Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Science Concept of Time in the Work of Thomas Hylland Eriksen (Master Thesis) Pavol Fabuš Brno 2008 Declaration of authorship I hereby declare that I have written this thesis without any help from others and without the use of documents and aids other than those stated in literature. In Brno, 29. 5. 2008. Acknowledgements I thank my supervisor, Mgr. Jakub Macek, for many insightful conversations during the development of the ideas in this thesis, and for helpful comments on the text. Some people cry out against the acceleration of time, others cry out against stagnation. They’re both right. Henri Lefebvre CONTENT 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………7 2. ACCELERATING PACE OF LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY AS A SUBJECT OF INQUIRY……………………………………………………………… 9 2.1 Laymen’s Point of View as a Starting Point……………………………………..9 2.2 Methodology……………………………………………………………………10 3. THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN: TYRANNY OF THE MOMENT……………….12 3.1 Norwegian Social Anthropologist T. H. Eriksen……………………………….12 3.2 Tyranny of the Moment. Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age………...12 3.2.1 The Problem of Growth in the Information Society……………………...13 3.2.2 Acceleration as the Historical Process……………………………………16 3.2.3 Tyranny of the Moment and Its Consequences......................……......…...16 3.3 The Role of Media in Tyranny of the Moment……………………….………...19 4. ACCOUNT OF ACCELERATING PACE OF LIFE IN WRITINGS OF OTHER AUTHORS……………………………………………………………………………...23 4.1 James Gleick: Faster. The Acceleration of Just About Everything……….……23 4.2 Heather Menzies: No Time. Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life……….……25 5. TIME AND SOCIAL THEORY……………………………………………………...28 5.1 All Time is Social Time…………………………………………….………….28 5.2 What is Time?.....................................................................................................29 5.3 Time as a Medium of Social Interactions………………………….…………..31 5.3.1 Ordering and Repetition………………………………….……………....32 5.3.2 Time as a Scarce Resource……………………………………………….34 5.3.3 Modernity and Time-space Distanciation………………………………..35 5.3.4 Impact of Time-space Distanciation on Social Formations……………...37 5.3.5 Complexity and Fragmentation………………………………………….38 5.4 Speed and Accelerating Pace of Change………………………………………40 5.4.1 Accelerating Pace of Life Is Nothing New……………………………....42 6. THE ROLE OF MEDIA IN CONSTRUCTION OF TIME………………………..44 6.1 The Media as Inhibitors or Accelerators………………………………………46 6.2 Time and ICT……………………………………………………………….…48 6.2.1 Flexibility and Attention………………………………………………...49 6.2.2 Fragmentation and Inequalities…………………………………………52 7. EVALUATION OF ERIKSEN’S NOTION OF TIME………………………….…54 8. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….…....60 9. NAME INDEX………………………………………………………………………..62 10. SUBJECT INDEX……………………………………………………………………63 11. LITERATURE……………………………………………………………………….64 10.1 Other Internet Sources………………………………………………………70 12. SUMMARY, KEYWORDS…………………………………………………………72 11.1 Summary…………………………………………………………………….72 11.2 Keywords……………………………………………………………………72 13. APPENDIX…………………………………………………………………………..73 1. INTRODUCTION We are living in quick times. So they say. But asking ourselves what is the reason and nature of the speed, we come to a battery of interpretations and every one of them should be taken as an invitation to its scrutiny. A special position among them is held by the concept of time perception. Speeding of time is truly a commonsensical consequence of times saturated with information – the times we live in. “Time is flying”, “hours have changed into minutes” and other similar phrases are used on daily basis, when we experience a discrepancy between our subjective notion of time and its clock measure. There are many reasons why to study the phenomenon of speed and acceleration. Among the most crucial is ever-present question why do we have less and less, when we are using technologies, which ought to save it. Poses acceleration a threat to our coherent relation to the world and to its understanding? Aren’ we driving up to the situation when we won’t have a time for our close friends and relatives, for ourselves? Aren’t we victims of our pursuit for greater effectiveness? Or is it so, that we are actually gaining more from the life, which is going to end one day? All these question are really hard to answer but we should at least try to understand this situation better. Writings like Tyranny of the Moment by Thomas Hylland Eriksen are addressing this anxiety and are too often disconcerted about the point of history we are situated in and the future in front of us. Therefore, in this thesis we would like to analyse the Eriksen’s account together with writings by other authors in order to find out how relavant and on what basis are they criticizing the value of speed we are ascribing to speed since the 19th century. In chapter 3 we will look closely into Eriksen’s book Tyranny of the Moment and pinpoint his main arguments, warnings and