility maximisation (in order to
profit ‘as much as possible’).
The ‘homogeneous-abstract’ time is the path through which the social
differences are integrated in order to make them productive. Thus, the ‘con-
crete times’ of collective action and different groups are arranged into the
abstract-homogeneous. The historical time produces a dialectic between the
collective action – namely, the incidence of human efforts to appropriate the
course of history – and the capitalistic forces that adopt different dominant
rhythms – such as the acceleration case. This means that the force of ‘human
agency’ is not mainly used for emancipatory goals, but rather for the utility of
diversified forms of post-industrial production. As Postone declares,

[h]istorical time in capitalism, then, can be considered as a form of con-

crete time that is socially constituted and expresses an ongoing qualita-
tive transformation of work and production, of social life more generally,
and of forms of consciousness, values, and needs. Unlike the ‘flow’ of
abstract time, this movement of time is not equable, but changes and can
even accelerate.
(1993: 294)

The last quotation means that the collective action exerts an influence on
the historical becoming but inside of an abstract force that overreaches its
current and real effect. In other words, “[b]ecause of the alienated character
of these forms, however, the history they constitute is beyond their control”
 Conclusions 139

(Postone 1993: 295). Though there are exceptions: revolutions. Within revo-
lution, several temporalities are affected by an impulse that forces not just
an accelerated pace but also a sudden or abrupt disruption on history over-
lapping the inertial course of the historical process. A revolution takes the
‘state of things’ by surprise in order to encroach on the time for a potential
coordinated response from the defeated power. This is why the revolution
should take place at the proper moment as well as at the least expected one. In
fact, as a milestone example, the Bolshevik revolution was developed in one
of the most ‘backward’ countries in Europe. This event makes clear the char-
acterisation of unpredictability. As stated by Susan Buck-Morss regarding
the temporal dimension of the Russian revolution:

his logic only underscored the temporal paradox that had plagued him
from the beginning, the fact that this Marxist revolution, historically the
most modern, most vanguard of events, had taken place in what he him-
self believed was one of the most economically backward countries in
Europe.
(2002: 58)

The Russian Revolution demonstrates how at least two strong tempor-

alities are involved in the very same event. An unpredictable result occurs
when suddenly an ‘advanced’ or ‘forefront’ force straddles the moment to a
‘backward’ society. Then, in this precise regard, we cannot speak in a linear
nor homogeneous temporal frame, since there are historical junctures that
defeat the natural course of temporal succession in a social, stabilised order.
Therefore, when I refer to homogeneity, the relevant object indicated is the
regime that evolves the differences, not that one deleting all of them. The
homogeneity uses differences to overcome them rather than swallow them
up, or simply eliminate them. The homogeneous led the heterogeneity into a
specific logic that turns alternative paces into the dominant forces, sometimes
by making a choice advisable and other times by turning it simply mandatory.
One example of this homogenisation regarding temporal regime is routine.
The schematised practices according to a specific task were significant for
the establishment of industrial work (Sennett 1998).2 Then, a scientific man-
agement of productivity (as proposed by Fordism, Taylorism or the Toyota
Production System) is not just an organisation of labour but also a regime
over work through time. Put differently, there would be no rational-industrial
organisation of work without a temporal compartmentalisation and stand-
ardisation of activities. The aforementioned proposers of these theories
believed that the scientific method of management included calculations of
exactly how much time it takes a person to do a particular task or to define
her work rate. This is the productive translation of the standard time and the
homogenisation of practices as the purposeful rational goal-oriented action,
coined by Max Weber (1978). The maximisation of time is the outcome to be
140 Conclusions

achieved in order to get an EE (efficiency, effectiveness) production system.

Without a highly sophisticated use and distribution of time, the whole produc-
tion process would be in danger. The dynamic stabilisation that presupposes
the capitalist development as a Triple A process of appropriation, acceleration
and activation (Dörre et al. 2017) is strongly tied to a rationalisation over tem-
poral structures that makes the productive forces feasible. In this regard, the
expansion of the capitalistic way of production in a traditional acceleration
of productive energies can be considered as one side of the temporal dom-
inant regime since, on the other, we can see processes of deceleration that are
also promoted when necessary. Actually, the fact that acceleration is not the
only possible temporal regime in modernity is also pointed out by Hartmut
Rosa himself.3
Nevertheless, the dominant social force in the capitalistic era is to speed
up the structural social process in order to fill a global scope. The expansion
of a global modern project is only possible when different paces of life are
scrutinised for being part of one universal path (Dörre et al. 2015).4 A ‘back-
ward’ village must be pushed into an accelerated pace in order to be a func-
tional part of the whole, otherwise it could be in serious danger of shrinking,
as several examples in the east of Germany have shown (Prosinger 2011;
Ringel 2018).
On the other hand, homogeneous does not imply necessarily ‘static’, but
rather a controlled movement. The movement without ‘advance’ leads the
current acceleration that does not entail an actual ‘deep change’ on social
conditions, but rather ruling dynamics in the same historical direction. In
other words,

the acceleration logically, but also empirically, reaches a point where it

turns into a ‘frenetic standstill’5 [rasender Stillstand], in which movement
and stagnation can no longer be distinguished from one another, and the
concept of dynamic no longer applies.
(Dörre et al. 2015: 597)

In understanding this paradoxical situation, I offer a complementary

explanation through the ‘repetition of changes’ thesis: acceleration does not
imply necessarily to go further in one way, but to move faster, even in a cir-
cular manner. Similarly, speeding up is not always to advance in some respect
but also to traverse the same route in less time. That is not to ‘stay’ in the same
place (standstill), rather to cyclically repeat the same path, but faster. This is
quite clear in the case of an economic crisis: as an inner aspect of the liberal
economy, the frequency of crises seems to growing up.6
For agents of homogenisation, in general, we can count mainstream
perspectives on economic order, temporal conceptions about time coming
from the natural sciences (especially physics) but also from some traditions
 Conclusions 141

in humanities and particularly philosophy. In this respect, the book thesis has
followed the line traced by some intellectuals (Blumenberg, Löwith, Koselleck)
according to which temporal perspectives are strongly related to conceptions
of the world, nature, life in general and especially human societies, resulting in
a dominant conception about time and social life – which in turn is translated
into domination over nature, a teleological history, but also an open future
and the collective action influx – introducing a universal, increasingly global
and standardised concept on time and history. On the other hand, tenden-
cies towards heterogenisation are identified with movements and process that
represent and promote diverse temporalities. Relevant examples can be seen
in rural versus urban velocities; ages and their differentiated practices; claims
for pluralism, tolerance with ‘differences’ among south–north, west–east or
social class, religious belief, gender and so on. In this sense, both diversity and
cosmopolitan ideals produce and reproduce heterogeneous values. This can
be seen within strong practical consequences in the case of the rhythm of pol-
itics: liberal democracy as political regime has its own pace for coordinating
stances and decision-making, being synchronisations particularly difficult or
unlikely most of the time, even impossible to some extent:

The assumption that we are at the beginning of a political project and not
on the dark border of history, seems nowadays fundamental for avoiding
the endemic social depression and the shrinkage of expectations facing
the cultural global homogenisation, climate change and the ongoing
financial crisis.
(Avenessian and Reis 2017: 10)

More specifically, the book thesis has explored the paradoxical situ-
ation of time that is both homogenised, through the proliferation of
global mechanisms such as technology, neoliberal political economy or
a standardised International Right, that tend towards universal cultural
patterns, and diversified, through a prototype of global society that encourages
cultural exchange, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, respect of minorities and
democratic values, giving rise to countless temporalities coexisting. For the
latter, I took as a starting point an intellectual position that recognises mod-
ernity as an historical moment characterised by the coexistence of divergent,
even contradictory, cultural flows. Regarding the latter, as I have exposed
above, agents of homogenisation can be identified with global tendencies
towards standardisation of relationships such as political economy in neo-
liberal and financial system (Chapter 2), as well as technical and scientific
discourses about progress or evolution (Chapter 4). Conversely, broadly
speaking, heterogeneities can be observed in liberal and radical democracy,
as well as progressive discourses that affirm cosmopolitism, pluralism and
no-boundaries flags.
142 Conclusions

