As I have been writing, practices are carried on amid arrangements of objects. Promenading, betting, talking and watching races are carried out amid the arrangements of objects that form viewing stands, concessions, the trackside holding area, the interior paddock, and the passageways, staircases and doorways that permit movement between these. Practices, moreover, are tied to other practices and also bound up with other bundles of practices and arrangements more or less tightly or loosely. The practice–arrangement bundle at Keeneland on race day, for example, is bound up with (1) the bundles of the Keeneland corporation and of the taxi services that bring people to the track and (2) the bundles at Keeneland during annual horse sales or at other race tracks during their meets. The sum-total of linked practice– arrangement bundles at any moment forms a gigantic, intricate and constantly metamorphosing web that forms the overall site of social existence (see Schatzki 2002). This immense plenum also defines the total objective temporal and spatial spread of social life. Elsewhere (Schatzki 2002, 2003) I have argued that social phenomena can be understood as segments or configurations of this plenum of practices and arrangements. This claim entails that any social phenomenon consists either in a practice–arrangement bundle or in features of such bundles (racial prejudice, for example, consists in features of many bundles). What I want to argue in the remainder of this chapter is that interwoven timespaces form an infrastructure that pervades the practice–arrangement plenum, linking actions and tying practices together into the bundles that make up the site of the social. Stated in more familiar terms: timespace is crucial to the constitution of social phenomena. I will essay to make this claim plausible by sketching how timespaces underlie the coordination of action, the aggregation of practices and, in this sense, the integration of individual lives.
Timespace and the Organization of Social Life
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