The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of t... See more

South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has developed a useful approach to think about different ways of spending and thinking about time online. Han outlines 3 distinct understandings of time: mythical time, historical time and atomised time.

Mythical time

For Han, mythical time is a time that is full of meaning that transcends the present m... See more

There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting our troubles with time are somehow all in the

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L’accès au temps libre révèle ainsi sous une lumière nouvelle des inégalités socio-économiques, des inégalités de genre mais aussi des inégalités territoriales. Dans ce contexte, une politique démocratique doit avoir pour objectif de redistribuer ce « capital temporel », afin de garantir à tous un accès minimum au temps libéré. C’est le sens de la

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Sharma argues that the contemporary relationship to time is characterized by “the looming expectation that everyone must become an entrepreneur of time control.” Each of us must “recalibrate” to temporal expectations that vary widely along lines of power and privilege.

We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fuelled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organising time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work and socialise are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than eve

... See more

We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fuelled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organising time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work and socialise are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than eve

... See more