Towards heterogeneous temporalities

The unequal distribution of time that shows its material character can be
noticed not just in terms of the intersectionality mentioned in Chapter 2 but
also into the temporal schema that take place in every life stage. According
to the time of living, several practices are associated. For the Western case,
differences in life stage involve several layers. An important question that
arises when a temporal analysis is emerging is whether we are in front of ‘one’
absolute time or multiple temporalities. This is not relevant only in methodo-
logical terms when one talks about regimes in plural, but in order to clarify
the notion of time itself. During the last few decades, several positions on
specialised literature in social sciences and humanities have supported the
idea that there is no one, but rather multiple temporalities (see Introduction).
The principal idea under these efforts is usually more than a coherent or sys-
tematic proposal, but an effort against to one-dimensional conception about
temporalities. This is usually the case when political openness is searched for
diverse social groups.
In another field, but following the same path, the philosopher Gilbert
Simondon has stated that “nothing proves in advance that the individuated
being should be in only one possible way; if there were several types of indi-
viduation, there should be various types of logic, each one corresponding to
a defined type of individuation” (2009: 43). This implies that one regime, as
a precise type of individuation, does not conclude the multiple varieties of
temporal logics. In this regard, this work has been an attempt to grasp those
parallel and even paradoxical conditions of temporal regimes: being one and
multiple at the same time. That is why I would emphasise that a temporal
regime is closed to a ‘total social fact’ in the sense of Marcel Mauss’ theory
(1966)7 through which the symbolical and the material, apart from being
inseparable, are inscribed in a system of representation. This means that the
temporal regimes I have proposed here make explicit an already settled reality
by the historical dimension into some of their most sophisticated scientific or
religious manners as well as the practice of everyday life. When I refer to a
‘total social fact’, it does not imply that I assert that temporal social regimes
are the only way in which we can grasp reality. Rather, I suggest that temporal
regimes are a necessary aspect of social and cultural studies in order to grip
its own vast consequences by providing privileged access to certain topics that
involve temporal dimensions related to subjectivity and historical analysis
such as expectations, rhythms, projections and time distribution.
Subsequently, contemporary temporal order can be understood as para-
doxical also considering that homogenisation and heterogenisation share
the same starting point. Within the body of this work, I have demonstrated
that both phenomena are consequences from the very same nucleus: Western
values towards global capitalism split between universalism, standard market
(Chapter 3) but also trends to incorporate differences through democracy,
 Conclusions 143

cosmopolitism, no-boundaries flags and cultural exchange (Chapter 2). Then,

the paradox rises when the very same nucleus produces two opposed regimes.
If they did not come from the same root, there would not be contradiction
as such. Multiple temporalities by themselves are not paradoxical. The high
speed of digital networks is not contradictory with the pace of life in a small
town in the Chilean desert (or the accelerated process in history with my slow
experience of time when I am trying to find the right words for this writing).
The contradiction occurs when the claim for velocity (related to economic
development, connection, production, progress) is accompanied by claims for
diversity and cultural differences (respect for communities, their pace of life,
modes of production, beliefs). Both speeches, coming from the very same
nucleus, make it possible to speak about paradox or even contradiction. The
same core is the current global (neoliberal) order that tends to universalise a
global culture, while at the same time claims respect for cultural differences,
particularities and diversities. Global economics are strongly related to the
process of homogenisation, and we can find more integration of differences in
the political globalisation but both are intimately tied, creating the perception
of ‘one world’ (Mondialisation, Mundialización).
Instead of referring to a non-centre, I am suggesting the idea that in the
contemporary world, there is already plurality, or that reality is always
plural: this means that regimes (whether political, religious, temporal, art-
istic) do not ‘create’ the diversity, but rather articulate it in specific and
contingent ways. Furthermore, there are conditions that produce totalising
homogeneities: from a current perspective, the homogeneous-dominant cap-
italism, acceleration or extractivism is conjugated with the affirmation of
values in the opposite sense such as pluralism, respect for the different ‘other’
(labelled as ‘migrant’, ‘exotic’, ‘foreigner’), cosmopolitism and cultures that
are considered non-Western. Then, the paradox is quite clear: the same
Western principle that encompasses the dominant processes of economy
(financialisation, neoliberalism) and politics (liberal democracy), proposes
the respect and inclusion of the other, the autonomy and sovereignty of the
states as well as the economic ‘open boundaries’, the freedom of worship
and ‘expression’ of diversity. I try to put this in a clearer manner with the
following schema (Figure C.1).
The reference to a temporal dimension is just one possible aspect regarding
the homogeneity and heterogeneity. The temporal scheme offered here is one
of the multiple variables that can be analysed. As it is well known, the forth-
coming global order from a Western matrix envelops multiple aspects for its
understanding. Since global phenomena have several variables, the way in
which this can be grasped is potentially limitless. Therefore, I propose one
particular temporal analysis among them. Following the latter, the origin-
ality of this project does not lie in the thematisation of temporalities from
a social theory viewpoint (this has already been done several times), but in
delimiting (and opening up) a field of research that can be useful for the
144 Conclusions

Global society

Global
order

Political
economy

Global Liberal
markets democracy

Standard
Values of
modes of
diversity
production

Non-Western
Universal
values
values
affirmation

Temporal
coordination Multiple
(standard universal temporalities
time)

Homogeneity Heterogeneity

Figure C.1 Global society in a temporal division scope.

social sciences and humanities regarding temporalities as regimes. As I have

exposed in the Introduction, social theorists have been deeply concerned with
understanding temporality and its connections within social reality for sev-
eral decades. They have produced macro-theoretical arguments to explain
what has happened with temporality and its order within the onset of mod-
ernity, such as long tendencies towards the acceleration of social process or
the concept of ‘space-time compression’. On the other hand, theorists have
also emphasised the plurality and diversity of simultaneous times in the
 Conclusions 145

contemporary world, providing an overview of the modern experience but

from an angle that captures the variability of this experience under the con-
cept of ‘contemporaneousness of the non-contemporaneous’ (Chapter 2).
Similarly, there are perspectives indicating different areas that highlight how
time is used to construct borders and cultural differences (such as advanced vs
delayed societies, developed vs underdeveloped, evolved vs primitive). Within
this framework, the following observations have been formed:

(a) The lack of dialogue between the two approaches/explanations8 limits the
understanding of contemporary times as a paradoxical phenomenon that
needs to be clarified.
(b) This leads to the understanding of both homogenisation (macro-
theoretical level) and heterogenisation (simultaneity and non-synchrony)
of contemporary times. By doing so, I provide a concept of temporal
regimes which is able to be used to grasp a better comprehension of
socio-temporal patterns as well as their frictions, complementarities and
different manifestations in several fields.

More precisely, the multidimensional experiences of time, as well as

stable and dominant ones, need to be put in a framework that can provide
explanations about their coexistence. Process through which, on the one hand,
old spatio-temporal barriers are narrowed by technical mechanisms (internet,
flights, cars, cultural and technical devices in general – music, films) and, on the
other hand, multicultural encounters for decentralised, pluriversal and diverse
experiences of time (cultural rhythms, non-standardised clock-time) deserve
further investigation explaining their main characteristics, interconnections
and rubbings. Considering this, a notion of temporal regimes holds a cen-
tral place which allows to be addressed the structure of time as homogen-
eity – as long as the regime indicates the existence of stable conditions or
patterns – while, at the same time, it enables the study of more than one tem-
poral scheme, showing how time works in various fields and social conditions.
In other words, the narrow old spatio-temporal barriers tend to homogenise
a global society; at the same time that a multicultural clash initiates not only
a decentralised, multiple experience of time and their connections but also
their frictions. For the latter, the notion of temporal regime addresses the
structure of time as (1) a long-term dimension of homogeneity, pointing out
the existence of stable conditions; (2) while enabling the visibility of several
schemes reckoning temporal heterogeneities. This analytical tool grasps the
global temporal phenomena as unavoidable inquiry within current societies.

Global temporalities
The idea of globalisation is heavily relevant for grasping both the homoge-
neous and heterogeneous levels. However, in general terms, I would not say
146 Conclusions

that this is a work centred around globalisation. I use the term in a broader
sense, considering the existence of an increasingly interconnected and ‘shared’
world. Since this is a work on tendencies that creates standard temporal
dynamics, and because temporalities involve focus in economics and politics
that are closely connected with global conditions (such as one standardised
universal clock, markets, politics), a global stance is unavoidable. At the same
time, it is a work on heterogeneities, which means that global tendencies have
a counter-face by which localism, particularities, biographies and geographies
have their own rhythms, velocities and paces that coexist with global flows.
These multiple, temporal phenomena are not produced by globalisation as
such, but incorporated into it. In other words, the diversity is not an out-
come of liberal Western democracies, rather a threshold over which their pol-
itics works. Heterogeneities are a socio-historical factum everywhere and not
a result of modern claims for cosmopolitanism and pluralism. Conversely,
these global tendencies try to deal with them by incorporating them into a
homogeneous universal scale.
Subsequently, I suggest thinking of the temporal modern condition as both
homogenising and heterogenising. I propose that current temporal structures
involve both general trends towards homogenisation of temporal patterns as
a universal coordinated time alongside linear ideas about the history; as well
as multiple experiences depending on hallmark uses and the unequal distri-
bution of time, making it feasible to speak about heterogeneous regimes. At
this point, it is not possible to say what dimension is clearly preponderant.
However, there are several theorists (Harvey 1985; Virilio 1986; Rancière
2011; Rosa 2013) who describe current times under accelerated, linear and
standardised categories. This invites one to emphasise the homogeneous char-
acter of global times, and even deeper, if we consider that these phenomena
are closely related to Western values, which are also dominant, we can con-
sider the globalisation and their consequences also as a cultural homogenisa-
tion process (in economic, political or technical levels). In this sense, ‘global
tendencies’ are trends to one big order, one global culture (society or village),
and for this reason, they constitute a regime of homogenisation.
Conversely, heterogeneities are not outcomes of globalisation by them-
selves, at least, not if we consider that diversity occurs where life is. The
heterogeneities identified here result both from social categories (such as
class, gender, age) and from a worldwide framework in which we can compare
them (south–north, east–west). Let me put it this way: the heterogeneities are
classified and ordered (compared and separated) according to the concepts
of social theory that are the ‘glasses’ by which we see global phenomena,
and also heterogeneities exceed what is classifiable since they are potentially
countless and in incessant movement. In this sense, not only emerging phe-
nomena, vanguards and social movements but also what is still unknown
can be involved in the heterogeneous or, at least, as the matter from which
they come.
 Conclusions 147

