Elsie’s Reviews > In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics > Status Update

A balanced space-time approach is culturally necessary for democracy in order keep state power and the market in check.

I found that what most populations encounter is not the fast pace of life but the structural demand that they must recalibrate in order to fit into the temporal expectations demanded by various institutions, social relationships, and labor arrangements.

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.

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.1 Such a perspective seems determined to envision time and space as competing cultural values rather than intertwined facts of life.

In the spatializing of slowness through buildings and theme parks, slow spaces sustain uneven temporalities.

Instead of creating a new libera- tory relationship to time, slow practices reassert the power of institutional space in people’s lives. These spatial solutions to the problem of speed work upon people’s sense of time in order to keep them fixed within a confining relationship to capital.

Slowness does not and cannot acknowledge its material preconditions or the diversity of demands that sit outside its concrete edifices and sacred spaces. Many of these material re- lations are fast paced, mindless, and mundane; slowness hides the rhythm of material relations, the very condition of its possibility.

Temporal differences are said to exist because people treat time differently. For example, the multiplicity of time refers to the different ways one can choose to spend one’s time on a daily basis. It is the ability to manage one’s time that “creates a temporality conducive to ethical relations with others.

To live slowly in this sense, then, means engaging in mindful rather than mindless practices which make us consider the pleasure or at least the purpose of each task to which we give our time.

But what makes the staycation unique and worthy of consideration is that capitalists and other disciplinary institutions of power, in this case big media, construct new and innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movements in space.