108 Michael G. Flaherty. the Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experi

108 Time’s Books / KronoScope 12:1 (2012) 104-125

Michael G. Flaherty. The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experi- ence. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. 154 + xxxviii pp. “Now we’re murderers because we kill time,” an opening line in a popular song promoting the pursuit of pleasure,1 is a strong pronouncement of the connec- tion between time and agency. It’s an example of the popular perception that time is an apparatus external to human beings and a nod to what Michael G. Flaherty refers to as a myth of the public at the mercy of a temporal regime. Murderers of time, the song’s protagonists, have chosen to spend their moments out from under the rubric of productivity, choosing to not participate in time’s disciplining power in order to seek social gratification. It’s a hyperbolic state- ment intended to denote empowerment. It invokes the concept of agency and the normative understanding of agency as an act of resistance––entry points into Flaherty’s new book, The Textures of Time. Picking up and naming that which has been present but unarticulated, Michael G. Flaherty brings attention to the relationship between time and agency. He opens up the concept of agency and draws time out of it, in turn giving time more texture through a new typology of agentic practices. Flaherty argues that people are actively customizing their temporal experiences by doing “time work.” He pronounces how and in what ways we actively make time experiences and not wholly in opposition to one great time regime. Flaherty’s time work identifies a number of ways in which people are always already everyday engaged in acts of agency. For most people, the sense that there is no agency in their lives is shaped through the regularity of activities such as going to work, eating lunch mid-day, buying gas every other week, seemingly locked in a circle of working to produce, producing to consume, consuming to sustain. However, Flaherty’s concept of time work and its textures intervenes to disrupt the lethargy that accompanies the sense of being time’s passenger. He points to the multiple ways in which choices, acts of agency, are enacted simultaneous to the coming, going, sitting, or standing of producing and consuming within social structures. As he puts it: the willful modification of our own temporal experiences is often realized though subtle and guarded practices. Textures of time, or patterns of time work, are ways in which people customize their temporal experiences within structural time rhythms; the temporality of the organization in which they are situated does not wholly determine the individual’s experience of time.

1 Young Money, “BedRock,” We Are Young Money, CD (CMR, 2009).

The Textures of Time is organized into eight chapters, six of which focus on different types of time work. The first chapter familiarizes readers with the concept of agency, some of the ways it has been under-considered, and its usefulness as a lens through which to examine human experiences, particularly within social structures. Chapters 2 through 6 carry us through each of the six types of time work identified: duration, frequency, sequence, timing, alloca- tion, and taking time. The naming schema will invoke a sense of the content of each; however, be advised that the robustness of each type cannot be ascer- tained without reading each chapter. In each chapter, Flaherty defines the type of time work, describes how it is enacted, provides examples from his data col- lection of first-person accounts, and discusses the type of time work in con- nection to the relationship between time, agency, and self-determination. The agility with which Flaherty presents the schema, the multifarious data, and related scholarship is admirable. Individuals engage in time work while at home alone or while interacting with others, while sitting in an office or standing behind a counter, or while attending a lecture. Flaherty shows that the agentic practices of time work are invoked wherever people are. Having collected accounts from approximately four hundred and six subjects (over a six year period), he’s able to show types of time work enacted within a range of settings. Subject demographics include students and non-student professionals with occupational roles that include banker, beautician, and engineer, and a close balance of male and female subjects. There is limited representation, Flaherty acknowledges, of time work among members of different socio-economic groups. For scholars and their students interested in this body of needed work, Flaherty book will be impor- tant for developing methodology and key concepts for a comparative study.2 To this possible site of further inquiry, I’d like to add another consideration, are there types of time work that take place without choice? That is: could we consider how time work enacted by one party can subject another party or draw another party into experiencing the particular type of time work without choice? The setting itself is not a condition necessary for invoking a particular kind of time work in all but one type. “Taking time,” discussed in Chapter 6, is time work that is specific to a setting in which one is remunerated for an

2 Flaherty identifies Angela O’Rand and Robert A. Ellis, “Social class and Social Time Perspetive,” Social Forces 53 (1974): 53. To this I add John Streamas, “Closure and Colored People Time,” Time: Limits and Constraints: The Study of Time XIII, ed. Jo Alyson Parker, Paul Harris, and Christian Steineck (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 219-35.