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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822378334 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Sarah Sharma is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Read an Excerpt
In the Meantime
Temporality and Cultural Politics
By Sarah Sharma
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5477-2
CHAPTER 1
JET-LAG LUXURY
The Architecture of Time Maintenance
During my layover in Atlanta between Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and Vancouver, a young man reading Plato's Republic strikes up a conversation. After a few minutes of small talk at gate b9, I find myself in a pretty heated discussion. My fellow traveler is a software developer for video games, with a particular interest in cell phone consoles. He is a Canadian citizen who moved to Buenos Aires when his company decided to "go global." He is perplexed that my area of research involves taking a critical approach to media and technology. Since I am a professor of media and cultural studies in a communication studies department, he first assumes that I will be a good networking opportunity. He hands me his business card almost as soon as I mention what I do. We start talking about what I teach. He soon realizes that what I profess is not akin to his unconditional blanket love for technology. I may even come off a little technologically unsavvy, in fact, probably quite a bit so, by comparison.
It comes as a surprise to me, though, when he asks if I am "like Zygmunt Bauman"—that is, someone who is angry and threatened by the inevitable future of technological progress. He goes on to tell me that multi-player video games on cell phones are a part of the future—a future that is fast approaching. In fact, "in many parts of the world this future has already arrived." This future is intrinsically "good because it is diverse" and is "diverse because it is fast moving." He then proceeds to paraphrase Bauman's Liquid Life at length. For Bauman, "liquid" men and women are the fragmented subjects of liquid modernity. In liquid modernity, social forms do not have enough time to solidify. Long-term thinking becomes impossible and liquid moderns must find new ways to exist in the new temporality of liquid life. People such as me (and Bauman) are bogged down by our heavy thoughts. According to my fellow traveler, Bauman and I have made careers out of critiquing technology because we are too conservative and fear change. This leads to a denial of the social diversity that global capital and new technology promise.
At one point he boldly states, "I am Liquid Man." Liquid Man then confesses that Bauman's writing was therapeutic for him because it describes who he is. Although, he warns, Bauman's take was much more negative than the way Liquid Man actually experiences liquid life. He exclaims, "I enjoy being Liquid Man." By this he means he relishes all the accouterments of a mobile and fast-paced lifestyle: the plane hopping, social networking, contract employment, and technological gadgets that keep him plugged in. Being without bonds in this liquid world means he can "keep going with the flow." Liquid Man tells me he feels free, not limited by the weight of the world.
While Liquid Man and I continue to have a conversation about how technological visions of the world are too often divided between dystopia and utopia, he gives me something else to ponder. Liquid Man says, "I love the airport." "Look around," he says, "look at all these people thrown here together. I just love airports, everything and everyone I need is probably right here, right now." He is excited by the new possibilities inherent in airport sociality. Strangers sharing space and the constant emptying out and filling up of the airport present a business opportunity for him. He can network, conduct market research, tap into the crowd, and even promote his new software. For Liquid Man, fast times are for the free and unfettered spirits. The obvious gathering place for these fast and free spirits is the modern airport. Liquid Man and I part ways at the first boarding call: "I would like to invite all Gold Status Star Alliance members to board at this time." Liquid Man stands up, smiles, and shakes my hand. "That's me," he says, with all of the self-assurance of a card-holding member of the Gold Status Star Alliance.
Liquid Man's appreciation of airport sociality is echoed in Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, a book written for business leaders, urban planners, and other "global visionaries." It makes the argument that the potential of the airport lies less in its spatial location than in how it is a site of connectivity, keeping everyone from "workers" to professionals connected to the global market. If new leaders of the twenty-first century pay more attention to the airport, the book argues, they can remap the world. Airports are places where the dueling goals of capitalism—global homogenization and local diversification—can be realized together. While this excites capitalists, it horrifies the critical theorist of speed.
In speed theory, the airport is a (lamentable) structural transformation of the public sphere and material evidence of the fall of the public man. Spaces such as airports, speed theorists argue, signal the demise of political space and the rise of an apolitical time. In this literature, spaces of transit are denigrated for their homogeneous architecture, purified and pacified interiors, and lack of local referents to situate the individual traveler. At the airport, the retreat of individuals into their own personal technospheres mimics a larger withdrawal of citizens from activating public space. In Crepuscular Dawn, Paul Virilio maintains that the new architecture of globalization is based on modular standardization and synchronization. In Pure War he argues that airports are the new capital city, no longer a spatial capital but a temporal capital where departing and arriving are more important than dwelling. He argues: "When we know that every day there are over one hundred thousand people in the air, we can consider it a foreshadowing of future society: no longer a society of sedentarization but one of passage; no longer a nomad society, in the sense of the great nomadic drifts but one concentrated in the vector of transportation." He goes on to say: "People are no longer citizens, they are passengers in transit." Similarly in Bauman's case it is Liquid Man who replaces the political category of the citizen; the contemplative and deliberative subject gives way to one who is open, malleable, fragmented, unattached, and—of course—fast moving.
