Since social sciences and humanities have been deeply concerned with understanding temporality and its connections with historic-political dimensions, they have produced, for one side, macro-theoretical arguments to explain what has happened with temporality and its order within the onset of general patterns, particularly about Modern and Contemporary Times in the case of social sciences. In that vein, Paul Virilio and Hartmut Rosa have written extensively about long-tendencies toward the acceleration and high-speed of social process, whereas David Harvey and Anthony Giddens suggests the concept of “space-time compression” to explain what happens to structures and experiences in the modern world. On the other side, theorists such as François Hartog, Reinhart Koselleck and Helge Jordheim6, have emphasized the diversity and plurality of simultaneous times in the contemporary world, providing an overview of the modern experience, yet from an angle that captures the variability of this experience under the concept of a “regime of historicity” (Hartog) or “contemporaneousness of the non-contemporaneous” (Koselleck, and Jordheim following Koselleck). In the same vein comes Johannes Fabian’s germinal work, which uses anthropological perspectives to indicate the 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. primitives). In this framework, one can also locate empirical research on practices, uses and conceptions about time that are structured according to gender, social class, biography, etc. [CITAR PAPERS] in synthesis; for these approaches there is not just one temporal pattern (high-speed, acceleration or space-time compression) but several temporalities coming from the constitutive fragmentarity and diversity of the social. Then, according to the main analysis about time, there are two main opposed theses about temporality: time is constituted by general tendencies from economics and politics, to one standardized clock conception that supports process of acceleration and high-speed societies, constituting a macro-theoretical approach that methodologically conceives time as a one dimensional and homogeneous tendency. On the other hand, descriptions can be observed that support a conception of time as multiple, highlighting the variability and diversity that demands more complex understanding of socio-historical time conceptions and their characteristics. During the process of research, I realized that no theoretical perspective has dealt in a proper manner with that difference, having only produced insufficient tools for grasping the complexity of how temporal perspectives works in current societies. As such, it is interesting to note the lack of dialogue between these two approaches-explanations limiting the understanding of social theory of contemporary times to a paradoxical phenomenon that deserves to be clarified. More precisely, this apparent contradiction leads us to ask if both homogenization (macro-theoretical and general tendencies) and heterogenization (simultaneity and no-synchronicity of multiple times) are two faces from the very same kernel or, conversely, responds to different phenomena. In order to clarify this, we propose to use the concept of regimes of temporality to best interpret socio-temporal patterns as well as their frictions, complementarities and parallel manifestations. In other words, multidimensional experiences of time, as well as stable and dominant ones, need to be put into a framework that can provide explanations about their coexistence. The process through which, on the one hand, old spatiotemporal barriers are narrowed by technical mechanisms (internet, flights, cars, cultural and technical devices in general) and, on the other hand, multicultural encounters for decentralized, pluriverse and diversified times (cultural rhythms, non-standardized clock time, sacred times) deserve further investigation to explain their main characteristics, interconnections and rubbings. Considering this, this paper will demonstrate that the notion of regimes of temporality enables an historical address of linearity or circularity, progressive and regressive time, evolutive as well as scientific measures of time and its objectivity; where in all these cases several epistemologies, knowledges, politics and philosophical conceptions involve temporal perspectives, using temporal dimensions to explain, justify and legitimate social orders. That means that general temporal structures coexist with temporal forms that are not included in them. To approximate what might be denominated as the previously mentioned “regimes of temporality”, the theoretical framework analysis is subdivided as follows: i) the relevance of the notion “regime”; ii) regimes of temporalities; and iii) characteristics of some regimes of temporality (progress, acceleration, presentism-futurism).
No comments:
Post a Comment