What do you think?
Rate this book
In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics
The world is getting faster . This sentiment is proclaimed so often that it is taken for granted, rarely questioned or examined by those who celebrate the notion of an accelerated culture or by those who decry it. Sarah Sharma engages with that assumption in this sophisticated critical inquiry into the temporalities of everyday life. Sharma conducted ethnographic research among individuals whose jobs or avocations involve a persistent focus on taxi drivers, frequent-flyer business travelers, corporate yoga instructors, devotees of the slow-food and slow-living movements. Based on that research, she develops the concept of "power-chronography" to make visible the entangled and uneven politics of temporality. Focusing on how people's different relationships to labor configures their experience of time, she argues that both "speed-up" and "slow-down" often function as a form of biopolitical social control necessary to contemporary global capitalism.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
9 people are currently reading
283 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 5, 2019
This is such an interesting book – much more interesting than I thought it was going to be. We all know that space has a huge impact on society – that there are places where you are likely to not belong, that there are places that are rich and others poor, that we move in such places quite differently. You know, the affordances available in Kenya and those available in the United States are significantly different from each other and those differences can be understood ‘spatially’ as a kind of geography. The point of this book is to show that two people can be in the same ‘space’ and experience it entirely differently according to their relationship to time. And that that relationship isn't random, but directly related to the social position they hold.
To explain this the author introduces us to a number of people who engage with the world quite differently, even when they occupy much the same space. She starts by looking at those who are more or less at the top of the pecking order – that is, those who jump from city to city, who communicate with others via ICT and so on in ways that collapse time, virtually making everything concurrent. These are people who are very highly rewarded for their skills, and who live in a kind of crazy no-time. One of the things that she notes about these people is that they need to be sustained by other people, even though they often think they are self-supporting. Even merely reading this section made me feel a bit exhausted. The idea that these people have created ‘no-spaces’ and ‘no-times’ – and these are anything but ‘utopia’ - is perhaps heightened when you think of the nature of time within these worlds.
The book then shifts towards those who are employed to support these time warriors. We are introduced to them basically through the power relations they have with others. And these are brought into sharp relief when you consider whose job it is to wait. I once heard Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones being asked what his decades with the band had amounted to, and he said something like, mostly it was about waiting around. I suspect Mick Jagger didn’t have nearly this same experience, even if they were mostly only metres apart. She talks about taxi drivers in this context, and their relationship to time and how it is significantly different from that of the high power people they service. She also focuses on how the precariousness of finding ‘the next fare’ can cripple so much else in their lives. This all seemed like a kind of bizarre ritual that resembled nothing quite so much as gambling to me. I really could see how taxi drivers might end up spending more and more of their life dedicated to waiting ten more minutes just in case.
The next two chapters involved ideas I really wasn’t expecting – one was on yoga and then one on the slow food movement. Yoga was particularly interesting because she interviewed some workplace yoga instructors and asked them about how they felt doing yoga as a kind of ‘wellness’ program for employers. Often yoga was sold as such by the company, even if employees had to take the lesson in their lunch hour. She ends up viewing yoga as essentially exploitative. That is, what you get in your lunch break isn’t quite yoga as the philosophy intends, but rather something that will allow you to recalibrate and stretch your body enough so as to allow you to sit at your desk for perhaps another four hours. In a sense, this makes the yoga teachers seem a bit like those doctors in war zones who bring people back to life so they can go on being tortured. Actually, now I think of it, almost exactly that.
The slow food movement is also very interesting here – I hadn’t really paid too much attention to it over the years, but it turns out it was originally set up by Marxists who were protesting against fast food outlets. What is interesting, though, is that she makes it clear this is a protest movement for the relatively well off. How one ‘spends’ time is anything but equal, or equally available to all people, exactly the point of her book – it is as much a signifier of one’s wealth and privilege as the spaces one is able to occupy.
