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http://tas.sagepub.com/content/21/2/273The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0961463X12452830 2012 21: 273Time Society

Robbie Fordyceaddressing subjective experiences of time

Temporal escapes: Deployments of 'time work' as a methodology for

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fascinating collection of interviews on the question of time and its acceler-ation with many internationally known philosophers, architects and artists.

By way of conclusion, given my own political and theoretical persuasion, Iam hesitant to say that a consensus concerning the role of time in revolutionhad been reached by the end of the conference. One thing, however, is cer-tain: the conversations and calibre of scholarship over the two days were aninspiration, and rearmed our belief in time as a central political concern.

References

Eriksen TH (2001) Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the InformationAge. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.

Hassan R (2009) Empires of Speed: Time and Acceleration of Politics and Society.Leiden, Boston: Brill.

Levine R (1997) A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a SocialPsychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently.

New York: Basic Books.Pietrzyk K (2010) Activism in the Fast Lane: Social Movements and the Neglect of

Time. Fast Capitalism 7.1. Available at: http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastca-

pitalism/7_1/pietrzyk7_1.html.

Kamilla Pietrzyk

Kamilla Pietrzyk is a PhD candidate in Political Science at York University,Toronto. She is writing her dissertation on the relationship between media,capitalist temporality, and contemporary networked social movements.

Temporal escapes: Deployments oftime work as a methodology foraddressing subjective experiencesof timeMichael G. Flaherty, The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience. Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 2011. ISBN 1439902631

The Textures of Time is dedicated to the defence of the sociological conceptof agency, which Flaherty engages with through a non-deterministicperspective on time. The primary method for achieving this defenceof agency is through explicating how individuals attempt to manipulatetheir subjective temporal experiences along the lines of six perspectives on

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time: duration, frequency, sequence, timing, allocation, and taking time.Flaherty has previously described these practices as time work (seeFlaherty, 2002, 2003), and he returns to the idea in order to present theconcept in relation to a large number of fascinating case studies. Timework is any practice that modies temporal experience, whether in theself or in another. This could be as personal as the attempts to make timepass more quickly such as the example of a young student who ritualizesdoodling during her lectures in order to speed the progression of time; orthe attempt to slow temporal progression by inhabiting a particular tem-poral space to its fullest, for which Flaherty cites the Zen Buddhist exhort-ation to Be here now (p. 31). While the entirely intrapersonal temporalmanipulations are, at times, intriguing examples of the self-determinationthat Flaherty seeks to expose, the attempts by individuals to impose tem-poral experiences on others act as the most compelling data when alliedwith the concept of time work. The paradigmatic example seems to be theanecdote of a crowd-averse librarian who, unlike her husband, wishes tonever be the rst to a dinner party: I want to arrive a little late to ensurethat we are not among the rst ones there . . . I nd little things to do todelay our departure, like nding just the right accessory to wear, or remem-bering there was something I wanted to bring with me and thus subvertsher husbands own attempts at temporal control (pp. 9697). As Flahertyunderstands interpersonal temporal contexts of frequency, one personsagency is experienced as another persons determinism (p. 46).

Time work shows great critical potential in its ability to classify a widerange of diering practices from a new perspective, in such a way as toexpose temporal agency amidst or as a product of social, cultural, andindividual activity. Time work is not delivered as merely a new criticalperspective; Flaherty takes the concept further in The Textures of Time inorder to address the self-determining individual. The idea that the individ-ual can consciously engage particular practices in order to have someexperiences and not others, to be able to savour or speed the beautiful orboring moments in life, the routines that become personal devices forremembering some schedules or as a means for the employer to controlemployees, all become examples of self-determined temporal subjects elicit-ing a modicum of resistance against being externally determined. The cap-acity to expend the most precious resource we have in the form of eitherintervention or forbearance (Giddens in Flaherty, p. 143) through meansdeveloped in formal cultural practices, or informal personal rhythms, allmake for a compelling argument for self-determination.

The contest between having the free will to inuence the world and beingsubjected to the determining qualities of material existence is the debate thatFlaherty wishes to contribute to. Being determined by ones environment is

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contrasted with the self-determination to choose how the social environ-ment reacts to the individual. By wilfully placing oneself into the path ofcertain chains of events, an individual becomes capable of choosing howreality is manifested. Flaherty does present some of the possible forms forthis self-determination in the last chapters of The Textures of Time: at thepoint of its greatest cynicism towards agency this leaves the individualengaging in consensual determinism, but, as he notes elsewhere, these per-spectives lead to a case where, We could dismiss [their] behaviour as aninstance of cultural determinism but only by reducing these people to mind-less cultural dopes who act without electing to do so (p. 85). Such perspec-tives on behaviourism versus agency help to unpack limiting demarcationsthat both perspectives tend to employ. Flahertys rst chapter presents aninformative historicization of the debates between those sociologists whoadvocate for the existence of agency (or something like it), and those thatdisregard the possibility of free will within a model of behaviour that isentirely predetermined by physical laws.

