Time and space, calendars and maps: constituting social being.

James, Paul

The god associated with time was a blood-thirsty savage. Kronos, son of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), castrated his father to become ruler of the universe during the first Golden Age of humanity. This was the age before humans lived in families, generations, tribes or states. (1) The universe went backwards. Humans did not give birth and then in turn die. They came to life autochthonously as the classical Greek concept, and now anthropological term, would have it--out of the earth itself. Kronos is informed by his parents that he will be dethroned by one of his own sons, and so begins devouring his offspring at their birth. His wife moves to save one of their newborn, Zeus. She deceives Kronos with a stone wrapped in baby clothes. Some versions of the myth have Rhea pressing the stone to her breast and her flowing milk creating the stars known as the Milky Way. Zeus grows to godhood and does overthrow his father. In doing so, he sets the clock of mortality, which for the first time allows humans to experience the pain and pleasure of the succession of generations.

How different is that sense of cosmological time from the abstracted empty time which obsessed the modern/postmodern world at the end of the second millennium of the Common Era? This was the time of the Y2K global panic, One Minute Bedtime Stories, and machines that measured temporal change in nanoseconds. A hundred years had passed since Guglielmo Marconi had sent the Morse letter 'S' across the Atlantic, and quite new regimes for regulating, exchanging and communicating across time and space were being promoted. On 1 January 2000, a consortium of European and US corporations, the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), launched a software system to provide a global web-based standard-time. Supported by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, IMRG proposed a system that overlaid Greenwich Mean Time, and extended the Co-ordinated Universal Time protocol to create what they called Greenwich Electronic Time (GeT). GeT was intended to be a common international standard for electronic communication and commerce. (2) It was aimed squarely at rationalizing and systematizing the global market. Also around the turn of the millennium the idea of a common, global, standard-map based on satellite imaging was being mooted. A commercial satellite called Okonos swept the world, taking spatial photographs with a one-metre resolution. Its digital images were available for sale on the World Wide Web, and such images were being used for global climate-change forecasting relevant to the agricultural futures markets and for selling packages of temporal risk.

Time and space at the turn of the millennium were thus dominated by classical modernist concerns about efficiency, profit, movement, speed and control. However, this was complicated by other coexisting temporal and spatial modalities. The modern turn of the millennium was also the year 1420 according to the traditional Muslim calendar, the year 208 according to the calendar of the French revolution and the year of the Dragon according to the Chinese calendar. (3) The range of alternative possibilities included those in tribal settings where the millennium was as marginally relevant as Father Christmas. It included neo-traditional forms of millenarianism such as espoused by the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo that released nerve gas into the Tokyo subways in order to speed up the time of Armageddon; or as held by the Concerned Christians who fled to the holy city of Jerusalem in 1999 just in case the doomsayers were right. And it included postmodern relativizations, both conceptual and material, of the very notion of calendrical time that made a concept of the millennium possible in the first place.

Woven through that brief evocation of the complex layering of contemporary forms of temporality and spatiality is an argument that the contemporary world can only be adequately understood in terms of a matrix of interweaving ontological formations: tribalism, traditionalism, modernism and postmodernism. This is the task of this article--to introduce an approach to understanding time and space that goes beyond conventional propositions that talk either of time-space distantiation or time-space compression in the contemporary world, as if time and space can be characterized as flat categories that stretch and contract, come to the fore and fall away. How do communities that continue at one level to be constituted in the framing of tribalism tend to live their categories of temporality, spatiality and embodiment? What does it mean to live under the conditions of the dominance of modern time and space? Is it possible to talk of 'postmodern time' or 'postmodern space'? In answering these questions it is important to realize that it is not the expressions of time or space or their content that mark the difference. It is questions of social form. In other words, the 'constitutive abstraction' approach being used in this article attempts to address issues of intersecting social formations. (4) This means setting up the conditions for explaining how, for example, while both the traditional mediaeval Order of Matins and a postmodern neo-tribal film Highlander IV make much of the phrase 'world without end', they are set in completely different temporal and spatial frames. The overall argument can be summarized in three main propositions, although I will add more points as the article proceeds.

Proposition 1: Time and space are deeply embedded social-relational categories. They are ontological categories constituted as both the context and the outcome of patterns of social practice and meaning. In short, time and space can only be understood socially. (5)

Proposition 2: Different social formations live their dominant or framing senses of time and space in fundamentally different ways. For example, the notion that time passes at one second per second is a tautological and modern convention rather than being either intrinsically natural or scientifically verifiable. It is abstracted from nature, and verifiable only within a particular mode of scientific enquiry--the Newtonian treatment of time as unitary, linear and uniform. It reached its culmination in 1974 when the second came to be measured in atomic vibrations, allowing the post-phenomenal concept of nanoseconds--one-billionth of a second. The time of postmodernity, including the time of relativity and quantum physics, does not move in this way. In the late-modern/ postmodern case of Einsteinian relativity it moves in relation to the speed of the participant through space.

Proposition 3: Across history, more abstract modes of living in time and space have become layered across more concrete modes, reconstituting rather than replacing those 'prior' forms. (6) To give a simple example, the 'telling of the time' has moved from knowing the patterns of nature--for example, the movement of the sun across the sky, seasonal changes, or the movements of the stars--to reading increasingly abstracted forms of measurement: sands through the neck of an hourglass, the movements of hands on a mechanized clock, digital read-outs based on the unseen oscillations of quartz crystals. Despite historical shifts in the dominant ways of telling the time, modern/postmodern persons do not always wear digital watches and they occasionally check out the height of the sun to work out what time it is. Most people are blithely unaware of an existing global Internet time developed by the Swiss company Swatch that uses a meridian in Biel and divides the day into 1000 divisions of 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. Neither do they care that the Swatch digital watches they wear, although abstracted from analogue time, themselves tend to use a form of temporal presentation that harks back to the mediaeval sundial. (The first circular faces or dials on clocks, with pointers visually indicating the hour of the day, date back to the 14th century.)

