The Temporality of Social Orders

Abstract

A certain strand of contemporary political theory has recently been much-exercised over what Heidegger long-ago called “the concept of time.” In particular, a number of contemporary theorists have recently called for a turn toward a more radical thinking of temporality that would prove more appropriate to, and more robust in thinking through, contemporary politics. While I cannot claim a disinterested position from which to judge this work, I think it marks an important turn in contemporary theory – although not necessarily one that has gained all that much momentum. The language these thinkers use to describe their own understanding of time differs, but the various approaches all converge on the idea of a more radical temporality (a “second time” as it were) that we can clearly and sharply distinguish from dominant, mainstream, or everyday concepts of time. Under the former heading, i.e. a new thinking of time, we find a diverse set of names/concepts: duration, disruptive time, time as becoming, spectrality, time out of joint, untimeliness, hauntology. Under the latter heading, i.e. that which these concepts resist, subvert, or offer alternatives to, we find a narrower grouping: clock-time and chrono-time, progress and progressivism, teleology, and, above all, linear time (Chambers 2000; Chambers 2003; Brown 2005; Connolly 2002; Connolly 2005; Grosz 2004; Widder 2008; Hutchings 2008; Rahman 2009).

I wish to emphasize that these works differ, sometimes dramatically, in their theoretical targets and their political goals, with investigations that range from liberalism, to pluralism, to evolution, to ontology, and back to democracy. My intention here is not to minimize the diversity of these works, nor to downplay their importance. (I come here to praise them, not to bury them.)However, to advance the very enterprise on radical temporality and politics to which these works are committed requires viewing them from a perspective that reveals a set of commonalities, commonalities which may also mark the limits of this project as currently formulated. One such shared attribute can be found in the fact that “time” often enters into the discourse of contemporary political theory in phenomenological and existentialist flavors. What I mean by this is not that the work on temporality is dominated by phenomenological and existentialist philosophy, but that time is taken to be important as the experience of a subject. Contemporary theorists try to reconceptualize temporality in a manner more suitable to politics by starting with different experiences of temporality. Thus, we experience time not only as clock-time, but also as duration; we experience the linear flow of time, but we also experience its disruptions; our very encounter with time reveals to us that it is out of joint. These experiences therefore provide guidance for new concepts of time, and these concepts are meant to be more suitable for politics to just the extent that they reflect the experience of subjects.

Here I argue for a thinking of time that goes beyond experience. To unpack this claim and to articulate an argument in support of it, I start by suggesting that the recent turn in contemporary political theory toward untimeliness might itself be considered untimely in the sense of arriving on the scene late. The ground that a writer like Derrida appears to uncover may have already been trod by his teacher, Althusser. Althusser certainly has no reputation as a thinker of great historical sense (the structuralist label rescinds such a title before it could even be granted), nor as a theorist of radical temporality; none of the contemporary theorists cited above rely on or even mention his work. Yet contained within Althusser’s project of rereading of Marx we can find just that: a theory of untimeliness prior to the coining of the term; a thoroughgoing rejection of linear and everyday time Althusser 2006a [1965]; Althusser 2009 [1968], hereafter referred to as “RC” in all citations).

But Althusser does a great deal more than simply “think untimeliness” earlier. Althusser enters a debate that is not so much over “the concept of time” (as Heidegger puts it, and as I think, much of the recent discussions have been trapped in) but over conceptions of temporality as they relate to history and to politics. In so doing, he introduces a number of conceptual innovations that, I argue, can help to significantly rework the terrain of temporality and politics. Althusser was opposed, perhaps most of all, to what he saw as the “ideology of empiricism”; he understood empiricism very broadly as an epistemology that took knowledge as the experience and possession of the knowing subject, who would extract knowledge of the “real object” from all that is inessential. One might fairly describe Althusser’s entire project as offering a nonempiricist reading of Marx. In any case, and without doubt, he always worked diligently and consistently to produce a non-empiricist concept of temporality and history. That is, Althusser’s treatment of temporality insists on the idea that time must exceed experience, that no conceptualization of temporality can start or rest with the experience of a subject. It is for this reason, first of all – and not simply because he thought untimeliness “first” – that I turn to Althusser on time.

Moreover, I suggest that the entire critique of linear/progressive/chrono time may be incomplete because in its focus on the experience of time it misses a crucial dimension of the relationship between time and politics: a radical conception of temporality must be directly tied to a theory of what Althusser calls “the social formation.” I will elaborate on the meaning and importance of this term in more detail within the body of the paper, but here I will simply say that, for Althusser, “social formation” is a term that, as he says,"denotes so-called ‘society’” (Althusser 2006a: 251) and that seeks to capture the interconnectedness between what we often call “the social,” “the political,” and “the economic.” Althusser thinks time differently and more deeply precisely because he makes the crucial move of linking temporality to the social formation. I call this move crucial because it allows Althusser to produce a conception of temporality that cannot be reduced to spatiality and this, in turn, makes it possible to theorize a time appropriate to politics. Rather than conceive of temporal alternatives (duration vs. clock time, e.g.) that human subjects might experience or invoke, we must grasp temporality as emanating from society, and a theory of time must be therefore be linked to a theory of the social formation.