There is also an interesting discussion on capsule hotels that my daughters told me about in Japan. The idea is that businessmen in Japan might work back late – perhaps working the clock around – and then, rather than go home, make their way to a kind of capsule, I assume a bit like a morgue cabinet, and they sleep there. Also, certain people are able to sleep on public transport and be well regarded for it, while others sleeping on it would be shunned.
There is also some nice stuff on the gendering of time – and the nature of homelessness and how getting to work (yes, we live in a world where people can work and be homeless at the same time, to our infinite shame) might mean not being able to sleep in a shelter, since that would guarantee being late for work, or not being able to get the kinds of causal work available only if you arrive a particular times.
I really enjoyed this book. The notion that everyone might be experiencing time differently while occupying the same space is interesting because we often think of time and modernity as always being about ‘speeding up’ – but for some people it might be much more about being available and that might well mean time is a kind of waste. The notion of waiting, of being at someone else’s beck and call, is central to this book. As also is the idea that if capital buys us anything, it buys us time, where commodities are purchased that are congealed time (hours of other people's time we can make use of). Capital, then, allows us to fill our time much more meaningfully. Like I said, this was well worth the read
To explain this the author introduces us to a number of people who engage with the world quite differently, even when they occupy much the same space. She starts by looking at those who are more or less at the top of the pecking order – that is, those who jump from city to city, who communicate with others via ICT and so on in ways that collapse time, virtually making everything concurrent. These are people who are very highly rewarded for their skills, and who live in a kind of crazy no-time. One of the things that she notes about these people is that they need to be sustained by other people, even though they often think they are self-supporting. Even merely reading this section made me feel a bit exhausted. The idea that these people have created ‘no-spaces’ and ‘no-times’ – and these are anything but ‘utopia’ - is perhaps heightened when you think of the nature of time within these worlds.
The book then shifts towards those who are employed to support these time warriors. We are introduced to them basically through the power relations they have with others. And these are brought into sharp relief when you consider whose job it is to wait. I once heard Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones being asked what his decades with the band had amounted to, and he said something like, mostly it was about waiting around. I suspect Mick Jagger didn’t have nearly this same experience, even if they were mostly only metres apart. She talks about taxi drivers in this context, and their relationship to time and how it is significantly different from that of the high power people they service. She also focuses on how the precariousness of finding ‘the next fare’ can cripple so much else in their lives. This all seemed like a kind of bizarre ritual that resembled nothing quite so much as gambling to me. I really could see how taxi drivers might end up spending more and more of their life dedicated to waiting ten more minutes just in case.
The next two chapters involved ideas I really wasn’t expecting – one was on yoga and then one on the slow food movement. Yoga was particularly interesting because she interviewed some workplace yoga instructors and asked them about how they felt doing yoga as a kind of ‘wellness’ program for employers. Often yoga was sold as such by the company, even if employees had to take the lesson in their lunch hour. She ends up viewing yoga as essentially exploitative. That is, what you get in your lunch break isn’t quite yoga as the philosophy intends, but rather something that will allow you to recalibrate and stretch your body enough so as to allow you to sit at your desk for perhaps another four hours. In a sense, this makes the yoga teachers seem a bit like those doctors in war zones who bring people back to life so they can go on being tortured. Actually, now I think of it, almost exactly that.
The slow food movement is also very interesting here – I hadn’t really paid too much attention to it over the years, but it turns out it was originally set up by Marxists who were protesting against fast food outlets. What is interesting, though, is that she makes it clear this is a protest movement for the relatively well off. How one ‘spends’ time is anything but equal, or equally available to all people, exactly the point of her book – it is as much a signifier of one’s wealth and privilege as the spaces one is able to occupy.
There is also an interesting discussion on capsule hotels that my daughters told me about in Japan. The idea is that businessmen in Japan might work back late – perhaps working the clock around – and then, rather than go home, make their way to a kind of capsule, I assume a bit like a morgue cabinet, and they sleep there. Also, certain people are able to sleep on public transport and be well regarded for it, while others sleeping on it would be shunned.