The Abstraction of Time

It is a dangerous analytic task upon which we embark. The possibilities of being misunderstood are endless. I originally intended to begin the article by simply describing the dominant nature of time in social formations framed by tribalism. However, rather than taking such a direct route, I will begin more strategically by first underlining Proposition 3 through using an example of the complex layering of ontologies of time in a particular tribal-traditional-modern community.

The Tokelau, a Polynesian community living on a narrow island flanked by ocean, have two coexisting calendrical systems. The first is a celestial 'night-time' calendar based on the positions of the stars and connected to tribal subsistence activities, particularly fishing. The second is a modern 'day-time' calendar. With the abolition of traditional kinship in 1915 and later establishment of a Tokelau public service, the way that time was traditionally lived--day and night--has been overlayed by a second modern system of day-time reckoning, 'office-time'. In other words, with the institutional abstractions of the polity through the coming of the institutions of church, public service, school and hospital--one set of processes in a more general shift--natural or embodied time has been reconstituted. This has profound consequences for tribal-traditional time even if continuities from the past are still carried through. This change is connected not only to the abstraction of institutional authority over the authority of kinship relations, but also to the intertwining of modes of practice--for example, to the abstraction of exchange and the increasing centrality of money:

 What one could then call 'subsistence time' denotes activities
 centred around the production (including hunting and
 gathering activities), distribution and consumption of food.
 'Office-time' activities are those that involve the running of
 various departments of the Tokelau public service. These
 activities are to a greater extent (although this may be said
 only to be a matter of degree) outward oriented, and have
 their roots in the monetary sphere ... The two systems
 conflict in several respects, and there are many signs to
 indicate that they have opposing consequences with respect
 to social reproduction. In short, whereas subsistence-oriented
 activities are geared towards reproducing large
 extended families and a very tight network of inter-family
 co-operation, monetary based activities tend to produce
 smaller, more independent units and do absolutely nothing
 to generate village cooperation. On the other hand, the
 monetary sphere is also closely connected with the demands
 for closer inter-atoll and national co-operation on a formal
 institutional level. (7)

Thus, as Ingjerd Hoem's research illustrates, face-to-face integration becomes more privatized as the dominant level of integration is both extended and abstracted. This, in intersection with the commodification of the economy, makes 'national cooperation' across the three Tokelau Islands more thinkable, even desired. The subjective consequences of this go very deep, challenging something as basic as how one looks at another person. As traditionally understood, the Tokelau face is made as a 'fragrant presented surface' in public contexts, adorned, oiled, perfumed and attentively demure--the 'day' side of things. Looking at another is framed by careful codes of social engagement. For example, to directly 'face' another person is to assume a posture of social equality. The new infrastructures confuse this sense of the public face. It adds another layer-in-tension to the day: the public post-gendered face required by the public service; the direct voice elicited by modern pedagogy.

Similarly, the modality of communication shifts. In traditional Tokelauan ways of speaking, relationships tend to be represented in spatial terms rather than through direct personal pronouns, and great care is taken in either ascribing or avoiding implied attributions of agency. The sensitivities here are linked to one's place, understood in both spatial and social terms. Hoem writes:

 We can see here a way of thinking which is deeply rooted in
 the forms of sociality which produce and are produced by it.
 To switch ways of thinking and forms of sociality associated
 with the palagi [the modern Westerner], or to live in various
 combinations of the two is certainly possible. What I wish to
 point out here, however, are the discrepancies between two
 frames of reference. In terms of the linguistic representation
 of agency presented above, such discrepancies are apparent
 on the syntactical level. In the modes of communication
 associated with the making of the nation-state (education,
 official documents, etc.), there is a markedly different
 pattern of communication. The syntax shows more
 resemblance to the patterns of English: the pronouns
 (especially ego-orientation) enter, the spatial reference is
 backgrounded and the typical pattern of verb-initial
 sentences, is left in favour of noun initiation (achieved
 through topicalisation). This is significant in that the ego- or
 I-orientation is traditionally heavily sanctioned and
 downplayed. (8)

Confirming these changes are shifts in the content of traditional songs. At the now regular administrative meetings of representatives of the three atolls, songs are sung as tribute and 'confirmation' of tribal-traditional culture. However, instead of the songs beginning with particularistic lines of placement such as 'Atafu my beautiful island ...', the words are changed to stretch the sense of belonging across the atolls-as-a-unity. Atafu turns into 'Tokelau, my beautiful homeland ...', and the song itself, as repository of oral knowledge, is redirected to play a quite different role of national unification. (9)

In this example, relations of time and space are analytically distinguishable even as they are embedded in everything else. Tribalism is an ontological formation, a layer of being, not a totalizing description of communities we call 'tribes'. Now, I can make the bolder points 1 and 2 again--the argument here is that despite this overlaying of formations we can still examine what it means to live in the dominance of tribalism, or any other ontological formation, as a specifiable way of living. Put simply but in more theoretical terms, the argument is that we can analytically abstract the generalities of that ontological formation and distinguish it from other formations. The pitfalls besetting this journey are rife. For example, when Anthony Giddens uncritically quotes Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer having no 'concept of time', he needs to be much more careful about how he frames such a move. Writing in 1939, Evans-Pritchard says:

 Strictly speaking the Nuer have no concept of time and
 consequently, no developed abstract system of time-reckoning
 ... there is no equivalent expression in the Nuer
 language for our word 'time', and ... they cannot, therefore,
 as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual,
 which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. (10)

The sentence that Giddens uses to frame that claim, on the surface, is weak: 'Most small-scale "primitive" societies seem to lack such an abstract conception of time (or of space either)'. (11) He is very careful to distinguish between the general human category of historical consciousness and the modern notion of historicity--the reflexive control of linear time. However, in accepting Evans-Pritchard's assessment, the weak qualifier falters and Giddens carries forward the unsustainable dualisms between timeless cultures and cultures with linear time. (12) We can say in reply that contemporary tribes have tended to acquire a powerful sense of their own historicity, that the slow acquisition process of that sensibility can in many cases be traced to the clash of ontologies that came with colonization or culture contact, and that Giddens has picked out what is one of the most misleading quotations from Evans-Pritchard that it was possible to find.