As it turns out, Liquid Man, Virilio, and I have something in common. The airport transfixes us all. The meeting between an international business traveler so affirming of speed and me, both well versed in cultural theories of speedup, indicates that perhaps speedup is a narrow and uncomplicated worldview characteristic of a privileged relationship to time. Far from the airport bar, distinct temporalities—in the air-traffic-control tower, at the baggage claim, and on the tarmac, for example— unselfconsciously carry out their machinations to make our conversation possible. As the concretized infrastructure for the maintenance of global capital's accelerated flows of goods, money, people, and information, the political and economic importance of the airport cannot be understated. But the importance of the airport has less to do with how it fails as a public space or how it is speed space and more to do with the way it operates as a routing mechanism for different temporalities within the larger biopolitical economy of time.
In airports people wait, serve, sleep, rush, and work within a highly uneven relationship to time. At any given moment there are new visitors, residents, citizens, laborers, and denizens who are spilling out of various flights and enduring different plights. Many travelers breeze through security. Immigrants and visa holders move through passport control at speeds determined by some combination of socioeconomic status and geopolitical context. The range of service workers in the airport includes baggage handlers, taxi drivers, janitors, shoe shiners, retail clerks, servers, bus drivers, parking attendants, and beauticians. In this list we must now include nutritionists schooled in the science of jet-lag dietary requirements and acupuncturists who prick and poke bodies to help them overcome sleep deprivation.
In a time-obsessed culture, the airport is a particularly vital node for the reproduction and maintenance global capital's most valuable subject: the frequent business traveler. Upon arrival at the modern international airport, the frequent business traveler is met by a multimediated infrastructure—one that consists of technologies, commodities, programs, and laborers, all oriented toward the enhancement and protection of their time. "Keeping up to speed" is a discourse that reverberates in the corporate speak of the companies the travelers work for, the ads for their mobile technological devices, and the business literature they read. Speedup is a perception of time constantly confirmed by the elaborate system of temporal support that greets travelers in airport lounges, hotels, their offices, and the air. This ideological belief in speed operates as a scaffold: one that holds up while it hides the temporal infrastructure that keeps travelers on pace and along the paths that are commensurate with the aims of global capital.
The temporal value of the frequent business traveler is largely unparalleled by any other tired population that labors under the auspices of global capitalism. Frequent business travelers experience the world as accelerated and fast paced. They describe their lives and their labor as largely lived outside normal time. My careful consideration of three representative case studies draws attention to the relationship between frequent business travelers' position within the biopolitical economy of time and their subsequent perceptions of speedup. Frequent business travelers' unwavering belief in the speed of life indicates less about the new realities of a spedup world than it does about their position within the biopolitical economy of time. It is no wonder that the fellow traveler I met in Atlanta loves being Liquid Man; he enjoys the maintenance of his privilege now found in liquid form at the modern airport. In his uncritical affirmation of a world of speed, what Liquid Man doesn't see is that he is being quickly carried along and ushered through, liquefied by a temporal architecture designed especially for him.
Three Itineraries: The Frequent Flyers CLAIRE
Claire is an independent consultant in her mid-fifties with adult-aged children. I meet Claire at her home office in Toronto, which is where she spends her workdays when she is not on the road. She typically travels for work once a month, this after a decade of traveling every week. On the day we meet, she is taking an afternoon break from writing an article for one of the city's major newspapers. Her article is on the subject of "time management and balancing acts in the time-crunched workplace."
Claire has a degree in psychology. She is a consultant who specializes in business psychology, specifically "helping people to maintain balance, including diet, health, and domestic issues related to work—spousal issues, life planning, and time management." She describes her profession as an "on-site psychologist who teaches certain echelons of a host-company 'emotional intelligence.'" Claire "helps people to feel comfortable in their own skin in order to eradicate the dysfunctional behavior that takes up too much time." She works with people's emotions in order to keep up the increasing demands that come with "tighter cycles of production." Given speedup, "there is less time nowadays for posturing and positioning." According to Claire, "emotional intelligence" is about the efficient use of time for certain types of working environments and specific types of workers:
[When you focus on unproductive emotions,] you lose a phenomenal amount of time. You lose thirty to forty percent of your day. There is only so much time and you lose. When you have to produce you don't have time to lose, so I try and help [my clients] find their voice and their confidence. Emotional intelligence isn't a necessary skill for every working person, but for those people who have goals related to their employment.