There is also some nice stuff on the gendering of time – and the nature of homelessness and how getting to work (yes, we live in a world where people can work and be homeless at the same time, to our infinite shame) might mean not being able to sleep in a shelter, since that would guarantee being late for work, or not being able to get the kinds of causal work available only if you arrive a particular times.
I really enjoyed this book. The notion that everyone might be experiencing time differently while occupying the same space is interesting because we often think of time and modernity as always being about ‘speeding up’ – but for some people it might be much more about being available and that might well mean time is a kind of waste. The notion of waiting, of being at someone else’s beck and call, is central to this book. As also is the idea that if capital buys us anything, it buys us time, where commodities are purchased that are congealed time (hours of other people's time we can make use of). Capital, then, allows us to fill our time much more meaningfully. Like I said, this was well worth the read
January 10, 2024
Sarah Sharma’s book, In the Meantime, adopts an ethnographic approach to understand how time is experienced, felt, and manipulated in everyday life. Through a series of ethnographic portraits – including immersive interviews with a taxi cab driver, an office yoga instructor, and a slow-food supporter – Sharma demonstrates the uneven temporalities which criss-cross and entangle our public lives. A theory of “power-chronography” emerges from her ethnographies, which she uses to identify and critique the subtle ways that power infuses the spatio-temporal dimensions of the everyday.
We know from special relativity that a subject’s phenomenological experience of time speeds up or slows down depending on that subject’s positioning within space-time. However, as Sharma argues, much of this positioning is mediated through labour. This is particularly true since the advent of modernity – a period described by Zygmunt Bauman as increasingly “liquid” in form.
Every occupation contains a different set of shifting temporalities which structure the worker’s relationship to the task at hand. For instance, the taxi cab driver is typically understood as a fast-paced, almost manic professional. Drivers chase fares and zip across the urban landscape in a highly competitive industry where every moment counts and every second is commodified. That image is certainly true in one sense. Yet, in another sense, it is also true that the day-to-day experience of a taxi driver is punctuated by huge amounts of time where they are just sitting, idling, and waiting – all essentially slow activities. Indeed, Sharma is correct to argue that, for an age that is almost unanimously defined by speed and brevity, there are equally as many moments of slowness, delays, anticipation, and boredom. Speed-ups and slow-downs are two sides of the same coin in Sharma’s vignettes.
Thus, inequalities – rather than uniformities – dominate the lived experience of time. Sharma refers to this as “differential time”, and it challenges the meta-narrative of modernity as a perpetually accelerating temporal horizon. Each of Sharma’s interview subjects reveal that the temporal dimensions of labour are far more nuanced than any claim about the haste of contemporary society.
I think that this counter-narrative point is the best contribution of Sharma’s text. However, I also think that she oversells the radical and revolutionary potential of “power-chronography” as a political critique. I’ll give two reasons for this challenge – one semantic-ideological, the other socio-pragmatic.
Firstly, Sharma insists that only a politics which is attentive to the uneven experiences of time is truly revolutionary. Yet I would argue that a critique of the everyday assumes the tone of the everyday itself, such that a radical or revolutionary politics of the everyday seems a contradiction of terms. This oxymoronic quality is also what makes Henri Lefebvre’s work so accessible yet politically ineffectual, in my estimation. Isn’t a politics of the everyday literally an anti-revolutionary politics? How can a revolution, properly understood, be considered everyday? Revolutions are antithetical to the everyday – they are ruptures and nullifications of the everyday. To conceptualize the everyday as radically emancipatory seems misguided, though I may be wrong.
My second point is more practical in its orientation. Some sense of ideological wholeness and unity is required for political organization. The very unevenness and multiplicity of public temporalities makes political mobilization virtually impossible on this basis alone. If – as Sharma’s research suggests – the public sphere is temporally fractured, rather than unified, then how could a consolidated political movement, both radical in thought and revolutionary in practice, develop from temporal spaces marked by separation, individuality, and difference? Put another way, if your experience of labour-time isn’t the same as my experience of labour-time, then I fail to see how a politics of “differential time” could overcome the very alienation at its core.