Another common and equally unhelpful version of this differentiation is to say that tribal societies live in circular time and modern societies live in linear time. It is not that cyclical time does not exist in tribal and traditional thought and practice--for example, we find it in the Hindu law book of Manu, and in the Books of Chilan Balan from the Maya Indians of Yucatan in southeastern Mexico, although there we also find a coincidence of circular and linear time. (13) It is rather that a metaphor of linearity, even when it bends back upon itself, is an inadequate way of describing the rich complexity of dominant temporality in customary tribal cultures. This limitation applies to all variations on the modern linear metaphor: circular, pendulum-like, reversible and even rhythmic time.

This inadequacy of all modern metaphors of time when describing tribal time has led at least one contemporary commentator to go back to the claim that there are cultures where time does not exist. 'Having disposed of cycles, I want to dispose of time itself,' writes Tony Swain in relation to the Aborigines of Australia. 'This is not as difficult as it first might appear,' he says. 'Ricoeur argues, correctly, that numbered intervals are necessary to open-ended linearity, but I would go further and say they are indispensable to time itself ... Significantly, the rhythms of Aboriginal life are totally unnumbered, as Aborigines traditionally used no counting at all.' (14) There is not the space here to debate the dubious claim that pre-contact customary Aboriginal people did not have counting procedures, but it is important to question Swain's claim that a tribal ontology of time depends upon a form of mathematics, associated with traditional and modern cultures. Why is time restricted to those cultures that differentiate and count things in the manner of stones on an abacus frame? This claim appears to be the opposite of that which we encounter when Arjun Appadurai reduces tribal gift exchange to traditional and modern commodity exchange.15 However, the effect is the same. In the case of Appadurai, a tribal category of being is reduced to a traditional-modern category, and disappears, or, as in this case (Swain), the capacity to deal in a category of being is stolen from tribal people directly, and ... disappears. Funnily enough, what Swain offers us back instead of 'time' is the concept of 'rhythmed events'. Call me simple, but it seems to me that we are back to a sense of time with his concept of 'rhythmed events'. It is a different sense of time from the temporality variously posited by Plato (cosmological time), Newton (empty time), or Einstein (relative space-time). It is time that is not talked about in itself, but it is time nevertheless.

One way of handling this problem, as already strongly hinted at in the examples used above, is to distinguish different forms of temporality without necessarily treating them as confined to different ontological formations. This still allows for a more specific proposition that argues that the nature of those formations can be characterized by their dominant temporal forms (see Table 1 below).

[TABLE 1 OMITTED]

Proposition 4: Tribalism can be characterized by the intersection-in-dominance of analogical, genealogical and mythological time; traditionalism can be characterized by the overlaying of cosmological time; modernism by the overlaying of empty and relative time; and postmodernism by the overlaying of virtual space-time. Analogical, genealogical and mythological modes of temporality are also available in post-tribal settings constituted in the dominance of traditional or modern ways of life--available particularly at the level of the face-to-face--but they tend to be confined to moments of remembering and ritual and treated as archaic, residual or quaint.

Analogical time treats temporal movement as analogous to changes in nature (where nature is always-already cultural). The most obvious examples are seasonal changes (the English words 'time' and 'tide' come from the Anglo-Saxon tid, meaning season); lunar cycles, the basis of the Islamic calendar; and circadian rhythms, including the diurnal birth and death of the sun. In the time of the Mambai of East Timor, past, present and future are located along the axis of the tree, from the trunk--base, source, origin, beginning; to the top--the end, the present-future. (16) In the time of the oral poetry of Hesiod (from the 7th century BCE) that has come down to us in written form as Works and Days (from the 5th century BCE), the activities of Gods and persons and the nature of things are bound up with each other: 'when powerful Zeus brings on the rains of autumn, and the feel of a man's body changes, and he goes much lighter, for this time the star Seirios goes a little over the heads of hard-fated mankind ... ' (17) This, by the way, is the right time to have sex. Analogical time is thus also bound up with embodiment (and, as we will see in a moment, it is linked though mythological time), but the time related to the human body has a rhythm of its own that can be analytically distinguished as genealogical time.

Genealogical time is time embodied in significant life-moments, life-histories and genealogies--periods of speaking, periods of pregnancy, life-periods, life-times of birth and death: all marked by ritualized and profane social moments. There is no concept of time-in-itself in this conception: it is temporality framed by face-to-face relations as a mode of integration and projected accordingly. Genealogies within customary tribal settings are held in embodied memory, but in other settings they are also stretched beyond memory and are abstracted as lists and (family) trees showing connections to past times and places. In tribal settings, genealogical time is abstracted from immediate embodiment, however it is not as abstracted and rationalized as Pierre Bourdieu suggests in his dualist treatment of genealogies, mappings and calendars as intellectual abstractions opposed to local generative schemes that just happen to occur in practice:

 Just as genealogy substitutes a space of unequivocal,
 homogenous relationships, established once and for all, for a
 spatially and temporally discontinuous set of islands of
 kinship, ranked and organized to suit the needs of the
 moment and brought into practical existence gradually and
 intermittently, and just as a map replaces the discontinuous,
 patchy space of practical paths by the homogenous,
 continuous space of geometry, so a calendar substitutes a
 linear, homogenous, continuous time for practical time,
 which is made up of incommensurable islands of duration,
 each with its own rhythm, the time that flies by or drags,
 depending on what one is doing, i.e. on the functions
 conferred on it by the activity in progress. (18)

In the present approach, Bourdieu's description of genealogical-calendrical time (as well as what he describes as 'practical time') fits into what can be called 'homogenous empty time'. (19) I will discuss this below in relation to modernist conceptions of time. However, before doing so I want to argue that, in tribal societies at least, analogical and genealogical time both tend to be drawn unevenly together in what might be called 'mythological time'.

