The timespaces of those who participate in a practice are partly common, partly shared and partly idiosyncratic. Participant timespaces are common when particular teleologies, motivations and place-path layouts are enjoined. Track employees are enjoined to provide good service to visitors and to shut off betting when a red light comes on, just as grooms, prior to a race, are enjoined to walk their charges in view of onlookers in the interior paddock. Enjoinments of this sort lay down common futures and pasts for the individuals subject to them; they also dictate common places and paths for these individuals’ activities. Common futures, pasts and spatialities also arise from the facts (1) that people often fall in with action regularities in a practice (participants encounter certain ends being regularly pursued, certain actions being regularly performed at certain places and people regularly acting for certain motivations) and (2) that in carrying out a given practice different individuals act in the same or similar material settings.
Participant timespaces are shared, meanwhile, when people act for the same end, react to the same state of affairs and understand the same places to be anchored at certain objects, but this sameness is not enjoined by practice organization. Nothing enjoins that a person aim to enjoy himself while at the track. On any given day, however, many visitors to Keeneland share this goal, just like they might share an understanding of a passageway entrance as a place to meet friends. Participant timespaces are idiosyncratic, finally, to the extent that people pursue ends, react to states of affairs and understand the world idiosyncratically.
As a person goes through her day, her actions bear futures and pasts and occur at places and paths that are parts of place-path arrays. She also thereby carries on this and that practice. Some of her futures, pasts and places will be common to and shared with the lives of other participants in the same practices. The organization, regularities and settings of a practice engender a net of interwoven timespaces, a net of interwoven jointly instituted futures-presents-pasts and place-path arrays. This net, incidentally, is a property of the practice. The activities of individual people are what possess futures and pasts and are performed at particular places and paths. As a whole, however, the net of interwoven timespaces that a practice’s organization, regularities and settings engender is a property of the practice and not of individual lives. In sum, the social character of timespace consists in the dependency of (1) the timespace of a person’s life and (2) the common and shared temporalspatial features of people’s lives on the social practices they carry out.
Actions and practices also bear properties of objective time and space. Performances of actions often take time, performances of different actions can be simultaneous or occur before and after one another, and performances mostly occur at locations in objective space. The objective temporal and spatial properties of a practice include the rhythms, sequences and periodicities of its constituent actions as well as the geometric distribution of the locations where these actions are performed. Although I cannot defend the following claim in this chapter, I contend that many of these objective properties derive from the timespaces of actions and from the practices that actions compose. In particular, it might be emphasized, the rhythms and periodicities of practices such as betting, watching races and observing horses in the interior paddock reflect the timespace nets instituted in, and thus the organizations of, both these practices and practices related to them. In this sense, ‘local’ rhythms and routines of consumption rest on features of practices as wholes. More ‘global’ rhythms and routines of consumption require the interrelation of many more ‘local’ or wider practices spread out in time and space. These broader rhythms and routines are underpinned by local rhythms and routines (among other things) and likewise rest on the organizations of practices. Examining these dependencies is beyond the scope of this chapter.
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Ted Schatzki