Having said that, the focus of this book inquiry is on Western societies,
but accepting input on conditions from other places is also relevant in order
to complement and challenge arguments that indicate, depending on the
case, tendencies to homogenisation or heterogenisation on a global scale. As
I exposed in Chapters 1 and 2, to proceed in this way is advisable since time is
not just an abstract nor neutral aspect in contemporary societies, but a con-
crete mechanism of administration and organisation of life itself, considering
that it is also an approach on politics of time and modernity, and, as stated
in Chapters 2 and 4, we gain a conceptual tool for understanding other
perspectives of temporal regimes (such as acceleration) and varieties (pres-
entism, futurism, utopia), as well as temporal frictions (primitive vs advanced
societies; evolutionism or progress). This approach could provide new tools
for social theory in order to understand underexplored aspects of temporal
dimensions in the contemporary world. Which are these underexplored
aspects? As explained above in more detail, the lack of synthesis between
explanations of social time which, on the one hand, explain general trends
(such as acceleration) and, on the other hand, describe particular temporal-
ities (differentiated by urban, sacred, class or gender categories to name a few)
reckoning the existence of multiple temporal expressions. Following that,
this book has proposed a theoretical alternative which connects both sides
through the notion of ‘temporal regime’. In this sense, it is possible to con-
ceive both the general character of social time and their multiple and diver-
sified manifestations. According to this, I state that contemporary societies
are characterised by the acceleration process, but this is only one temporal
regime out of many others, even though its influence is dominant among most
of them. Temporal regimes are distinguishable, but many times they are also
co-implicated. A white student from a middle-urban class could experience
a more accelerated pace of life regarding her upcoming placement in high
school, while an indigenous student with a low-urban class background does
not feel the same pressure since her future depends likely less on academic
scores: maybe she has more concerns about how to get an employment right
after school rather to think about university studies; even when both belong
to an accelerated metropolitan fashion in comparison to a slower rural place.
The last example shows some difficulties in generalising a temporal experi-
ence without giving room to fruitful intersectional analyses.
With a focus on clashes and hierarchies of homogenisation and
heterogenisation of time, it is necessary to observe how this operates at
administrative, organisational and political levels. A temporal regime in terms
of progress develops a teleological perspective which is conducted through
several temporal orders and administrations from governments, public pol-
icies, regimes of work and production, organising time in periods, cycles and
journeys according to standardised measures. In this regard, the very writing
process of this book was in a first moment focused on clashes, hierarchies and
the co-constitution of different social temporalities. Nevertheless, in a second
148 Conclusions

moment, I have realised that those layers are always implicated with all kinds
of managements and organisational orders (in individual life as ‘steps’ from
birth, like kindergarten, school, university/institute, work, marriage, children,
travels, holidays, old age, retirement, etc.) which means that it is necessary, at
least, to take an overview on how time is used as a ‘commodity’ (planning/
scheduling politics over life for instance) until determining the process of life
itself changing clocks on summer–winter seasons; stages of life (childhood,
adulthood, younghood); even forecast for planting and harvest (or popula-
tion estimate rates, animal reproduction, etc.)
Having this in mind, I afterwards realised that the utility of the term regime
resides in two main general conditions. On the one hand, regime is related
to particular repetitive and stable conditions that constitute unity. This unity
is even better recognised as homogeneity inside of what is possible to find
regular and reiterative patterns in which time is involved. For example, as
shown in Chapter 4, regularities as linear conceptions of time, with evolu-
tionary perspectives and secularised conceptions in history, create conditions
for a temporal regime in terms of progress; or perspectives about possible
futures and uncertain human incidence on the fate of history settle a tem-
poral regime in terms of utopia.
Subsequently, the concept of regime has the potential for considering more
than one pattern of regularity. In this sense, it is possible to think simul-
taneously about various regimes in parallel or interacting with each other:9
acceleration patterns coexisting with ‘slow food’ movements; measurable-
standardised global clocks in parallel to sacred, mystic and non-rational ideas
on time; futurist perspectives with presentist or romantic paths; urban versus
rural paces; as well as differentiations by gender, age or even occupation. By
using the notion of temporal regimes, it is possible to have an overview of
several phenomena that are usually considered isolated but can have deep
connections among them, as I have demonstrated: a material time (Chapter 1);
a standardised clock-time and its implications on a working day basis, as well
as within education and pension systems (Chapter 2); non-sacred time and
liberal or progressive politics; advanced vs delayed societies/communities
and ideas related to the philosophy of history in terms of evolutionism (also
Chapter 2); the use of technics and technologies of and over temporal aspects
(Chapter 3); and the concept of acceleration with regard to utopia and pro-
gress (Chapter 4).10
Some of the main sources considered when building up this concept were
Hartog’s notion of ‘regime of historicity’ and Koselleck’s Gleichzeitigkeit
des Ungleichzeitigen (contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous) and
multiple temporalities but also Foucault and Althusser for the affinities and
differences of their dispositive and apparatus concepts with regime. I used the
notions of apparatus and dispositive as concepts related to regime, pointing
out useful meanings from them but also stressing their differences. These are
notions that I explored in depth to develop the notion of multiple regimes
 Conclusions 149

and their relation to different, yet connected, phenomena. Elias was also
a strong reference regarding the notion of social time as a mechanism of
social coordination as well as its utility for standardising a measure of time
with social purposes. However, the crucial consideration of these inputs
was the notion of material time. In my opinion, all of these perspectives
(with different emphases) are crossed by a material understanding of time
since they do not assume temporal concepts as isolated from their socio-
historical basis. Far from an abstract or neutral notion, Chapter 1 states
that time is an operative dimension for several social and cultural processes.
It encompasses the material aspect of everyday life. The purpose in this part
is to provide a coherent concept for the stabilities, hierarchies and social
orders that compose temporal regimes as exemplified with the bond between
the concepts of utopia, progress and acceleration with a ‘futurisation’ of
history (Chapter 4).
Therefore, a notion of temporal regime does not try to belong to any
tradition in particular, although it is close to many of them. The temporal
regimes thesis follows the same path as critical theory and cultural studies,
namely, to envelop a diagnosis of the contemporary society and a criticism
afterwards. However, beyond trying to be a ‘true’ adherent to a discipline
or what one may call a ‘school of thought’, this work seeks to be a useful
analytical tool and, where possible, a critical one. By critical I do not refer
to a never-ending profitable yet useless contestant position. The task of
critical theory is not to be ‘rebel without a cause’ but instead to inquire
about the historical conditions in order to have a better grasp on them
and, only then, to point out aspects of uncontested alienation. Especially
in the field of temporal studies, an apparently iniquitous and soft course
of critical theory, the first claim should be focused on showing the highly
sophisticated manner through which temporal regimes shaped social order
in so many regards. The task at hand is thus double: firstly, to reveal con-
vincing dimensions on the relevance of temporal regimes for social and
historical understandings; and, secondly, to visualise critical yields when
necessary. Notwithstanding, when the conditions are different, for instance,
facing brutal authoritarianism in several parts of the world (Torres 2020),
an excess of speculation can be counterproductive and Adorno’s next words
should resonate again:

there are quite definite concepts where you cannot get by without a certain
measure of simplification if you want to avoid the pitfalls of ideology. It
is necessary to employ these concepts with the same simplicity and bru-
tality as the reality to which they refer. We must differentiate as much as
we can, but where the bestiality and the primitive nature of reality speak,
we should take care not to lend them a helping hand by indulging in an
excess of differentiation.
(2006:141)
150 Conclusions

