This article is an attempt to define time, an attempt to realise that it is a construction with specific implications, both social and individual, for each and every one of us, but also an incitement to reshape the experience of time around, in and out of labour, in directions that produce less inequality and pain.
In early 2021, the Spanish government confirmed its intention to test a four-day working week model. The party that had proposed the trial welcomed the move by tweeting: “What could be a more important political issue than time in our lives?”[1]. A few months earlier, the global “climate clock” had been installed in a prominent place in New York, counting down the years and days left for governments to take action to prevent the destruction of the ecosystems that support life on the planet[2]. Three years and a pandemic later—which was like speeding up and stopping time at the same time—work, or the pursuit of it, continues to devour more and more aspects of our lives, and the oil giants announce record profitability, pushing us further away from an environmentally sustainable future. Academic Lisa Baraitser argues that the 21st century is dominated by a sense that we have no time to spare—personally, socially, and planetarily.
But what is time?
When someone asks me what my PhD is about, I often reply: “It’s about time; I study time”. They usually look at me slightly puzzled. The study of time seems either very existential or very scientific, and I don’t pass for a philosopher or a physicist. When I add that: “I mean how time organises our daily lives and society”, there is a moment of connection and excitement, an “Ah! This touches me too; this is important”. They all have some kind of mini-confession to make about how time has infested their lives and various imaginative or desperate attempts to manage it effectively. This spark of interest is usually followed by silence or some kind of deflation.
It’s as if we all know that time is important; we know it both intellectually and physically, but we lack the analytical tools to go deeper and explain what is important or what we want to change in our relationship with it. I myself often don’t know where to take this discussion.Time seems to be so intimate and so alien at the same time, and our problems with it seem so banal and enigmatic.
While the ideas associated with time are deeply embedded in language, consciousness, and social organisation, time itself, like most fundamental concepts, lacks clear definitions. In a “functionalist” analysis, time is what we commonly understand as clock-time, a time that is continuous and constantly broken down into successive equal units. It is a time that is immutable and neutral (each minute and each hour “costs” as much as the next one); it is a time that is homogenised and all-inclusive: everything happens, everyone and everything lives within a unified universal time. But, under a more hermeneutic perspective, time acquires other characteristics beyond duration. A more temporal time has intensity, rhythm, and tempo; in other words, it has texture and multiple qualities[3]. This time is characterised by polymorphism, and its value, its experience, even its very ability to flow, shifts with the seasons, situations, and socio-political and cultural norms. This more sociological and anthropological view of time treats it as something that co-produces reality, rather than reality taking place within it.
Does time construct winners and losers?
What kind of reality is produced by dominant conceptualizations and allocations of time? Time as a field of social justice has received far less analysis than space or identities; see, for example, the analyses of how our gender or origin affects our social position or experience.
Perhaps the most direct way of understanding the social implications of the construction of time is to consider the side effects of seeing time as linear. The arrow of time is always moving forward, and this movement is intertwined with notions of evolution and progress. This view of time is so deeply ingrained in the West that whole populations or communities that do not share the same concept of progress are labelled as “backward”—literally existing “in the past” of historical time. Similarly, in our personal time, we often feel like we are “behind” if we are not where we should be in terms of our life’s supposedly linear path (education, career, family, etc.). Seeing time as linear creates those who are “at the front” and those who are left “behind” in life and history.
Between the “micro” of the personal and the “macro” of historical time, there is a “meso” level of everyday social life, where it becomes more difficult to discern the effects of the temporal patterns and imperatives of contemporary life. This is largely because these patterns are naturalised, seeming to be self-evident rather than specific social norms and choices, as they actually are. It is natural or self-evident that we should work five or six days a week and that we should have x number of holidays per year. It is self-evident that we should work in capitalist contingent labour relations—that is, to break our time into boxes of specific quantitative units and exchange them for money!
Defining time as a quantified individual resource to be sold and invested creates—this time—the “insiders” and the “outsiders” in society. After all, the history of capitalism is closely interwoven with the temporal patterns of modernity. When the industrial revolution turned “factory time” or “shift time” into the most visible and, at the same time, most productive time, other times that did not fit into rational planning lost both visibility and value. Having a job is productive time—you’re in; but being unemployed is empty time—you’re out, no matter how much you co-produce a number of other daily tasks that don't “count”, such as taking care of your nephew or designing posters for local events.
Today, as traditional jobs are dying out, demands for “productive” time are increasing rather than decreasing, permeating more and more aspects of life. New divisions and internalised pressures construct who is in and who is out, defining “good”, “essential” and less good uses of our personal and free time.
Is time a personal resource?
Capitalism is always susceptible to producing generalised results such as “economic growth” or “rising living standards”, while concealing the inequalities that underpin them. Behind common misconceptions that life is “getting faster and faster” or that work can “now be done from anywhere!”, behind time management techniques and productivity hacks, our time is preserved and produced through relationships[4].
A series of time architectures and coordination relations between groups of different power maintain what we otherwise perceive as personal time: the taxi drivers’ night work allowing return from a Saturday party; the delivery driver’s rush maximising lunch break time; the cleaner’s Sunday work allowing a more relaxed weekend; mom’s cooking for her adult children providing time for a much-needed hobby; the (unpaid) overtime of thousands of workers in all fields of work, and the broken, unpredictable schedules that allow dozens of businesses to manage “company time” according to their supply, demand, and profit algorithms.
Perpetuating the myth of time management as a personal crusade keeps us from thinking of our temporal experience as something that is being produced collectively through relations, technologies, labour systems, social norms, and expectations[5]. Much like our time is almost never just ours, it is also never exactly “free”[6]. Free time, as commonly understood, is time already produced by our labour, it’s the time left over when tasks that have been deemed necessary, self-evident, or reasonable in a society have been completed.
The future of labour: what temporal experiences do we want to fight for?
What would it change, how would we live, if we didn’t see time as a line, as an individual resource to be invested? What kind of temporal cultures would we have and what types of tasks would we value as important? We believe that understanding how the temporal regime of our time shapes material and psychosocial deprivations and difficulties is crucial, if we want to make our lives more just and worth-living.
Our work with time is embedded in, derived from, informed and nourished by broader critiques of the meaning, function, and distribution of labour in society. It extends to the collective question of how we can reconstruct the experience of time around, in and out of work, in directions that produce less inequality and suffering. To politicise time means first to stop treating it pre-theoretically, that is, as a neutral background on which our lives unfold. Perhaps in the future we can talk about time as a common good that we can collectively decide how to shape, spend, and share, thus rearticulating both the meaning and the division of labour in society. Thousands of other spatio-temporal futures may await us, if we can imagine them.
Michelle Bastian, one of the most important sociologists of time, finds how remarkably little (meaning, none whatsoever) research exists on how different conceptualizations of time can contribute to the creation of other sociopolitical systems. We want to imagine these future communities of another time and another work.
For the time being, we are starting with a common week in our present lives, just before the future comes. Four podcast episodes, four days. Each episode touches on a feeling, a difficulty, or a need for time as an individual resource, as a relationship, as continuity, or as a field for transforming our lives. Each episode leaves you with a personal question.
So, come on, waste some time with us.