Blog Post 1
âThe apparently equally pervasive and abstract concept of space has generated a vast body of discourses, knowledges, and disciplines whose focus and specialization are the analysis, measurement, regulation and management of space and of movements within space (one need only fleetingly think aboutâŠarchitecture, urban studies, geography, and geology, among others to recognize space and spatiality as privileged objects of scientific and social regulation). Only relatively few names, however, are associated with studies of time and duration and there is no corresponding discipline or specifically focused and self-contained study of time and its unique characteristics. History, arguably the discipline most closely associated with time within the humanities, is notable for its failure to address the question of the ontological, epistemic and politic status of time. Its privileged objects of reflection, historical events, and processes, those that occurred in the past and retain some traces, some residue, in the present and the future, raise serious ontological and epistemic, and thus political and ethical, questions, methodological questions that the disciple has not even tried to address. Time and becoming remain un-reflected and under-theorized, except in rare and isolated cases, in the history of Western thoughtâ (Grosz, 1999 p.2)
               When I first read this, I was struck by both the broadness, and the profoundness of this insight. As Grosz says, space is something we are used to analyzing; it is something we are familiar with understanding and critiquing within the humanities and social sciences. We already conceive of space as something we can and should alter, manipulate, construct/destruct, and perpetually think about in a critical way. We are used to incorporating space as a framework for analyzing the world, how the world works and our experiences of it. However, as the author rightly points out, time seems to be the unspoken, and un-theorized, element of social and political ontology. We often think of it â when we think of it at all â as just a neutral operative phenomenon which encases all our doings, but which does not have a history, a political valence, a theorize-able substance of its own (perhaps outside of the highly abstract scientific discourses of theoretical physics).
          Groszâs argument that we in the humanities and social sciences ought to start to seriously theorize time, and make explicit its' role in how we make up the world, and in how the world makes us, seems immenselyâŠwell, timely, for lack of less heavy-handed expression. I think it might be especially evocative to try to explicitly investigate the ways in which social concepts and understandings of time effect thinking and what people consider thinkable. We tend to assume, I would argue, that all people throughout all of history, have experienced time in more or less the same way. Perhaps it would behoove us to scrap that idea, and overtly question how different cultures and social groups have understood time, and how those understandings have led to different practices, philosophies, theologies, social and political ways of being. Making time an overt angle of analysis might illuminate some things about sociality that have, up until now, flown under the radar. I am very excited by this possibility.
Grosz, E. (1999) Becomings: Explorations in time, memory, and futures. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