Simultaneous but non- synchronic times

In a broader sense, without being interested in defining one perspective, this
has been a work that can be situated in a critical viewpoint. Even though
it is not located in just one theoretical framework because there are sev-
eral influences coming fundamentally from conceptual history (Koselleck,
Hölscher) and the philosophy of history (Löwith, Blumenberg), it is closely
related to Critical Theory as a whole. From Foucault and Rancière, but also
ideas from members of the Frankfurt School as Marcuse (with his book One
Dimensional Man) or post-structuralist sociology (like Pierre Bourdieu’s ana-
lysis of time experience by social fields), this work has developed a material
characterisation of regimes of homogeneity as social struggle outcomes
between the knowledge and uses of time, as well as dominant perspectives
over social spheres.
In fact, one of the biggest concepts used to describe social orders and
structures is Althusser’s idea of apparatus. This concept is too rigid for the
purposes of this investigation and supposes a precise control over society
as a whole, making its use highly arguable in contemporary technological,
biopolitical and digital orders. In this sense, the Foucauldian notion of disposi-
tive elaborates a better understanding of adjustments over bodies, emotions,
knowledge, machines and behaviours. Then, the idea of dispositive is better
connected with the notion of regime as used in this paper. The dispositive
as ‘disposition’ (both as distribution in a plane space and subjective willing-
ness/readiness to others, things, tastes)11 of practices, orders, knowledges but
also bodies and natures in functional and instrumental manners provides a
useful approach to understanding the ‘order of things’ through a temporal
perspective. The dispositive as a mechanism that operates without ‘centre’
claims for specific layouts that turns individuals as ‘promoters’ of themselves.
To put this in temporal terms, individuals need to organise their behaviours in
periods, deadlines and time limits according to energy, money and/or efforts
to be more attractive or competitive, for example, by learning a new language
(to be more competitive in the job market), playing a musical instrument (to
be more attractive in social relations) or spending time with relatives, friends,
in travels or holidays (to rest and feel energy ‘charge’), but also in long-term
horizons as time for formation (increasing job skills for a craft or profession),
having children or moving from one place to another.
However, as shown in Chapter 1, the limit of the notion of dispositive
is that it does not identify accurately changing order(s) over ‘technologies
of the self’, while the notion of regime defines historically and today liquid
forms of dominance as politics of time that are produced in very precise fields
(such as state policies and neoliberal political economy) and forms of accel-
eration, as well as ideas about development, progress and/or expectations. In
other words, regime indicates a ‘realm’ under which practices and things are
distributed but also determines its dominances and the plausibility of change
 Conclusions 151

considering that every reign (realm or dominance) can be changed over time.
Through this concept, both sides are theoretically covered: the level of sta-
bility and the transformation of the social via temporal dynamics.
In addition, with this book, I pursued the sentence of Felix Guattari
whereby “[t]he aim of theory is to produce new, more heuristic theoretical
object” (1984: 3). While it is true that this work can mostly be allocated to
social and cultural studies, especially to social theory, it is also a disclosed
goal to straddle the boundaries between disciplines. This claim explains the
unusual shift from categories of analysis as general as the ‘temporalisation
of history’ to mid-range levels and micro-studies such as time politics in
‘governments’ and, then, specifically by membership groups (gender, age,
class). In the same way, the transversality that I have followed “is a dimension
that tries to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere
horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is a maximum communica-
tion among different levels and, above all, in different meanings” (Guattari
1984: 18). Thus, the two opposite theoretical explanations mentioned in the
Introduction of this work are explained by condensing the analysis into a tem-
poral regimes frame. Within them I bring horizontal as well as vertical tem-
poral analyses, but also across them and complementing their explanations
into diverse disciplines,12 as summarised in Figure C.2.
This figure represents the mutual influence of the multiple regimes that can
be founded into the society within bigger trends that define the general char-
acteristic of an epoch. Thus, there is a temporal structure in modernity which
is not fully homogeneous and which encompasses the heterogeneous aspect
of every reality. At the same time, there is a general path, a contingent uni-
versal tendency, that veils every singular individuality. The form in which late

Homogeneous regimes
Level of
Modernity
generality

Sacred time Measurable Administrable

time time

Religious Scientific Economics/ Level of

group politics specificity

Heterogeneous regimes

Figure C.2 Generality and specificity levels regarding homogeneity and heterogeneity.
152 Conclusions

capitalism shapes temporal relations embeds homogeneous and heteroge-

neous tendencies.
Moreover, with the temporal regimes thesis I have exposed that what is
regular is maintained or repeated over time: then what remains can be
assumed to be an immutable part of the reality where no other forces
oppose it, i.e., something permanent over time. As I showed, there are sev-
eral aspects involved for producing repetition: from conceptual and his-
torical emergences to political and economic projects among many others.
Nonetheless, this repetition or iterance is defeated by the frenetic innovations
that characterise current times. Consequently, how can permanence coexist
with change? A sketch on this was addressed in Chapter 2 and the section
above: there is movement without revolution. One of the oddest and most
incredible characteristics of contemporaneity is its capacity to deal with these
two opposing forces. In other words, to keep some static aspects that do not
change or, rather, do not change at the same speed as the others.13 Then, not
only is disclosing temporal regimes involved in contemporary societies fun-
damental to grasping the patterns of repetition but also to understanding
the rate of change: with modifications is possible to point out the pace of
living since when more change take place, the perceived rhythm becomes
faster. Radical transformations, such as revolutions, move the pace of his-
tory in an extremely rapid fashion, while moderate or superficial alteration
could emphasise the movement of society without a significant change. The
current state of technology, political and global phenomena can reveal some
unattended logics that are almost undiscerned without a temporal frame.14
Furthermore, it is possible to distinguish two logics from the tie between
repetition and change: on the one hand, there are necessary aspects that do
not mutate, but rather are still permanent and repetitive, while others are in
constant modification. This is close to what Rosa calls ‘dynamic stabilisation’.
On the other hand, it is feasible to discern a second feature wherein a temporal
direction towards an increasing number of ‘improvements’ and innovations
occurs without structural transformations. Movement without revolution, or
rather dynamism without transformation. An obvious, everyday example of
this is YouTube: meanwhile its appearance signified a digital revolution in the
access to visual material of all kinds (music videos, archives, documentaries,
reports, films, etc.), at the same time, it did not produce a radical change in the
economic conditions of a ‘free market’. Of course, yes within the logics of free
market: rather the opposite effect was set since it was easily accommodated in
the form of monetary retribution via payment advertising for those who have
material with high views.
Taking this in mind, I can state that one of the main conclusions of this
work is that we live in simultaneous but non-synchronic times. Human and
non-human entities envelop their own temporalities that, although they take
place at the same world time, are not synchronised. Modifying slightly the
‘simultaneous of the non-simultaneous’ sentence I argue that we are now
 Conclusions 153

facing the ‘simultaneousness of the non-synchronic’ meaning that we share

a world space that although highly interconnected does not involve the same
temporalities. This was likely the case across history, but today the tremen-
dously intertwined world give rise to a more notorious decoupled exchange.
Examples such as the circulation of commodities from one continent to
another, ranging from production conditions that are not easily compar-
able – crossing oceans to execute and satisfy lifestyles that are not typical of
a region because of its climatic or cultural conditions – show how societies in
different states of composition are forced to interact in a global market that
connects them. Subsequently, the economic process links them but does not
synchronise them (or just synchronise them at the production and consump-
tion levels).
Finally, I also distinguish a second cluster of temporal regimes which are
connected directly or indirectly with time. The first ones are closely networked
with traditional temporal notions such as present, past and future. This is the
case when François Hartog labelled as ‘presentism’ the current historical pro-
cess or different socio-political concepts of history which I here develop as
temporal perspective in terms of ‘futurism’ (Chapter 4), while other regimes
are constituted by rhythms, cycles and speeds. In the second instance, the tem-
poral dimension is more related to the velocity within a social process. This
is the case with temporal regimes as acceleration or delays. Even a third dis-
tinction is possible when referring to synchronies or desynchronies between
social fields and the simultaneity of social phenomena. In this regard, the case
of romantic movements who vindicate past fashion and lifestyles15 is one of
the most evident examples, but this could also be extended to include different
stances in social fields such as law or politics where rules or decisions are not
updated with the latest social conditions, or they need, on the other hand,
to return to old jurisdictions and past decisions to get better solutions for
contemporary or future verdicts. Therefore, in contemporary societies, syn-
chronicity and simultaneity are also conditions that should be produced and
gained. This is quite visible in moments of crisis and transformation, when
everything seems to be outdated, such as a time that is not coupled with itself.
It just remains to pinpoint that meanwhile my analysis has been focused on
the recent West history, I do not rule out that this study can be applied to other
historical contexts or other cultural formations. Quite the opposite: if the
project has been well developed and argued, the concept of temporal regime
should be able to be adopted to diverse historico-geoghraphic processes.