Mythological time narrates the medium of life, a medium that is 'beyond' but also informs and is part of what happens here. It originates before but frames the experiential world now, both temporally and spatially. Mythological time keeps getting drawn back to analogical and genealogical instances--for Hesiod, time is implicitly the narrative space of all being, but it is also embodied in Kronos and the story of the generations. We find the same process exemplified in that most extraordinary form of mythological time, the Aboriginal 'Dreamtime' or 'The Dreaming'. One of the complications of getting at this form of time is that the concept was first named by anthropologists--from Baldwin Spencer and F. Gillen at the end of the 19th century to W. E. H. Stanner in the mid-20th century. This Western-introduced appellation was then thoroughly incorporated into various Aboriginal interpretations of their own being-in-time. It now connects different mythologies about the lives of Ancestral Beings across different tribes and clans that were once either discontinuous or only loosely connected. Notwithstanding this process of translation from one language-group into the conception of Aboriginality, the forms of the Dreaming myths, though not its content, have similarities across Indigenous Australia--it is the ground of past and present. It is not conceived of as a single totalizing creation-story but as a series of sacred stories that differ from place to place and from storyteller to storyteller depending upon their knowledge. As Fred Myers puts it in his work on the Pintupi people, The Dreaming can only be understood as being both a given condition and an interpretative projection in relation to the placement of those who live and tell it:

 For the Pintupi, at least, particular attention should be paid
 to the precarious achievement of Society within the
 constraints of life in dispersed local groups as a construction
 that transcends the present and immediate. Essentially, the
 form taken by The Dreaming among the Pintupi represents
 this dilemma. Its structure is a product of the way Pintupi
 society reproduces itself in space and time. Indeed, the
 distinction that the concept of The Dreaming establishes
 between two levels of being reflects the structuring of
 Pintupi space. Such a view sustains the intuition that two
 other constructs of major importance in Pintupi social life--ngurra
 meaning 'camp', 'country', or 'place', and walytja,
 referring to 'family', 'relatives', or 'kin'--are fundamentally
 linked to the concept of The Dreaming. It is in relation to this
 practical logic that space and time, defined by the Dreaming,
 acquire their value. (20)

In this instance, and many others, mythological time is inextricably bound to relations of place (for the Pintupi, ngurra), embodiment (walytja) and knowing (ninti--in Pintupi, 'holding'). The elements of being are in this setting not abstracted out of each other. However, with the colonial encounter it was brought sharply into focus as new pressures of time-discipline, displacement and codified knowledge hit people in the face. In this one tectonic process of confronting white colonizers from a different world-time, these older forms of time-space were brought under great pressure and brought to the attention of Indigenous peoples themselves as the ground of their nameable ways of life. (21)

Cosmological time, by comparison, is time that is abstracted from mythological time by processes of universalizing and synthesizing myths and practical logic. It is time beyond history but expressed only through it. It is beyond sensible human knowing, but expressed through material instances, mediators, shadows on cave walls, or signs of God on earth. Unlike in the case of the ancient Greek Gods or the Ancestral Figures of the Dreaming, cosmological time is not embodied, but rather instantiated in its omnipresence. It is the whole truth, the One Truth and the only Truth, however contested. This kind of temporality includes what Anderson, drawing upon Benjamin, calls 'Messianic time', temporality that brings past, present and future together connected in the sight of God. However (leaving aside the blatant ethnocentrism of a concept that names the dominant traditional form of time in terms of the religions of the Torah), confining the time of traditionalism to the Messianic would be to accept that the sacred in traditionalism is an all-encompassing frame of that ontological formation. To the contrary, even if the sacred is extraordinarily important, it was not all-encompassing. From the ancient Stoics and Epicureans to their Renaissance brethren, temporal connection did not always depend upon a god or gods. In some conceptions, 'What has happened has happened and it is no longer possible to undo whatever has happened. Lazarus does not rise, Iphigeneia does not live on after her fiery death, nor does the sun stand still in the sky at Joshua's command'. (22) In the present argument, what secular traditionalism still depended upon, however, was something beyond itself, usually Nature as cosmology.

