Timespace and the Organization of Social Life Ted Schatzki
Introduction
This chapter argues that timespace is central to the organization of social life. By ‘timespace’ I do not mean – as is usual – some combination of objective time and objective space. The timespace concerned is a phenomenon of human activity that is based in the teleological character of human life. It is also something largely overlooked in social thought. My thesis is that interwoven activity timespaces form a kind of infrastructure through which human activities coordinate and aggregate. Because coordinated and aggregated activities are essential to society, this infrastructure is fundamental to social life.
Analytics of Time and Space
When social theorists say ‘time’ or ‘space’, they, like most people, mean objective time or space. Objective time and space are time and space conceived of as features of reality that persist independently of human activity and understanding. Examples are the geometric arrangement of a room and the time it takes for a grape to ripen on the vine. Human activity and understanding can affect or comprehend objective times and spaces (as when humans rearrange a room or plant a vine in a greenhouse), but what they affect or comprehend persists independently of the activity and understanding. That feature of objective reality that is dubbed ‘time’, moreover, is succession: whenever events or instants occur before and after one another, there is succession – and time. Of course, different conceptions exist of this before and after ordering, including, most famously, absolute time, relational time and, on some interpretations, relativistic time.<sup>1</sup> Considerable dispute also exists regarding the entities whose succession constitutes time; events and instants are not the only candidates. Two prominent conceptions of objective space are, likewise, absolute space and relational space. Whereas absolute space is space construed as a container or arena in which events occur and entities exist, relational space is a collection of relations among entities (longer than, inside, etc.) and of properties based on those relations (length, position, etc.). Relativistic space also sometimes counts as a type of objective space.
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