Notes
1 Especially “The Dialectic of Labor and Time”. In Postone words,
[a]lthough the measure of value is time, the totalizing mediation expressed by
‘socially necessary labor time’ is not a movement of time but a metamorphosis
of substantial time into abstract time in space, as it were, from the particular to
154 Conclusions

the general and back. This mediation in space constitutes an abstract, homoge-
neous temporal frame that is unchanging and serves as the measure of motion.
Individual activity then takes place in, and is measured with reference to,
abstract time but cannot change that time.
(1993: 294; my italics)
2 According to Sennett, this was already fulfilled with Fordism:
[t]he fears Adam Smith and Marx harbored of routine time passed into our
own century as the phenomenon called Fordism. It is in Fordism that we can
most fully document the apprehension Smith had about the industrial capit-
alism just emerging at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in the
place for which Fordism was named.
(1998: 73)
3 In the introduction to Social Acceleration, Rosa states that:
it can hardly be surprising that in countless works of social science (and not
only second-rate ones) one finds the crude and unqualified assertion that in
modern or contemporary society absolutely everything is accelerating … That
this is false hardly bears mentioning. Even a cursory glance at daily life shows
that a wide array of processes are slowing down (most unhappily, for example,
in traffic and legislative deadlock), while others stubbornly resist any attempts
at acceleration (the most palpable here are those relating to one’s own body,
e.g., colds and pregnancies).
(2013: 22–23)
4 In other words,
this process of Landnahme [appropiation] is inextricably accompanied –across
all formational phases – by a constant tendency towards social ‘acceleration’,
which can be understood as the compulsion to increase the speed of circu-
lation, determining not only the logic of economic change, but also that of
cultural and political changes. Moreover, it is no coincidence that Landnahme
(in reality as well as metaphorically) and acceleration appear as spatial and
temporal tendencies of change, respectively: the movement of capital leads
to a continuous, directed, gradual change of the spatio-temporal regime.
Formational shifts can thus also always be conceived as revolutions of the
social conceptualisation and cultivation of space and time, although these
revolutions are accompanied by critical aggravation and possibly adhere to a
more general logic of escalation (as, for instance, David Harvey tries to encap-
sulate with his term ‘time-space-compression’.
(Dörre et al. 2015: 593–594;
epub version)
5 In Social Acceleration (2013), Rosa, following the creative German translation of
Paul Virilio’s Polar Inertia, develops this concept in a more accurate way.
6 With all their differences and consequences, a short overview upon the most
relevant economic crisis from the last century and this one makes the argument
explicit: 1929–1973–1980–1997–2008.
7 As it is well-known, Mauss defines the idea of total social fact as a dimension that
cross almost every aspect of social life. In the following terms:
 Conclusions 155

These phenomena are at once legal, aesthetic, morphological and so on. They
are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and
diffuse morality; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or
disapproval. They are at once political and domestic, being of interest both to
classes and to clans and families.
(Mauss 1966: 76)
8 Macro/modern/global vs multiple/diverse/heterogeneous temporal tendencies.
9 For sure the quality of being one and multiple is not exclusive from the regime
notion. It is easily verifiable that we can find the same feature in several concepts
such as pattern, structure, apparatus or dispositive. The conceptual regime
distinctions as I used here were already established deeper in Chapter 1.
10 An overview upon this will be summed up in Figure C.2.
11 This dual character of the word is clearer in the Latin Languages. In Spanish
disposición, Italian disposizione, Portuguese disposição and French disposition, the
word implies ‘be geared towards’ as well as the ‘distribution of things’ in a cer-
tain space.
12 But even from the individual experience of everyday life is feasible to get examples
of temporary overlaps. The use of technology provides a good example: now, in
2019, I watch the Alexander Kluge’s film Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige
Zeit [The assault of the present on the rest of time] from 1985 that in turn speaks
about the course of the time in the individual and the collective life, pointing
out several historical epochs like modern, medieval and prehistorical times; even
though I am in front of my laptop at the beginning of the 21st century.
13 As stated by Postone,
[b]ecause so many aspects of social life are transformed more and more rapidly
as capitalism develops, the unchanging underlying structures of that society –
for example, the fact that labor is an indirect means of life for individuals – can
be taken to be eternal, socially ‘natural’ aspects of the human condition. As
a result, the possibility of a future qualitatively different from modern society
can be veiled.
(1993: 300–301)
14 To this respect, this thesis proposes that the contemporary times are crossed by
different velocities that do not deny a general path towards a homogeneous tem-
poral regime. In Postone words:
[t]he notion that the commodity form is the ultimate ground for capitalism’s
complex historical dynamic calls into question any transhistorical opposition
between a conception of history either as a single, homogeneous process or
as the result of the intersections of a variety of social processes with their
own temporalities … the historically dynamic character of capitalism suggests
that although capitalism is not necessarily marked by a unitary, synchronous,
homogeneous historical process, it is, as a whole, historically dynamic in a
way that distinguishes it from other forms of social life. The relations among
various social levels and processes are organized differently than they would
be in a non-capitalist society; they become embedded in a general, socially
constituted, temporally directional, dialectical framework.
(1993: 306)
156 Conclusions

15 Although a quite arguable thesis on the decline of the individualism, Michel

Maffesoli coined the term ‘urban tribes’ to describe the social phenomena
of groups promoting different lifestyles connected with dissimilar temporal
backgrounds (among other characteristics).
If I chose to use the word ‘tribe’ … it was to show that we are witnessing a
return to what used to be thought of as outdated. Today in the concrete jungles
that are our contemporary megacities, there is a need to stick together.
(Janin 2014)
More details in Maffesoli (1996). Just to mention some examples of urban
tribes: chaps, people who enjoy this trend like to revive the clothes and mannerisms
of the 1940s; rockabillies who celebrate classic rock played by the likes of Elvis
Presley, Carl Perkins and Bill Haley.

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Index
Note: Page numbers with an ‘n’ denote notes.
5G technology 103
absolute time 142
abstracts/abstraction 7– 8, 30, 88– 92, 93,
94, 137– 138, 149
acceleration, progress and utopia, tie
between 110, 131– 133, 149; and
change 131; futuristic structure
131– 132; historical level 111; political
level 110– 111; relations with repetition
131; temporal level 111
acceleration(s) 4, 41, 68, 90, 121– 131,
138, 140, 153; and alienation 69; and
contemporary societies 61; definition
of 111; effective by force 130– 131;
as frenetic standstill 71; history and
human efforts 130; identification of
regularities of change 34; as intrinsic
phenomenon of modern times 129;
making up for lost time via 125;
patterns coexisting with ‘slow food’
movement 22; process of 37; and
progress 126; progressive expectations
about 73– 74; promotion by utopian
motifs 121; with regard to utopia
and progress 148; and repetition of
changes 22, 131; and secularisation
57; of societal processes 2; of socio-
historical processes 77
achievements 6, 22, 50– 56, 114, 115,
125– 126
activation, and capitalism 140
Actor– Network– Theory (ANT) 15n9
actualisation 89, 138; of future 120;
and temporal virtuality 101, 103; of
tradition 60
Adam, Barbara 15n4
administration of life 49– 50, 57, 64– 65,
147– 148
Adorno, T.W. 113– 114, 149
advanced societies/communities 20, 22,
48, 66, 71– 72, 86, 147, 148
Albuquerque, C. 36
Alliez, Eric 35, 40
Althusser, Louis 29, 42n8, 148, 150
analogue and digital moments,
difference between 99– 100
analogue moment 96, 97– 100
Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige
Zeit, Der (film) 155n12
another history, possibility of 56, 114
Anthropocene 14, 16n10, 112
anti-ageing technology 63, 98– 99
apolitical technology 86
apparatus 28, 29, 42n8, 148, 150
appropriation, and capitalism 140
artefacts 83, 84, 85, 91, 94, 102, 137
articulability 38
articulation 39– 40
Assmann, Aleida 26
associative capacity 103
Atkinson, Will 42n9
Augé, Marc 96
automation 7, 12; growth of 86, 104;
Industrial Revolution 85– 86; process
88
autonomy 3, 53, 64, 99, 143
Auyero, Javier 29
Avenessian, Armen 141
Bauman, Zygmunt 13, 82, 90, 94, 95,
97– 98