Empty time, the leitmotif of modernism, gradually overlays the power of cosmological time, particularly in Europe across the period of the late-mediaeval and after, and eventually carries through the dethroning of both God and Nature as dominant categories. Empty time is time-in-itself, natural with a small 'n'. It is time self-consciously abstracted as a category of existence, able to be mapped day by day onto empty calendrical grids. Time in this setting is often described metaphorically--it travels like an arrow, it is spaced like knots on a long string, and it flows like a river--but it is not part of these things in the way that analogous time would have it. This is the form of temporality that allows for historicity. That is, it leaves the space for reflection upon 'historical time' as it is measured (tautologically) across time and space. The emergence of such a level of temporality leads us in two directions simultaneously: the first is subjectivism, for example, as expressed by Immanuel Kant, for whom time was the foundation of all experience. The second is objectivism, expressed by Isaac Newton in 1687 as giving the possibility of 'Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, [flowing] equally without relation to anything external'. (23)

Empty time emerged in the cracks of cosmological time, particularly, as Richard Sennett documents, through processes of agency or object-extension: through corporations being given a lifetime of their own, abstracted from the lives of persons, or through objects of exchange, including money, being used to secure time or deferred salvation. Using an example of economic contractual obligations being rewritten in 13th-century Paris, Sennett writes:

 If a charter could be revised, the corporation defined by it
 has a structure which transcends its function at any one time
 ... In Humbert de Romans' Paris, measured time was just
 beginning to make its appearance in the guilds: guild
 contracts, especially in the manufacturing trades, specified
 the hours of work and computed wages on this basis. (24)

Empty time allows many practices, and brought much contestation. It is this kind of time that frames the possibility of conceiving of usury, lending money at interest, in effect 'buying time'. Despite being prohibited at various times by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it legally escaped the strictures of cosmological time by being allowed in dealings with persons from a different cosmology--a mediaeval Muslim, for instance, could borrow with interest from a Jewish lender. This can be compared to usance, a form of lending over variable time discussed by Chris Gregory in Savage Money. (25) Usance involves repayments in kind after the exchange-use of goods such as grain and land, and is not interest in the modern sense. For example, when a farmer is lent seed, contracting to pay back some time after the harvest that amount of seed and an additional contracted proportion, the rate of usance has a value, but there is no abstraction of common temporal measure in that calculation. There is no sense that a certain amount of time equals a certain level of return. The temporal point called 'after the harvest' remains a socially negotiated horizon. The return is embedded in the fate of nature and the continuing embodied relationship between lender and borrower.

This is not to say that usance cannot be rationalized in the modern sense, but it did not begin life that way. In Gregory's words:

 As such it has its value in the historically contingent
 relationship between the lender and the borrower.
 Temporality, as the reciprocally recognized relationship
 between lender and borrower, determines the language used
 to describe the transaction--use? interest? usury?--and
 values it as good or bad. (26)

In a world of strangers conducting business in an increasingly abstract market, usury quickly became normalized. Time-measured capitalism emerged powerfully through the 18th into the 20th centuries, aided by time industrialization--the industrial production of the mechanisms for telling the time. In 1760, the production of watches averaged one timepiece per worker-month. In 1960, a decade after the United States Time Corporation made the first Timex watch, the company was making eight million of them annually. A further decade on, and it had globalized its production base and was making thirty million timepieces in plants around the world. (27)

This period of the 18th into the 20th centuries was also the time of intensifying historicalism, the propensity to globalize a single temporal system and a singular sense of 'world-time' (28) across a singular world-space. Homogenous empty time became the first kind of time that allowed for the global extension of time without becoming beset by internal contradictions--mostly because it relativized other temporal systems in terms of itself as the normalized ground of everyday practice. In empty time, the high priests of cosmological time could have their holy days (quickly becoming holidays), but the calendar they added their days into was rationalized in terms of relativized nature. Inside the sacred houses, time was gradually reworked. The sacred concept of the hora (hour) became regulated in empty time as reformists, including John Calvin and Martin Luther, argued for limiting sermons to a consumerable abstract time-measure. (29) Holy days were a longer term problem. For centuries, philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians had attempted to reconcile analogical time (the time of nature) with different versions of cosmological time (religious renditions of the time of the sacred): the Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century, the Hindu astronomer Aryabhata in the 6th century, the Venerable Bede in the 8th century, the Arab mathematician Mohammed Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi in the 9th century and the Oxford Franciscan Roger Bacon in the 13th century. (30) The problem was that the days of their calendars were out of step with the lunar months and the solar year. In 1582, Pope Gregory VIII finally issued a papal bull to realign sacred and analogical time in terms of a new calendar, but this was the beginning of the end of the dominance of cosmological time, at least in Christendom.

This intersection of cosmological time and empty time continues to the present. For example, the hands of the clock at the front of the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque remain at 8.47 am, the time that the tsunami struck Aceh on 26 December 2004. Seven thousand people attended the Eid al-Adha holy day service early in 2005 to honour the tsunami victims across Indonesia. However, empty time nevertheless framed these holy events as the rest of the world squabbled over which high technology early-warning system would be used in the future to simultaneously warn nations in the Indian Ocean about impending disasters. Extending upon the preceding discussion we can add a further proposition.

Proposition 5: The extension of a generalized connection across an abstracted world-space--namely, globalism--is associated with a parallel temporal process of generalizing connection across world-time: historicalism.

Empty time is also associated with modern globalism. The great revolution of empty time culminated in the 19th century with political and scientific debates around the introduction of standard world-time. In 1884, at the Prime Meridian Conference, agreement was finally reached to link the world temporally, counting twenty-four hours around the globe with each hour aligned to zones marked by longitudinal meridians east and west of Greenwich. It was symbolically the last gasp of traditional 'Rule Britannia'; even if the conference was held in Washington DC. This was time as globalized and practically relativized in relation to one's actual location on the globe. There are many theoretical ways of coming at this development: from the level of empirical generalizations about the detail of the debates and technological developments, through conjunctural and integrational analysis, to categorical analysis about the changing nature of time itself. Most often the history of time has been written about at the level of collecting details for making empirical generalizations. In the story told by Clarke Blaise, standard-time began in the mind of the chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Sandford Fleming, in June 1867 when, in Bandoran, Ireland, he missed the Londonderry train because of a basic temporal discrepancy. (31) At that time, across the world, railway times were set separately and only in rough relation to each other, usually taken from solar readings. However, at a more abstract analytical level, it is possible to tell the story as a world-history of the emerging dominance of a new mode of temporality. As we have seen, this revolution was neither immediate nor totalizing and universally accepted. It is indicative that in Joseph Condrad's novel The Secret Agent (1907), the central character, a Russian anarchist, is sent to England to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, the site of the prime meridian.