Typically, Claire works with men in middle management all the way up to CEOS in various North American companies. More recently she has started traveling to Western Europe and South Asia. She tells me she is "going global with emotional intelligence." At the time of my visit, Claire has just been invited to work at a call center in India. She explains that she "does not do knowledge management or time management on the call center floor, where there are three thousand operators, because they are there for the money, so they don't really need it." Time management is reserved for workers whose time is of qualitative concern or whose productive capacity is not measured in units of time that correspond to a going rate of pay, or wage. This subtle comment reflects exactly how the differential biopolitical economy of time operates. Labor time is understood qualitatively for some populations in the labor force, not purely in labor time's productive capacity; "quality" time can only exist for those whose time does not literally equal (company) money.
Claire works "eight days a week, depending on what you call a day." When she is on the road, her day can begin at four thirty in the morning and end after dinner, when she "still has to be 'on.'" When Claire is not traveling for work, she feels more in control of her time: "I come and go. I know the rhythm of work. I know there are times I can't think and I forget it. And when I'm in a mature mood, I'll say screw it and I'll take off and go play. But when I'm not in a mature mood I'll sit and struggle to produce." For Claire, "knowing the limits is part of having emotional intelligence." She jokes that though she is in the business of time management "for others," she still needs better balance for herself.
DARRYL
Work-life balance for Darryl, a married father of two in his mid-fifties, is a nagging tension. He is an executive specializing in human resources for a high-tech firm, and Darryl says: "There is no separation of work and life until retirement. I think about business twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week." Quite candidly, Darryl admits: "I just can't relax." But the alternative, as he sees it, would be "a middle-range income, which means debt and less freedom in the future." Citing a weekly business magazine on the "toxic workplace," Darryl contends that "the whole value and the way people work has made it very difficult to find job satisfaction, unless you are at the top of the house." Darryl is extremely proficient in the corporate discourse surrounding retirement and time management. An important aspect of his job includes running workshops to train managers to better supervise the "time of their employees" and to "meet the demands of changing technologies." He works in and out of the various global offices of his company to "standardize the efficiency and the methods of time management." He also advises and consults with individual employees on their retirement and future goals.
I meet Darryl in his home in Toronto. He recently relocated in order to be closer to his two grown children. He greets me in a golf shirt embroidered with his company's insignia. Darryl has been an executive for numerous high-tech firms in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Canada. He has traveled internationally and nationally for business for more than two decades. At one point, he estimates, he was traveling 240 days of the year. In the past three years, Darryl has significantly cut down on his travel to "about once every two weeks for a few days or once a month if it's a weeklong trip overseas." Adding it all up, Darryl figures that he has probably spent more time in hotels, airport lounges, and in the air than at home.
More recently, Darryl has made a shift in his travel habits to try and make the journey more comfortable. He now chooses boutique hotels over chains. He expresses a preference for train travel in Europe; whether knowingly or not, Darryl cites a popular Canadian National Railway advertisement, saying that the train is "a much more human way to travel." For Darryl, his new focus on comfort is an effort to become, citing another piece of business literature, "high touch in an increasingly high-tech world." When I inquire as to what this phrase means to him, Darryl explains that "'high touch' is face-to-face and more personal in relation to a highly transactional and technology-driven type of work environment." Darryl is worried that "people have lost the human touch in the increasingly fast-paced information-driven world." Darryl is a voracious reader of business literature. As I spend a few hours with him, he relays an extensive knowledge of the different anxieties in workplace culture over the past three decades. He is on top of every global business strategy that has been disseminated in the popular press.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Meantime by Sarah Sharma. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Tempo Tantrums: Speed and the Cultural Politics of Time 1
1. Jet-Lag Luxury: The Architecture of Time Maintenance 27
2. Temporal Labor and the Taxicab: Maintaining the Time of Others 55
3. Dharma at the Desk: Recalibrating the Sedentary Worker 81
4. Slow Space: Another Pace and Time 108
Conclusion. Toward a Temporal Public 137
Notes 151
Bibliography 177
Index 187
What People are Saying About This
"A thoughtful book on an important topic, In the Meantime is filled with rich ethnographic detail. I loved the chapter on taxi drivers and appreciate the integrity and intelligence that Sarah Sharma brings to bear in her analyses of middle-class and wealthy subjects, groups that can and should be studied with care and attention."
"In these dispatches from the frontlines of global capitalism, Sarah Sharma shows the unequal distribution of what Lewis Mumford decades ago called shock absorbers. Harold Innis meets Marx and postcolonial theory: time turns out to have both a price and color. The tale that life is getting faster will never look the same once you’ve read the vivid slices of life portrayed in this book."