Benjamin, Walter 55– 56, 78n7
Benz, Ernst 57
Bergson, Henri 5, 7
bio-market 72
biopolitics 7, 62, 65, 66, 67; biological
time 62– 63; definition of 62;
governmentality 47, 62, 65; material
dimension for 63; and power over
time 63; time politics 62, 63; and time
politics 63
biopowers 63
Birth, Kevin 84, 89, 91, 94, 105
Bloch, Ernst 15n2, 26, 41– 42n5,
134n3
Blumenberg, Hans 51, 115, 127; on
acceleration 53, 125, 126, 130; on
acceleration and secularisation 57; on
future 117, 122; on institutions and
lifetime 62; lifetime and world time,
scission between 51, 77n1, 123; on
material aspect of time 14, 15n8; on
measurement of time 104; on progress
52, 115– 116
Bolshevik revolution 139
Borges, Jorge Luis 7
Bourdieu, Pierre 15n3, 30, 77n2
Brown, Saskia 15n5
Bruno, Giordano 40
Buck-Morss, Susan 139
bureaucracies 12, 62, 64, 65, 68, 88
calendars 36, 82, 83, 84, 89, 94
Callinicos, Alex 56
Callon, Michael 15n9
campus 15n3
capitalism 26– 27, 68– 69, 142; and
activation 140; appropriation 140;
capitalistic forces 138; late capitalism
68, 74, 86, 133, 152
change 68, 128, 152; permanence of 31,
51; regularities, and acceleration 34;
and repetition, connection between
70, 128; repetition of 22, 124– 131,
140; rhythm 124– 125; social change
54; see also transformations
chaos 29
Chernilo, Daniel 134n5
Christian notion of time 6
Christian perspective on history 114– 115
chronology 25, 27, 37, 47, 118
cinematic timing, and historicity
101– 102
Index 159
cinematography, indexicality of 101
climate change 2
clocks 2, 4, 21– 22, 83, 94, 148
collective actions 25, 29, 38, 56, 113, 117,
138– 139, 141
collective singular 52– 53
communication: digital communication
2; electronic communication 100;
information and communications
technology (ICT) 82, 95– 96, 98; mass
production of 97; social media 95, 96,
103; see also interactions
Conceptual History 7, 28, 42n7, 110,
116, 150
conceptual history 150
concrete practices 25, 89– 90, 132
concrete times 138
contemporaneity 152
contemporaneousness of the non-
contemporaneous 20, 26, 145, 148
contemporary high-speed quality of
society 5
contemporary societies: and acceleration
process 48– 49, 147; and temporal
practices 49
contemporary times 20– 21, 72, 122, 124,
145, 155n14
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
84– 85, 91– 92, 94
Cordero, Rodrigo 43n14
cosmopolitanism 1, 3, 141, 146
crises of time 33, 34
cultural exchange 3, 141, 143
cultural flows 3, 67, 141
cultural studies 110, 137, 142, 151;
technics and technologies 85;
temporal regime 22, 25– 26, 35– 36; on
time 2, 5, 6– 7
current times 13, 26, 33, 76, 110, 121,
129, 146, 152
cycles, organisation of time 147,
153
Davis, Kathleen 47
decelerations 4, 9, 41, 68, 70, 140
De Certeau, Michel 77n2
DeLanda, Manuel 137
delayed societies/communities 20, 22,
145, 148
delays 29– 30, 63, 68, 124– 125, 128, 130,
153
Deleuze, Gilles 28
160 Index
democracy 47, 68, 71, 78n13; liberal
democracy 3, 68, 75, 141, 143, 144,
148; outside formal politics 72;
processes 74; time of 71
despatialisation 13, 88, 89– 90, 97, 104,
137
desynchronies 33, 48, 74, 88, 153
deterritorialisation of time 13, 88– 96,
97, 137
Deus ex machina 105n1
difference minorities 3
differentiation 5, 22, 69, 72, 124, 148
digital era 95– 96
digitalisation 7, 12, 85, 96
digital moment 97, 99– 103
digital temporality 85, 96– 97; and
analogue moment 97– 99; digital
moment 99– 103
discipline, and regime 8, 32
disembodiment of time 90
dispositives 28– 29, 32, 57, 66, 148,
150– 151
diversity 1, 29, 146; of regimes 32; of
simultaneous times in contemporary
world 2, 20, 144– 145; standardisation
of 39; of temporal structures 9
Doane, Ann 92– 93
domination over nature 114, 116, 141
Dörre, Klaus 26– 27, 154n4
Durkheim, Emile 66
dynamic stabilisation 24, 69, 140 152
dynamism without transformation 152
economics/economy 41, 48, 146, 151;
acceleration of 69; crisis 140, 154n6;
free market 68– 69; global economics
143; rhythms of 88; social life as 10;
speed of 69
educational system 7, 22, 61, 62, 63, 65,
131, 133, 148
election period, as political time 74
electronic communication 100
Elias, Norbert 1, 10, 35– 36, 83, 94, 149
empty times 30, 78n7, 91
Engels, Friedrich 133
Evans-Pritchard, E. 90
everyday life: multiple temporality 67;
organisation, and utopia 118– 119;
power relations within 40; technology
104; technology in 84, 99, 104,
155n12; temporal politics of 65; and
time 7, 149
evolutionism 5, 22, 112, 132, 147, 148;
see also progress
exactness 84
Fabian, Johannes 1, 2, 20, 47, 48, 62,
66– 67
fantasy 120, 121– 122
filled times 30
films 89, 95, 101– 102
Fleming, Sandford 93– 94
food 64, 65– 66, 85
Fordism 139, 154n2
Foucault, Michel 28, 39, 62– 63, 66, 148
Frankfurt School Critical Theory 69
French Revolution 56, 74
frenetic standstill 69– 70, 71, 129, 140
Freud, Sigmund 38– 39
future 29, 56, 59– 60, 61, 100;
actualisation 120; expectations about
74; open future 22, 29, 54, 56, 74– 75,
111, 117, 132, 141; and past– present,
division between 60; potentiality of
100; and progress 117– 118, 123– 124;
standardisation of 71; and utopia 120,
123– 124
futurisation 37, 119, 137, 149; and
experience of temporality 129; of
history 48; phantasmagoric structure
of 121, 122– 123; politics, and
temporalisation of history 50– 57; of
social process 111
futurism 9, 41, 147, 153
gaining time 84, 97, 126
gender gap, in time distribution 6
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe 110
ghosts 121, 122, 123, 133
Giddens, Anthony 2, 20
Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen
15n2
Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen
(contemporaneity of the non-
contemporaneous) 20, 26, 145, 148
Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen
(simultaneity of the non-
simultaneous) 3, 15n6, 23– 24, 26, 152
globalisation 1, 2, 143, 145– 146
global society 3, 23, 141, 144, 145
global temporalities 84– 85, 145– 149
global time 4, 94, 146
global warming 4, 14, 128
Goethe, J.W. 54