Unlike the attempt to standardize the basis of money in the gold standard, however, standard-time has become an enduring institution. It is not that it rules supreme, but it meets the requirements of what Bourdieu calls the practical logic in relation to the complex habitus of capitalism (based on an accelerating electronic, just-in-time mode of production and an expanding mode of commodity and financial exchange); mediatism (the systemic interconnectivity of a mass-mediated world based on a mode of electronically networked communication that emphasizes instaneity); and techno-scientism (based on a new intersection between the mode of production and the mode of enquiry that rationalizes time).

Other modalities of time have since emerged. Relative space-time grew up in the era of empty time, and although it has been around for nearly a century it does not look like displacing empty time as the dominant ontology of contemporary temporality. It is time connected and relativized in the expression E = [mc.sup.2] (matter-energy determines the curvature of space-time); that is, it is time relativized in relation to one's place and movement through the universe. In the field of physics, this kind of time has itself been 'superseded' by quantum physics, and more recently by notions of virtual space-time in which time has become the times of parallel universes and time warps.

This is time best expressed in science fiction, superstring theory, (32) and postmodern finance capital. It is time that, for example, makes its way into the material world via traded derivatives--that is, contracts made about the future 'specifying rights and obligations which are based upon, and thus derive their value from, the [current and projected] performance of some underlying instrument, investment, currency, commodity or service index, right or rate'. (33) Traded derivatives developed from the 1970s and grew exponentially from the mid-1980s. By the turn of the century, they amounted to an estimated US$70 trillion or eight times the annual GDP of the United States. Hedge funds also increased significantly over the first years of the new century, growing annually at approximately 15 to 20 per cent to an estimated US$1 trillion. Most startlingly, these more abstract forms of exchange outpaced more concrete exchange transactions such as commodity trading, which itself was greatly increasing in volume: foreign currency exchange was ten times world trade in 1983, sixty times in 1992 and seventy times in 1999. (34) The vagueness of the figures associated with the changes is testament to both the abstraction of the process and the superseding of older forms of institutionalization. Derivative exchanges are conducted 'Over the Counter' on private digital networks as the exchange of the temporally projected value of value units that do not yet exist except as computer-generated temporal projections. Hedge funds in their speculative mode effectively gamble on the future. Both collapse time into an eternal present and trade in fine calculations about what might happen.

In the present, then, we can find across the world all of the forms of temporality that we have been discussing, from the analogical to the virtual, and from the tribal to the postmodern. Empty time, the dominant temporality of this period, has become filled with the possibilities of other times and other sensibilities, but dominant it remains--a dominant and savagely demanding ontology that frames objective and subjective relations in the 21st century.

The Abstraction of Space

The abstraction and extension of spatiality across history and across different social formations arguably follows the same patterning as that of temporality (as do other modes of being from epistemology to embodiment--though there are some parting distinctions with the emergence of modern modes of embodiment, mostly because human beings still find it culturally impossible to treat their bodies as 'empty'). In the case of spatiality, the patterns of change are even more closely linked, despite a number of theorists of modernism claiming that, since the 19th century, time has replaced space as the dominant motif of social relations (or vice versa) (compare Table 1 above and Table 2 below).

[TABLE 2 OMITTED]

Just as in the case of analogical time, the ontology of analogical space involves treating social places as analogical to sites in nature. For example, the Yolngu place of ganma is the confluence of two waters, fresh and salt, that meet in a particular mangrove lagoon, as well as the power and danger of such a fertile life-giving place. (35) Place is bound up with time, embodiment and knowledge. Related to this, genealogical space is embodied in life-histories and genealogies--life-times of birth and death marked by ritualized and profane social moments (bound by the face-to-face as a mode of integration). Mythological space treats spatiality as the narrated life-world. This medium of the mythic is 'framing' and yet constantly permeates the whole experiential world without being singular. Mythological space is condensed in meaning at particular sites as places carrying the recognition of change or stability in time, such as stones, rock formations, trees, mountains, rivers, burial sites and other places marking life-passages. By comparison to mythological space--which is grounded in a landscape of meanings, unevenly drawing together places by analogy and genealogy--cosmological space, the dominant spatiality of traditionalism, is universalizing, proclaiming itself as metaphysical and totalizing. Particular sites are anointed as signs of the cosmological, and although these sites do not carry the cosmological in themselves, they are seen as expressive of it.

If, as discussed earlier, modernism is characterized by the overlaying of prior forms of time by empty time, we can say similarly that empty time walks alongside homogenous empty space as it leaves behind or reconstitutes prior forms of spatiality. Just as with the development of empty time, conceptions of empty spatiality developed in the fissures and contradictions of cosmological subjectivities and practices, emerging to overshadow the mysteries of earlier mythological space. Frank Lestringant, for example, shows how in the Renaissance world different forms of mapping continued side by side despite the dominance of ontologies of cosmological space.