Again, Sharma makes a number of insightful observations about the public sphere as temporally layered and discontinuous space, yet they strike me as impotent when evaluated at the level of political theory.
We know from special relativity that a subject’s phenomenological experience of time speeds up or slows down depending on that subject’s positioning within space-time. However, as Sharma argues, much of this positioning is mediated through labour. This is particularly true since the advent of modernity – a period described by Zygmunt Bauman as increasingly “liquid” in form.
Every occupation contains a different set of shifting temporalities which structure the worker’s relationship to the task at hand. For instance, the taxi cab driver is typically understood as a fast-paced, almost manic professional. Drivers chase fares and zip across the urban landscape in a highly competitive industry where every moment counts and every second is commodified. That image is certainly true in one sense. Yet, in another sense, it is also true that the day-to-day experience of a taxi driver is punctuated by huge amounts of time where they are just sitting, idling, and waiting – all essentially slow activities. Indeed, Sharma is correct to argue that, for an age that is almost unanimously defined by speed and brevity, there are equally as many moments of slowness, delays, anticipation, and boredom. Speed-ups and slow-downs are two sides of the same coin in Sharma’s vignettes.
Thus, inequalities – rather than uniformities – dominate the lived experience of time. Sharma refers to this as “differential time”, and it challenges the meta-narrative of modernity as a perpetually accelerating temporal horizon. Each of Sharma’s interview subjects reveal that the temporal dimensions of labour are far more nuanced than any claim about the haste of contemporary society.
I think that this counter-narrative point is the best contribution of Sharma’s text. However, I also think that she oversells the radical and revolutionary potential of “power-chronography” as a political critique. I’ll give two reasons for this challenge – one semantic-ideological, the other socio-pragmatic.
Firstly, Sharma insists that only a politics which is attentive to the uneven experiences of time is truly revolutionary. Yet I would argue that a critique of the everyday assumes the tone of the everyday itself, such that a radical or revolutionary politics of the everyday seems a contradiction of terms. This oxymoronic quality is also what makes Henri Lefebvre’s work so accessible yet politically ineffectual, in my estimation. Isn’t a politics of the everyday literally an anti-revolutionary politics? How can a revolution, properly understood, be considered everyday? Revolutions are antithetical to the everyday – they are ruptures and nullifications of the everyday. To conceptualize the everyday as radically emancipatory seems misguided, though I may be wrong.
My second point is more practical in its orientation. Some sense of ideological wholeness and unity is required for political organization. The very unevenness and multiplicity of public temporalities makes political mobilization virtually impossible on this basis alone. If – as Sharma’s research suggests – the public sphere is temporally fractured, rather than unified, then how could a consolidated political movement, both radical in thought and revolutionary in practice, develop from temporal spaces marked by separation, individuality, and difference? Put another way, if your experience of labour-time isn’t the same as my experience of labour-time, then I fail to see how a politics of “differential time” could overcome the very alienation at its core.
Again, Sharma makes a number of insightful observations about the public sphere as temporally layered and discontinuous space, yet they strike me as impotent when evaluated at the level of political theory.
January 17, 2025
“Power-chronography puts otherwise imagined stable places, spaces that are not usually recognized as transit spaces, like the home and the private sphere, in flux because it foregrounds the relationships among the multiple temporalities present while it detangles them. With a temporal imaginary, spaces that we do not normally conceive of in terms of transit become highly politicized spaces of movement — places like the workplace, the home, and the organic grocer. Treating all social spaces as transit spaces allows for recognition of the temporal contingency of political or public life. It also allows for recognition of the layers of temporal interdependencies as a particular form of power that plays out in private life. The tempo. ral gives insight into inequities occurring behind closed doors!2 The home, for example, can be seen for what it is — a space composed of multiple temporalities that is also a node within the circulation of goods, capital, infor-mation, and people. If the home is a space where people work, hire cleaners or other forms of domestic help, do online banking, and get packages delivered by commercial enterprises, then it is a space of transit. Understanding the home as a space of transit politicizes the space in a new way.