governmentality 12, 32, 63, 75, 77;
biopolitics 47, 62, 65; temporal
regimes 38, 40– 41
Guattari, Felix 151
Gurvitch, Georges 3, 87
Habermas, Jürgen 133n1
habitus 15n3
Harootunian, Harry 73
Hartog, François 2, 8, 20, 31– 32, 40,
148, 153; definition of regimes 32;
notion of regime 8– 9; regimes of
historicity 33
Harvey, David 2, 20, 47
Hassan, Robert 49
health insurance 62
health systems 24, 61, 63– 64, 65, 133
Heidegger, Martin 5, 7
heterochrony 75, 76
heterogeneities 1, 5, 146, 151; and
globalisation 145– 146; regimes 146,
151
heterogeneous interactions 105
heterogeneous materiality 28
heterogeneous potential of technologies
104– 105
heterogeneous temporalities 24, 142– 145
heterogeneous time 76
heterogenisation 21, 23, 141, 147; global
scale 147; starting point 142– 143;
tendencies towards 141
hierarchy of positions 71
historical acceleration 6, 52, 70
historical consciousness 10, 14, 31, 51,
60, 132
historical dimension 142
historical materialism 55, 127
historical movement 113, 131
historical nominalism/historical
ontology 28
historical progress 114, 115
historical times 31, 33, 138; definition
of 51; division between past– present
and future 60; and expansion 59;
experience and expectation 33; and
politicisation 51; and politics 60; and
social totality 52; and society 51
historicity 8, 52; and cinematic timing
101– 102; regimes of 9, 20, 25, 31– 34,
40, 148
historic-philosophical approach 48
historisation 52, 90
Index 161
history: experience as source of
understanding 123; and human
activity 56– 57; human beings as
in-charge of 56; linear concept of
4– 5, 116; occurring through time
53; oralisation of 111; religious
perspective on 114; secular point
of view on 114– 115; teleological
conception of 61, 132, 141; temporal
politicisation of 57; as temporal
process with political intentions 53– 54
Hölscher, Lucian 51
homogeneities 1, 2, 24, 29, 139
homogeneous-abstract time 138
homogeneous controlled movement 140
homogeneous potential of technologies
104– 105
homogeneous time 71– 72, 91– 92, 93
homogenisation 3, 5, 49, 84, 93,
141; agents of 140– 141; and
diversification of modern times 2;
and diversifications 5; of present, and
standardisation of futures 71; starting
point 142– 143
Horkheimer, Max 114
housing insurance 62
HUAWEI case 103
human agency 41, 47– 48, 50, 56, 77,
138
human destiny 54, 117
human nature 127
human reality 85, 113, 126
Husserl, Edmund 5, 7, 35
image technology 101
imagination 120, 121, 122, 131
immediacy 82
impersonal measurements 84, 88, 90,
91, 93
in-between times 9, 32– 33
individualisation 69
individuals, organisation of behaviours
150
individuation 41n4, 42n12, 142
industrial development 116
industrial era 83, 85
Industrial Revolution, stages of 85
inequalities 72, 76
information and communications
technology (ICT) 82, 95– 96
innovations 24, 69, 74, 99, 124, 152;
and acceleration 105, 128– 129, 131;
162 Index
recurrence of 128; repetition of 128;
and repetition 124; technological
innovation 1, 2
instantaneity 96, 104; of digital
communication 2; of interactions
96– 97; shaping of 99– 103
instantaneousness 95, 137
institutions 6, 40, 60, 63, 74, 78n8;
compulsory schooling 58; influence on
projective temporal experience 58; and
life stage 62; in shaping the experience
of time 58; and society 57– 58
instrumentalisation 13, 69, 84– 85, 86,
87
interactions 84; control over 103; and
digital temporality 96– 97, 100;
heterogeneous 105; history of 96; in
real time 100; social media 95, 96, 103;
uniform frameworks for 1; see also
communication
internet 1, 21, 96, 101, 103
Internet of Things (IoT) 103
Irmscher, Hans Dietrich 43n13
iterability 38– 39
iterance 128, 129, 152
Janin, Daniel 156n15
Jordheim, Helge 15n6, 23– 24
Juengst, Eric 98
Kern, Stephen 102
Kieślowski, Krzysztof 101
Kluge, Alexander 155n12
Koselleck, Reinhart 33, 34, 42n6, 49,
59, 120, 132; on acceleration 124;
Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen
3, 15n2, 15n6, 20, 23– 24, 26, 145,
148, 152; on history and time 90; on
modern world and historical moment
59; on new time 53, 54, 118, 123– 124;
progress, utopia and acceleration
110– 111, 116; on repetition and
change 128; saddle-time 105– 106n3;
temporal constitution of modernity 7,
15n2; on utopia 118– 119, 121
Latin American independence 74
Latour, Bruno 15n9
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 134n4
Lianeri, Alexandra 37
liberal democracy 3, 68, 75, 141, 143,
144, 148
life 28, 48; administration of 49– 50,
57, 64– 65, 147– 148; biopolitics
7; caring of 64; distribution of 6;
instrumentalisation 86; ordering of
61– 62; organisation of 147; paces of
125; production and reproduction
64– 65; production process 65– 66;
rationalities and technologies 65;
rhythm of 69, 125; stage 48, 62; and
technology 11– 12; and time frames 2
life extension: and old age, relationship
between 99; technology 63, 98– 99
lifespan: organisation of 83; and
technology 11, 98
lifetime and world time, scission between
51, 77n1, 123
linear progression 112, 132
Löw, Martina 106n6
Löwith, Karl 50, 114– 115
Lübbe, Hermann 2
Luhmann, Niklas 37, 75
machine: definition 88– 89; influence over
life 89; neutral aspect of 89; see also
technologies
Maffesoli, Michel 156n15
maintenance systems 34, 68
Mannheim, Karl 134n2
Marcuse, Herbert 86, 87, 105n2
Martinez, Carolina 119
Marx, Karl 31, 51, 61, 70, 133; on
materialism 61; on utopia 133
Marxism 51– 52, 56, 74
Massey, Doreen 2, 6, 20
mass media 96, 97, 98
material aspect: of biopolitics 63; of
social time 30; of temporality 125; of
time 14, 15n8
materialisation of times 89
materialism 55, 61, 127
materialities 4, 6, 30, 104; heterogeneous
materiality 28; of social life 63
material temporalities, and politics of
debt 30
material time 6, 49– 50, 148, 149
Mauss, Marcel 142, 154– 155n7
Meadows, Donella 66
measurable standardised global clocks
2, 4, 148
modernity 12– 13, 64, 137; and
acceleration 69; as an historical
moment 141; as a political project 53;

responsibility over time 125; temporal
constitution of 7; tempo-structural
condition for 123; and time versus
space primacy 94
modern times 1, 2, 26, 116, 123, 133; and
acceleration 129; futurisation of 118;
historical moments 26; and progress
116; as rupture with the past 110;
temporal regime 24
modern world, and temporality 2, 20, 59
moments of crisis 33, 34, 105n3, 153
money 87, 89, 150
Moore, M. 11
More, Thomas 118
Mouffe, Chantal 55
movement: law of 90; without revolution
152
multicultural clash 3, 21, 23, 145
multiple temporalities 71, 87, 142, 148
multiple times 3, 87– 88
multiplicity: of temporalities 23;
temporal regimes 8; of times 1
nation-states 62, 93
nature: domination over 114, 116, 141;
natural signals 84, 90; signs, impact of
artefacts on 84
Network Society 76
new times (Neue Zeit) 1, 2, 51, 54, 92,
103, 118, 123– 124, 130
Newton, Isaac 93
non-contemporaneity within the social
turns 73
non-sacred time 22, 148
novelty 11, 74, 99, 123, 128– 129, 131
objects 24, 25, 28– 29, 82, 89
old spatio-temporal barriers, narrowed
3, 21, 23, 145
Opitz, Sven 50
order of things 150
Osborne, Peter 47, 50, 64
otherness 120– 121
Ott, Michael 134n3
Parker, Harley 101
past 33, 38, 56, 100, 114; conservative
positions 74; reinterpretative approach
to 55; rupture with 60, 74, 110, 128;
and utopia 131
pension systems 7, 22, 63, 131, 133,
148
Index 163
philosophy of history 76, 150; in terms
of evolutionism 148; in terms of
progress 114
Picnic in Space (documentary) 101
planification 112, 116, 131
pluralism 3, 48, 141, 143, 146
pocket watch 82, 83, 84
Polanyi, Karl 87
political decisions 10, 23, 65, 68, 70– 71
political dimension 9– 11, 25, 74, 92
political forms of organising life 137
political standstill 69
political time, election period 74
political weapons 95
politics: central or middle stances 75;
conservative approach 74; forms of
60; over life, as time politics 61– 67,
131; progressive approach 74– 75;
requirement of time 70– 71; rhythm of
141; and temporal issues 63; of time
38, 49– 50, 103; of waiting 29
Pomian, Krzysztof 58, 59, 60– 61, 123
Postone, Moishe 52, 69, 70, 138,
153– 154n1, 155n13, 155n14
practices 49, 68, 77n2; concrete practices
25, 89– 90, 132; religious practices
66; schematised practices 139; social
practices 6, 27– 28; temporal practices
49
precise temporalities 67, 104
pre-individual 42n12
presence of the absent 123
present: homogenisation of 71; projected
towards the future 61; realisation of
100; and repetition 38; simultaneous
presents 33
presentism 153
preservation, repetition as 39
production system 139– 140
productivity, scientific management of
139– 140
prognosis 59, 118, 120
progress 3– 5, 12, 22, 48, 52, 55– 56, 90,
112– 118, 120; definitions 111, 113;
and expansion of history 131; and
future 117– 118, 123– 124; life time and
world time, separation of 52; temporal
patterns 114; temporal regime and
regularities development 34; see also
acceleration, progress and utopia, tie
between
progressive politics 22, 68, 148
164 Index
proto-global time 93
proximity 106n6
punctuality 83, 84
Purser, Ronald 49
Rancière, Jacques 71– 72, 73– 74, 75, 76
rationalisation 69, 83, 88
recurrence of novelties 128
reductionism 12
reflection 94, 95, 97, 120
reformists 74– 75
regime(s) 3– 4, 5; critical comments
on 24– 25; definition 32; dietary
dimension 24– 25; and dispositives,
difference among 28– 29; and
future 9; habits and social norms
25; heterogeneous materiality 28;
of historicity 9, 20, 34, 148; as
homogeneities interacting with
each other 8; homogeneity 29; of
industrial work, and homogeneous
abstract time unit 138; meaning 8– 12;
and objectifications 29; observation
of regularities 34; and pattern of
regularity 8, 148; patterns or ordered
ways of doing things 29; political
dimension 24– 25; rationale 22– 24;
rigidity-in-motion 24; simultaneous
presence of diverse regimes 9; and
social theory 25– 31; systematic
medical plan or therapy dimension
24– 25; unities and multiplicity 9; and
unity 8, 22, 148
regions, mechanism of distinction
between 5
regularities 3, 8, 39, 148
Reis, Mauro 141
renewal 124, 129
repetition 89, 152; and change 128,
152; of changes 124– 131, 140; and
innovation 124; as preservation 39;
repetition compulsion 38– 39; shaping
the present 38
resignation 29
revolutions/revolutionaries 74– 75, 128,
132– 133, 139, 152
rhythms 69, 141, 153; of change
124– 125; of economics/economy 69,
88; of life 69, 125; of politics 141
romantic movements 153
Rosa, Hartmut 2, 13, 20, 24, 27, 49, 74,
78n11, 106n7; on acceleration 129,
140, 154n3; on chronopolitics 71; on
consequences of political decisions 68;
on frenetic standstill 69; on machines
and their uses 97; on paradox for
politics 70; on progress and utopia
56; on society and historical time
50– 51; on technical acceleration
96; on technical time 91; on the use
of temporal domination 94– 95; on
waiting 30
Rose, Nikolas 48, 62, 64– 65, 98; on how
politics deals with life 63; on politics
as time 66; on politics of health 64
routine 139
Russian revolution 139
Sattelzeit (saddle-time) 90, 105– 106n3,
132
second nature 127
secularisation 10– 11, 48, 57, 69, 117, 127
Sennett, Richard 154n2
Sharma, Sarah 2, 20
Simmel, Georg 51, 82, 83, 84, 91
Simondon, Gilbert 39, 42n12, 85, 86,
88– 89, 97, 142
simultaneity 89, 100, 153
simultaneity of the non-simultaneous 3,
15n6, 23– 24, 26, 152
simultaneous but non-synchronic times
150– 153
simultaneous presents 33
singular individual 137– 138, 151
singularities 39
singular universal 137, 138
sleep time 65
‘slow food’ movements 4, 22, 72, 148
social coordination, and time 1, 10, 28,
31, 149
social distribution of waiting 29
socialisation 56, 127
social life 12; and technology 83;
temporal order 66– 67
social media 95, 96, 103
social studies 110, 137, 142, 151; technics
and technologies 85– 86; temporal
regime 22, 25– 26, 35– 36; on time 5,
6– 7, 8, 25– 26
social technologies 12
social temporalities 39– 40, 147
social theory gap 20– 22
social time 4, 147, 149; material
character of 30; regimes 26– 27