 The topographer's landscape-map was a profuse and
 indefinitely fragmented receptacle of local legends and
 traditions that were rooted in the vagaries of relief, hidden in
 the folds of terrain, and readable in toponymy and folklore
 [analogical and mythological space]; whereas the reticular
 and geometrical map of the cosmographer anticipated the
 conquests and 'discoveries' of the modern age. No doubt the
 marvellous [the mythological representation of fantastic
 creatures] was not absent from it; but it subsisted there only
 by special dispensation. If for example, the Le Havre pilot
 Guillaume Le Testu placed at the margins of the known
 world, in his Cosmographie Universelle of 1556, monstrous
 populations inherited from Pliny, St Augustine and Isidore
 of Seville, it was only to establish provisional boundaries for
 a knowledge in a perpetual state of progress. 'Progress'
 means here that enlargement of a space that was pushing out
 on all sides and stitching together, as voyages allowed, the
 remaining gaps in it ... (36)

In Lestringant's words, cosmological space during this period 'anticipated' empty space. That is, cosmography continued to treat cosmology as foundational--many map-makers from Sebastian Munster to Jodocus Hondius were geographer-theologians--however, the new forms of mapping displaced God to the textual and ritual mediations that accompanied the maps. Empty spatiality, in allowing space to be measured by new techniques and processes of technological mediation, set up new spatial perspectives such as the Mercator projection that put humankind as the viewer of the globe rather than God. It is no coincidence that by the 16th century, the Garden of Eden had largely disappeared as a mapped place. (37) Conceptions of empty space were framing the transition from frontiers to borders as abstract lines on a map and were linked to the emergence of institutionally extended spaces such as state-organized territory and private property.

Commodified space--private property--developed across the same period as institutionalized space. Both were dependent upon the institution of the state to set up juridical, military and administrative surveillance systems to establish their dominance and to regulate their reproduction, but they were also part of a shift in the dominant ontological frame that was to have an increasingly powerful effect on all the peoples of the world. The colonization of other frames of space and time occurred with brutal excess as sailor-soldiers headed out in ships with guns, germs and steel to fill the world's 'empty spaces'. (38) New kinds of abstract mapping carved up the landscape of the New World. Only a few years after the American Revolution had decided who was going to dominate North America, the United States Congress in May 1785 authorized the survey and sale of over a billion acres, stretching from Canada to Mexico in an immaculate abstract grid of straight lines. Thomas Jefferson's plan included states that were yet to be named and some that never came into existence--Assenisipia and Metropotamia. (39) Across the other side of the globe, Edward Gibbon Wakefield set out to do the same thing for Australia and South Africa. Into those 'empty spaces', and not just colonial spaces, people poured the sense that they were making new worlds, and in some senses they were. In Benedict Anderson's phrase, those spaces became 'saturated with ghostly national imaginings'. (40) (Recall the song of 'Tokelau, my beautiful homeland ...') States and nations were coming together. In another sense, those empty spaces were built over the partial destruction of prior ways of life.

Proposition 6: The modern abstraction of time-as-history and space-as-territory (in empty time-space) was foundational to the formation of modern state sovereignty, the nation-state and the 'take-off phase' of modern globalism. This is related to the argument that both the modern nation-state and disembodied globalism grew up together in the period of the late-19th century as relations of exchange and communication became dominated by increasingly abstract forms of interchange.

The modern struggle over the globalization of one form of generalizing empty spatiality--metric measurement--occurred during the same period. Over the period of the 18th to the 20th centuries metric measurement (that is, post-embodied measurement) was taken up by all the countries on the earth except for the United States, Burma and Liberia. Relative space-time emerged out of the limits of empty regulated space as the measurement of very large and very small things--from universes to atoms and light waves--failed to succumb to two-dimensional measurement techniques. In the late-18th century, the search for the length of the metre as one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator had been posited on the belief that because the globe was eternal and perfectly spherical it would generate a measurement that would be 'for all people for all time' (Cariat de Condorcet).41 However, when finally the metre was generalized and confirmed at the Convention of the Metre in 1875 (paralleling the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference), it became an exercise in modern paradox. By that time, science had stripped measurement of any analogical certainty. The metre had become no more than a relative measure preserved as a unit of convention in a platinum-iridium bar. And it gets more bizarre. In the mid-20th century, soon after the second became defined as the duration corresponding to the transition between 'the two superfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium-133 atom', or 9 192 631 770 periods of its radiation, the metre was redefined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second. Concurrently, postmodern notions of beyond space-time had entered the human lexicon with hyperspace, parallel universes and multiple space-time dimensions (again mostly handled as science fiction and avantgarde physics/philosophy). (42) Ontologies of empty space remained dominant, much as had empty time, not because it was the newest, but through being embedded in the globalized practices and subjectivities of what I have been calling capitalism, mediatism and technoscientism.

Out of this discussion, there is a final proposition that I want to put tentatively, and without developing it here as more than a concluding reflection.

Proposition 7: The reconstitution of time and space has political consequences, with more abstract means of connecting time and space giving increased potential for power at a distance. As the dominant way in which we live time and space has become more abstract it has become more open to processes of rationalization, objectification and commodification. This entails new considerations on the requirements of an alternative politics.

In this sense, the way that power is generated has itself become both (potentially) more extensive in its reach and intensive in its depth, as it has become more abstractly constituted. The abstraction of time and space is not intrinsically bad, but it has allowed for power to be extended in a multitude of forms, from the power of finance capital and mediated communication to the power of the systematized war-machine, that have had damaging consequences. The basic problem is that systems built upon such processes have come to dominate and increasingly flatten all other modalities of life. With the development of electronic trading, computerized storage of information, and an exponentially increasing movement of capital, there has been an abstraction of the relationship between territory and power, and an abstraction of the possibilities for control and exploitation. The term 'casino capitalism' (Susan Strange's term) partly captures this process, but together with terms such as 'fictitious capital formation' (that is, capital produced without a growth in production of material objects) it gives the misleading impression that this abstraction is less real than gunboat diplomacy, more ethereal than factory production. To the contrary, when for example global electronic markets sell futures options on agricultural goods not yet produced and transnational corporations speculate on the basis of satellite weather forecasting, both the relations and the power effects are very real. The commercial satellites mentioned at the beginning of this article have a bearing on the price and distribution of the food that we eat. Similarly, when the media broadcasts of March 2003 promising 'shock and awe' to the recalcitrant dictator of Iraq culminated in 'only' a 'limited strike' of Tomahawk cruise missiles on strategic targets in Baghdad, it did not mean that the outcome was going to be any less tragic or immaterial in terms of loss of human life. Although no war has formally been declared in Iraq, the long-term consequences of the horror now promise to stretch for years to come. Across all these domains what it means is that opposing such processes entails more than protesting against war or the meetings of finance ministers. An oppositional politics has now become a politics that has to deal with the basic constituents of social relations, including how we live in time and space.

