Consider, for example, the following fact reported in Dale Southerton’s contribution to this volume (see also Elizabeth Shove’s chapter): that coordinated actions today rest more on interpersonal arrangement and scheduling and less on institutionally prescribed times and spaces than they did seventy years ago. The action coordination that arises from communication and accommodation among family members or coworkers clearly rests on interwoven timespaces. The same, however, is true of the institutionally effected coordination that used to be more prevalent. For instance, in so far as the fixed workplace starting and finishing times that Southerton discusses coordinate action, they do so by instigating common, shared and orchestrated temporalities and spatialities for both workers and the people closely related to them (e.g. family members). The coordination of action that derives from institutional events works through interwoven timespaces.
A different sort of example is the chain of actions, through which a few clicks of my computer mouse eventuates in the delivery of a package at my front door. No accommodation, communication or scheduling occurs between me and the other people whose actions, combined, lead to the package sitting on my front stoop; the action coordination in this example does not result from a harmonization of the orientations of the actors involved. Each pair of actions in the chain evinces, however, a configuration of interwoven timespaces. These configurations might or might not be enjoined or instigated by institutionally prescribed phenomena such as workplace starting and finishing times. Without these configurations, however, the links, and thus the chain, would not exist. Linkages among people’s actions that do not work through the harmonization of orientations still rest on interwoven timespaces.
Notes
- Conceptions of succession as a subjective and not an objective phenomenon also exist, but I will ignore these in the following.
- All examples in this chapter are taken from Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Kentucky, where the author has occasionally spent an afternoon consuming.
- The structure of temporality resembles the temporal structure of motivation, as Schutz (e.g. 1962) conceived of it. Schutz, however, understood this structure as a configuration of objective time.
- I acknowledge that the significance of the world for human beings need not be teleological. Examples are religious, symbolic and aesthetic significance. By themselves, however, significances of these sorts do not specify spatialities, that
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