societies 73; comparing in terms of
stages of life development 48; rational
organisation of 116; temporal patterns
of 13, 20; see also contemporary
societies
sociocultural configuration 8, 12
socio-historical dimension 4, 6– 8, 14, 21,
33– 36, 47, 77, 111, 119, 146
socio-political concepts 90
socio-political dimension 27– 28
socio-political phenomena 34
sound technology 89
space in-between 48
space– time barriers 97– 99
space– time compression 2, 20, 144
spatial studies 6– 7
spatial turn 6– 7
spectre 43, 103, 122– 123, 133
speculation 120– 121, 122, 123, 132,
149
speed 52– 53, 111, 129, 140; of
connection 102– 103; of economics 69;
high speed of social process 20, 21, 73,
77, 88, 140; increment of 70; of social
life 50; temporal technologies 95
stabilisation 32, 57; dynamic stabilisation
24, 69, 140 152; stable conditions 24
standardisation 88; of diversity 39; of
relationships 141
standardisation of time 84, 88, 89,
93, 137; abstract measures 137; and
geographical locations 88, 92, 103;
standardised clock-time 22, 148;
structure of repetition and 124
standstills 69– 70, 71, 128, 129, 140
state of things 24, 39, 52, 60, 76, 118,
122, 133, 139
Stiegler, Bernard 47, 83, 97
subjectivities 73
subject of history 130
synchronies 14, 15n6, 23, 33, 67, 74, 75,
82, 153
synchronisations 72, 91, 141
systematic procrastination 52
Tabboni, Simonetta 36
Tarde, Gabriel 39, 42n11
technical mechanisms 21, 145
technical progress 31, 51, 86– 87, 120,
124
technics 6, 137, 148; coordinator role,
playing over time regarding devices
Index 165
91; forms of setting up time 97; and
time 5
technological acceleration 69
technological devices 3, 84, 97
technological dimension 9, 11– 12
technological improvements 88
technological temporal regime 104– 105
technological time, and scientific
paradigm 91
technologies 34, 116, 137; anti-aging
process 98– 99; communication
technology 98; definition 85, 104;
effects on lifespan 11, 98; energy
required for everyday use 99; exclusion
and inclusion forms 99; homogeneous
and heterogeneous potential, link
between 104– 105; neutrality of 86;
of/over temporal aspects 148; over
time 82, 98; relevance for time studies
82– 85; technical development and
pacification of existence 105n2;
technology abstraction 89; of time 82;
virtual dimensions 82
Telban, Borut 36
teleological history 31, 61, 132, 141, 147
Tellmann, Ute 50, 87
telos 14, 48, 56, 57, 113, 120, 132
temporal categories 66– 67
temporal decisions 92
temporal disposition 29
temporal domination 94– 95
temporal dynamics 21, 38– 39, 66, 76,
103– 104, 111, 137, 146, 151
temporal frictions 147
temporalisation 90; of history 31, 34,
50– 57, 90, 118, 151; of politics 53; of
utopia 119
temporality: coexistence 3; homogenous
vs multiple and diversified 21; of
instantaneousness 95; theses 20– 21
temporal orders 66– 67, 147
temporal overlaps 9, 33, 41– 42n5, 73,
89
temporal phenomena 3, 21, 35, 36, 39,
88, 137, 145, 146
temporal politics 75– 77; dynamics
47– 49; technical conditions 102;
see also politics
temporal reality, heterogeneous
constitution of 5
temporal realm, and time-oriented
history 59
166 Index
temporal regime(s) 4, 7– 8, 21, 137;
of acceleration 8; approach 12– 13;
articulability 38; co-implications
147; compared with time regimes
35; conceptualisation of 31– 34;
concrete aspects 29, 30, 49; and
continuity 37, 132; governmentality
38, 40– 41; and hierarchy of positions
71; iterability 38; materiality of 30;
and modern acceleration process 27;
and modernity 12– 13; nucleus of
unity constituted by homogeneous
tendencies 9, 41; patterns inside
and between 138; and regime of
historicity, differentiated 40; relevance
5– 8; in social fields 29– 31; in social
practices 6; and social theory gap
20– 22; structure of time 145; temporal
structural condition of modern times
24; in terms of progress 8, 22, 147,
148; in terms of utopia 22, 148; time
of 34– 38; towards 13– 14
temporal scheme 5, 66, 115, 143– 144,
145
temporal structures: coexistence
with temporal forms 21; in images,
simultaneity 101; material basis 63;
in modernity 151
temporal virtuality 101
temporary 35– 36
theory of history 8, 31– 32
time: assimilation, with coordinating
role 84; atemporal perspectives on
37; borders and cultural differences
construction 20; and chronology,
difference among 37; of democracy
71; disembodiment of 90; diversified
141; embedment in social practices
27– 28; as a field of struggles 66;
governing of bodies and feelings
using 83; grasping through its
measurement 87; as homogeneity
145; homogenised 141; and life aspect
7; as life phenomena 48; as material
aspect of social life and self-care
63; materiality of 6; maximisation
of 139– 140; measurement of 93,
105; in movement, via images 100;
notion of 35; as a paradoxical
phenomenon 2; permanence over
152; phenomenological notion of 35,
48; philosophical perspectives of 5;
plurality of 93; politicisation of 53;
of politics 67– 68, 75; pre-technical
grasp of 90; production and ordering
of 34; projection of 59; proper/
opportune time 25; representation as
indexicality of cinematography 101;
in situation 36; social and cultural
studies 35– 36; and social change 54;
social composition of 5; and social
coordination 1; social networks
102– 103; as a state of things 76;
through political concepts 53; uses
and practices of 68; utility of 91
time politics 62
time– space compression 5, 6, 12
time zones 92, 93– 94
timing 63, 68, 101, 117; acceleration
and delays 125; for behaviours 25; of
religious practices 66; of society 36
Tomba, Massimiliano 47
Torres, Felipe 51, 53, 73, 117, 132, 149
totalitarianism 114
total social fact 142, 154– 155n7
transformations 125, 153; dynamism
without 152; iteration of 128– 129;
radical transformations 152; see also
change
transhumanism 11
trans-individual 25, 41n4, 42n12
transport, mass production of 97
uniformity and public time 93
unity 91– 92
universalisation 88, 90, 92
universal standard time 92– 93
unpredictable result 139
urban space 83
urban tribes 156n15
utopia 4, 22, 56, 90, 118– 121, 131;
compared with phantasmagoria
121; definition of 111; and fantasy
121– 124; and future 120, 123– 124;
globality 118– 119; and historical
consciousness 132; historical
emergence related to its socio-political
background 122; image-composition
121; no-place, not-now and not-yet
of 90, 96, 118, 122; and past 131; as
a speculative exercise 120– 121; ‘spirit’
119– 120; temporal regime 8, 48, 74;
see also acceleration, progress and
utopia, tie between
 Index 167

verifiability of desires 120 Wajcman, Judy 83

verifiable reasons 120 Wallis, G. 54
Virilio, Paul 2, 20, 47– 48, 69, 83, 94– 95, war time 95
98– 100 weapons 95
virtuality 96, 100– 101, 103 Weber, Max 88, 139
visual technology 100 Western societies 6, 98, 147
Vrancken, D. 36 white-men temporality 6
World Economic Forum 85
Wagner, Peter 112, 117 World Standard Time 93
waiting 29– 30; disposition of 29; world time 51, 77n1, 123
politics of 29; social distribution
of 29 YouTube 152