(1.) This article is drawn from Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In, London, Sage, 2006.

(2.) BBC News Online, 1 January 2000, <news.bbc.uk/1/low/sci//tech/580334.stm>.

(3.) D. E. Duncan, The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock and the Heavens, London, Fourth Estate, 1999.

(4.) This approach is most strongly associated with writers involved in Arena Journal. For an extended development of the approach in relation to technology see S. Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory, London, Routledge, 2002.

(5.) For a different version of this proposition see B. Adam, 'Social Versus Natural Time: A Traditional Distinction Re-examined', in M. Young and T. Schuller (eds), The Rhythms of Society, London, Routledge, 1988.

(6.) This proposition thus addresses a couple of throwaway sentences of Norbert Elias' (Time: An Essay, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1992): 'One of the difficulties one encounters in an essay on time is the absence of a developmental theory of abstraction' (p. 41), and in a footnote: 'I deliberately avoid speaking of a level of abstraction. For from what is the concept of time abstracted?' (p. 201).

(7.) I. Hoem, 'Processes of Identification and the Incipient National Level: A Tokelau Case', Social Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 3, 1999, p. 291.

(8.) Hoem, Processes of Identification, p. 290.

(9.) Hoem, Processes of Identification, p. 292.

(10.) Cited in A. Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, London, Macmillan,

1981, p. 36. Giddens frames his discussion through Heidegger, saying that 'The temporality of Dasein, the human being and that of the institutions of society in the longue duree are grounded in the constitutive temporality of all Being ... there are at least five features of the human subject that distinguish human existence as peculiarly historical' (p. 34).

(11.) Giddens, Historical Materialism.

(12.) For an illuminating discussion of the lineages of this dualism see P. Rigby, 'Time and Historical Consciousness: The Case of the Ilparakuyo Maasai', in D. O. Hughes and T. R. Trautmann (eds), Time: Histories and Ethnologies, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995.

(13.) T. R. Trautmann, 'Indian Time, European Time', in D. O. Hughes and T. R. Trautmann (eds), Time: Histories and Ethnologies, pp. 167-97; and N. M. Farriss, 'Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology Among the Maya of Yucatan', in D. O. Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann (eds), Time: Histories and Ethnologies, pp. 107-38. ARENA journal no. 27, 2006

(14.) T. Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 18.

(15.) A. Appadurai, 'Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value', in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

(16.) E. Traube, Cosmology and Social Life: Ritual Exchange Among the Mambai of East Timor, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 14-15.

(17.) Discussed in A. Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures, New York, Basic Books, 1989, ch. 2, citation from p. 48.

(18.) P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 105 (author's emphasis).

(19.) Using the phrase that Ben Anderson brought to the fore in rewriting Walter Benjamin's work on temporality; B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, Verso, 2nd edn, 1991.

(20.) F. R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991, p. 48.

(21.) For an illuminating illustration of this process of confrontation see Chinua Achebe's novel Arrow of God, London, Heinemann, 1964; discussed at length in Elias, Time: An Essay, pp. 164-84.

(22.) A. Heller, Renaissance Man, New York, Schocken Books, 1978, p. 125. See also Chapter 6 in the same book, 'Time and Space: Past Orientedness and Future Orientedness'.

(23.) Both examples, including the quote, are from S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 11.

(24.) R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, London, Faber and Faber, 1994, pp. 204-5.

(25.) C. A. Gregory, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange, Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 213, 224-31.

(26.) Gregory, Savage Money, p. 226.

(27.) D. S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1983, pp. 241 and 340.

(28.) The concept of 'world-time' is adapted from Wolfram Eberhard, Conquerors and Rulers, revised edn, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1965.

(29.) On preaching time, as well as merchant, market and schooling time, from the end of the late-mediaeval period see G. Dohrn-van Rossum, The History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1996, chs. 8-9.

(30.) Duncan, The Calendar; A. Borst, The Ordering of Time: From Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993.

(31.) C. Blaise, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, New York, Vintage Books, 2000.

(32.) M. Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.

(33.) A. Cornford cited in S. Strange, Mad Money, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 30.

(34.) S. Sassen, 'Digital Networks and the State', Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 17, no. 4, 2000, pp. 19-33. See also J. Arnoldi, 'Derivatives: Virtual Values and Real Risks', Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 21, no. 6, 2004, pp. 23-42.

(35.) H. (Verran) Watson, Singing the Land, Signing the Land, Geelong, Deakin University, 1989, ch. 1; and H. Verran, 'A Story about Doing "The Dreaming"', Postcolonial Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 149-64.

(36.) F. Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, p. 4.

(37.) A. Scafi, 'Mapping Eden: Cartographies of the Earthly Paradise', in D. Cosgrove, Mappings, London, Reaktion Books, 1999.

(38.) J. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, London, Vintage, 1998. On the colonial geo-political imaginary see W. D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.

(39.) A. Linklater, Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History, London, HarperCollins, 2002.

(40.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 9.

(41.) K. Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey that Transformed the World, London, Little, Brown, 2002, p. 1.

(42.) Kaku, Hyperspace; M. Dodge and R. Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace, London, Routledge, 2001; M. Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Sydney, Doubleday, 1999.