In so far as the theoretical processes surrounding temporal agency areconcerned, The Textures of Time makes one move that essentially guaran-tees that behaviourist etiologies are thrown out before the debate over theactivity of the individual can begin. One of the rst requests that Flahertymakes is for social sciences to move away from deterministic frameworksfor understanding temporal experience that are imported from the naturalsciences (p. 1). Why is this signicant for behaviourism? Because the notionof behaviourism itself is historically indebted to empirical natural sciencesresearch; that is, behaviour as it is determined by cause and eect. Whentime is no longer considered as operating on a deterministic framework,then determinism has no purchase. It should be no surprise that, after thismove, Flahertys conclusions can hold no place for any notion of the sub-ject that is not based in agency. Cause and eect require a linear and deter-ministic perspective of time in order to function. Indeed, time is thedetermining factor in all processes of change within the natural sciencesthat Flaherty cites. Speed? Distance over time. Acceleration? Speed overtime. Flow? Volume over time. Population growth? Births, minus deaths,over time. Without a deterministic vision of time, it should be no surprisethat behaviourist conceptions of the individual become meaningless. Whilehe does present a spectrum of agency covering consensual determinism,cultural reproduction, reactionary agency, time play and ambivalence thequestion of behaviourism has not so much been resolved as it has simplybeen disappeared.

Whether this means that behaviourism is nothing more than a curiosityof deterministic perspectives of temporality, or if it is a legitimate constructthat Flaherty has merely obscured, The Textures of Time presents a highly

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developed and intriguingly nuanced approach to the question of agency.The case studies presented run the gamut of current social conditions, andFlahertys ability to present even the most seemingly mundane details ofindividual life as insurrectionary or sublime temporal achievements by theindividual make for a compelling discussion of temporal agency.

The evidence that Flaherty has amassed is varied and compelling,although completely contrary lives show similarities that are, at times,slightly unsettling. The domestic narratives of a family dinner mirror thecold anecdote of an ex-convicts control of his cellmate, On the rst day, Icame up with rules for when he could do certain things. I basically con-trolled when the talking started and stopped and when the lights went onand o, and Flaherty reads both examples as the benign or exploitativeimposing of interpersonal commitments on another individual (pp. 9192).Again, without apology or condemnation, Flaherty points to some forms ofdrug use as devices that some users employ to aid their attempts at temporalcontrol, providing an alternative to narratives of escapist fantasies as foundin some ethnographies of drug cultures. There is a sense of bemusementon Flahertys part when he recounts some individuals experiences: the dif-cult case of getting information from chronic marijuana users, or thewhimsical anthropomorphism in a young mans description of his leisure-time pottery. Flahertys research data is thorough, and presents myriadways of interrogating time work on interpersonal and social levels. Theevidence as to how individuals use time work to manipulate the behavioursof other individuals shows that time work is not limited to internal, sub-jective pressures, and, rather, has real consequences outside of individualexperiences of time.

The Textures of Time has provided relevant insights into my own eld ofmedia and communications. Flaherty makes a comment that

Human beings are not trapped in the present. Language empowers us to

transcend the here-and-now of our immediate circumstances. It follows that

one of the distinctive features of human nature is our capacity to take time

from the present in order to plan the future. (p. 124)

In addition, the capacity to present a qualitative means of describing aform of social surplus emerging from the discussions of ribald workplacebehaviour points to useful material for Autonomist Marxist theory.Furthermore, the capacity for discussing modern philosophys mostfamous piece of time work, that of eternal return, points to the workingof Neitzsches heaviest weight from a philosophic concept with a limitedaudience into a measurable cultural practice for self-determination(Neitzsche, 2001: 194).

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Flahertys text is coloured by a singular comment that was, in itself,unshakable once read, Does agency exist? And if so, does it matter?(p. 11). The question is, in all likelihood, unanswerable, but The Texturesof Time provides a great amount of material examples and devices for dis-cussions within the context of temporality for future studies where someform of agency is assumed to exist.

References

Flaherty MG (2002) Making time: Agency and the construction of temporal experi-ence. Symbolic Interaction 25: 379388.

Flaherty MG (2003) Time work: Customizing temporal experience. SocialPsychology Quarterly 66: 1733.

Nietzsche F (2001) The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an

Appendix of Songs (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy).Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robbie Fordyce

Robbie Fordyce is a PhD student in the Media and CommunicationsProgram at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Alternative mobilitiesPhillip Vannini, The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities: Routes Less Travelled. Farnham:

Ashgate, 2009, 279 pp. ISBN 9780754676669

With few exceptions, The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities: Routes LessTravelled, edited by Phillip Vannini, comprises a strong cast of writers froma variety of disciplines, both of which help to make it a relatively smoothride. The appeal of the collected papers resides in their richly evocativeillustrations of the diverse experiences of dierent modes of commuting(by plane and boat for example) for dierent users (the young, elderlyand disadvantaged) and the ways in which these, often disorderly, perform-ances produce particular relational spaces and times. Whilst it may notentirely full its stated ambition of providing a corrective to supposedlydominating accounts of connectivity and unfettered movement, it neverthe-less makes a solid contribution to a burgeoning literature which will be ofspecial interest to those interested in routes less travelled.

The structure of the book groups the 15 papers into three parts each con-taining ve papers. The chapters in Part 1 are concerned with the constructionand experience of space and time, those in Part 2 with elements that structure

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