suggestions. A special section will deal with media and their role in acceleration according to Eriksen. Chapter 5 will then serve as an addition to the analysis of Eriksen’s account regarding what both of these authors share and what do they add up to the subject. In the next chapter entitled Time and Social Theory we will look into how has the social theory dealt with time so far, what are the main concepts of time and what role does it play in the social world according to various authors. We will see that time itself has been for a long time neglected in social sciences but in recent decades gained its meaning and now is a part of vast research efforts both theoretical and empirical. With the help of time-space 7 distanciation concept by Anthony Giddens we will see how the current society came to the state analysed by Eriksen and others and in what relation is speed and acceleration with fragmentation and complexity. Finally, we will go through a set of notions on accelerated pace of life and valorization of speed throughout the history. In chapter on the role of media in acceleration we will show how media function as “sources of time” (Zeitgebers) and present a comparation of their slowing and accelerating effects. Both chapters 5 and 6 will serve as a theoretical framework for the final evaluation of Eriksen’s account in chapter 7. There we will use Eriksen’s own summary of the most crucial aspect of accelerated society and allocate them in the theoretical framework. This will help us to decide to what extent do we have to take Eriksen’s warning seriously or refuse them in the light of their insufficient grounding. 8 2. ACCELERATING PACE OF LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY AS A SUBJECT OF INQUIRY The experience of acceleration in its general understanding is no doubt a persistent part of our day-to-day life. We feel that our days are more and more filled with impulses of steadily growing variety. Moreover, it seems the more sophisticated technologies designed to be ever more effective if not downright time-saving we use the more we feel the scarcity of time we dispose of.1 In the time of writing this thesis the American alternative rock band R.E.M. released an album titled Accelerate. And this is just a drop in a vast ocean of speed-soaked culture we live in. “(…) fast ovens, quick playback, quick freezing, and fast credit,” laments James Gleick in his book Faster. The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Speed is power. Speed is blessing. And “before it meant velocity, Old English spede or spēd meant something more like success and prosperity.” (Gleick 2000: 51) Thus English phrase “God speed” refers to wishing a good luck. But speed is also a potential threat to deep engagement either in thought or in politics. We will argue later that speed can’t be dealt with as a single thing for it bears different meanings in different contexts. As we will see, speed or acceleration is to inconsiderable extent associated with superficiality, fragmentation, health issues and general insecurity. Moreover, we ourselves, know from our day-to-day experience what does it mean “to keep pace”, “to have a lack of time” or “to be engulfed by a multitude of information”, which is incoming faster and faster. It is necessary then to look closer into this subject and find out whether the warnings about increasing speed we are witnessing are based on solid ground or they are touching a mere surface of the complex issue. 2.1 Laymen’s Point of View as a Starting Point Speed is a status-marker and those, who nowadays want to be successful, must be fast and flexible. But is accelerated society a beneficial one? Are its members prospering and living healthy lives? Isn’t the accelerated pace of life putting us under too much strain? These are 1 Moore (1963: 31) refers to the study by William Goode and Sebastian de Grazia, who demur that labor-saving machines designed for households are time demanding both when they are operating and when they are not and waiting for repairs. 9 legitimate questions, because a day-to-day impression of such culture yields mixed feelings about it. One day we complain about the haste and the other we are enjoying the fast pace of problem-solving. However I dare to say, the remarks on accelerated culture comes mostly within critical rhetoric, which even corresponds with its commonsensical understanding. And exactly this common-sense, the knowledge of the laymen, is going to be an ever- present background of the following analysis. Because not just that the knowledge of laymen is partially composed of results of scientific inquiries, but “as a series of factual beliefs, it is in principle open to confirmation or otherwise in the light of social scientific analysis.” (Giddens 1976: 166) Last but not least it is important to note, that common-sense is not just a set of practical knowledge, to the contrary, it is in some substantial degree derived from, and responsive, to the knowledge and activities of experts, which directly contribute to the rationalization of culture (Giddens 1976: 115).