It means that gendered relations in the home become differently perceptible through the lens of time. It means that labor relations are revealed in new ways. Having one's home and yard attended to during the week so the weekend can be spent in leisurely pursuits needs to be understood within a political economy of time. As I have been arguing, there are gendered, raced, and classed itineraries of temporal worth within a heteronormative patriarchal global capital. The temporal public is a theory of the public that is awake to the politics of differential time.”
“As subjects of value within global capital, the time of the frequent business traveler is an important object of biopolitical regulation. The sleepy body of the business traveler, perhaps comparable only to the military soldier, is therefore also a significant object of knowledge production.? The problem of sleep is an area of scientific research shared by both the military and pharmaceutical companies. In fact, one military researcher who refers to sleep as "sleep architecture" maintains: "There is a quiet revolution going on in sleep medicine. Chronobiologists contend, ‘We are living in a time famine where there isn't enough time in our waking periods to accomplish all that is expected of us.’"
“To see the power-chronography of it all, however, does not require slow-ness, or any change of pace. Instead, power-chronography charts the relevant infrastructures of time maintenance and the forms of recalibration, as well as the temporal labor and temporal architectures that make slowness desirable and possible for some but not for others. Slowness is not outside the normalizing temporal order. Slowness encompasses its own particular ideological time claims and beholds its own exclusive temporal prac-tices.4 The promotion of slowness occurs for different ends — procapital, anticapital, and often in between. In the following section, my examination of four instantiations of the slow life and the different claims on time that they embrace lead to the conclusion that slowness is suspect. The cultural turn to slowness is a depoliticization of time, one that demands the containment and pacification of time. Through a critical analysis of slow culture a normalizing relationship between time and democracy surfaces. We must re-think the contours of democratic time.”
“A myopic theoretical focus on speedup had obscured the necessity of tracing how differential relationships to time organize and perpetuate inequalities. The concern over speedup is less about time than it is about space. The speedup narrative is based in a critique of a newly unruly tempo that threatens the spatial virtues of democracy! Such a perspective seems determined to envision time and space as competing cultural values rather than intertwined facts of life.
The political salience of speed is not just a theoretical matter. When time is approached from below, based on a cultural approach to the everyday, the anxiety over speed looks very different. Individualistic orientations toward time and its management have normalized the exploitation of others' time.
These dual concerns, in theory and everyday culture, are the impetus for In the Meantime's introduction of power-chronography as a way of locating how temporality operates as a key relation of power that manifests in the minutes, days, and lifetimes of different populations. Time is lived at the intersection of a range of social differences that includes class, gender, race, immigrations status, and labor. A temporal perspective offers insight into inequality and recognizes the transecting multidimensionality of social differences. Once acknowledged, the temporal is discernible everywhere.”
It means that gendered relations in the home become differently perceptible through the lens of time. It means that labor relations are revealed in new ways. Having one's home and yard attended to during the week so the weekend can be spent in leisurely pursuits needs to be understood within a political economy of time. As I have been arguing, there are gendered, raced, and classed itineraries of temporal worth within a heteronormative patriarchal global capital. The temporal public is a theory of the public that is awake to the politics of differential time.”
“As subjects of value within global capital, the time of the frequent business traveler is an important object of biopolitical regulation. The sleepy body of the business traveler, perhaps comparable only to the military soldier, is therefore also a significant object of knowledge production.? The problem of sleep is an area of scientific research shared by both the military and pharmaceutical companies. In fact, one military researcher who refers to sleep as "sleep architecture" maintains: "There is a quiet revolution going on in sleep medicine. Chronobiologists contend, ‘We are living in a time famine where there isn't enough time in our waking periods to accomplish all that is expected of us.’"
“To see the power-chronography of it all, however, does not require slow-ness, or any change of pace. Instead, power-chronography charts the relevant infrastructures of time maintenance and the forms of recalibration, as well as the temporal labor and temporal architectures that make slowness desirable and possible for some but not for others. Slowness is not outside the normalizing temporal order. Slowness encompasses its own particular ideological time claims and beholds its own exclusive temporal prac-tices.4 The promotion of slowness occurs for different ends — procapital, anticapital, and often in between. In the following section, my examination of four instantiations of the slow life and the different claims on time that they embrace lead to the conclusion that slowness is suspect. The cultural turn to slowness is a depoliticization of time, one that demands the containment and pacification of time. Through a critical analysis of slow culture a normalizing relationship between time and democracy surfaces. We must re-think the contours of democratic time.”
“A myopic theoretical focus on speedup had obscured the necessity of tracing how differential relationships to time organize and perpetuate inequalities. The concern over speedup is less about time than it is about space. The speedup narrative is based in a critique of a newly unruly tempo that threatens the spatial virtues of democracy! Such a perspective seems determined to envision time and space as competing cultural values rather than intertwined facts of life.
The political salience of speed is not just a theoretical matter. When time is approached from below, based on a cultural approach to the everyday, the anxiety over speed looks very different. Individualistic orientations toward time and its management have normalized the exploitation of others' time.
These dual concerns, in theory and everyday culture, are the impetus for In the Meantime's introduction of power-chronography as a way of locating how temporality operates as a key relation of power that manifests in the minutes, days, and lifetimes of different populations. Time is lived at the intersection of a range of social differences that includes class, gender, race, immigrations status, and labor. A temporal perspective offers insight into inequality and recognizes the transecting multidimensionality of social differences. Once acknowledged, the temporal is discernible everywhere.”
June 14, 2022
The conclusion of the book was assigned for a class I took, and I found it highly interesting. Enough so that I read the entire book. Sharma does a wonderful job of investigating the popular conception that time is speeding up. She provided real life accounts and intimate portraits of taxi drivers, yoga instructors, slow lifers, and frequent business travelers. These anthropological examinations made the book exciting, and broke up the denser theory for me. Her studies wove together to highlight her point: that our time is irrevocably intertwined. There is not one temporal perspective, there are many linked perspectives. The idea that the world is speeding up provokes the question of, for whom? And whose labor makes this speed up possible?
I found this book wonderful. Now I will consider a temporal perspective, and look within the framework of space to see the time relationships that exist.
I found this book wonderful. Now I will consider a temporal perspective, and look within the framework of space to see the time relationships that exist.
May 15, 2024
Really interesting exploration of time, power, and inequality. I liked the mix of academic analysis along with ethnographic aspects that make this potentially intimidating topic more approachable.
“Cab lag, then, refers to a condition of labor where people exist in a differential and inequitable temporal relation with another group with whom they are expected to sync up” (79).
“Nonetheless, without recognition of the multiple temporalities that underlie the social fabric or an understanding of how experiences of time are not just outcomes of individual choices, these intellectual responses and progressive social movements that respond to the problematic pace of life risk reproducing the very social inequalities they rail against” (110).
“Cab lag, then, refers to a condition of labor where people exist in a differential and inequitable temporal relation with another group with whom they are expected to sync up” (79).
“Nonetheless, without recognition of the multiple temporalities that underlie the social fabric or an understanding of how experiences of time are not just outcomes of individual choices, these intellectual responses and progressive social movements that respond to the problematic pace of life risk reproducing the very social inequalities they rail against” (110).
January 30, 2021
This book really spoke to me and it is an important read for the times we are in. Dr. Sharma speaks to the inequities of time, focusing on specific types of jobs that are time driven (like taxi drivers, hotel workers) and the time tension between those workers and those who use those services. A very interesting and necessary read!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews